My comment might warrant a separate topic, but for now, I'll put it here.
Honesty, Larian, and the Future of Baldur's Gate 3I feel like any allegations against Larian of being dishonest is unfair. Granted, I wasn't a part of any of their EAs before, so my knowledge of the subject is limited to Baldur's Gate 3 development, but I feel like they provided a lot to me to work with to show my point. Time will tell, but from what Larian did so far with their updates (ever since the game's first
presentation) was (somewhat) painfully honest. It would have been so much easier to release a trailer with only the best bits of the game, but instead, Larian CEO just decided to have a playthrough and risk the game bugging on him live (which it did, several times, with the last bug completely breaking the game). I don't know if Larian has any PR people (I assume they do), but I feel like every time Sven talks to someone they're probably banging their heads against the wall.
And this interview is not so different. Even the first response from Sven in the interview (“They're all horny, I can tell you that... So anybody who tells you the opposite, I can tell you that's not true.”) which I found funny and cute, made some people in this forum angry. But I guess that's not the issue most people here are so furious about...
The issue people here seem to be very mad about (and correct me if I'm wrong) is this line:
“I can imagine that we will never manage to find the balance that will please everyone,” says Vincke. But, there is a (sort of) solution: “The game will be moddable eventually, so people will be able to make their mods. I expect multiple flavors of Baldur’s Gate 3 to come out of that. Over time there will be probably a flavor that will appeal hopefully to everybody.”
Now again, if I was a Larian PR guy, I would be very angry with this answer. this is the kind of honesty that makes people angry. It would have been much more easier to pull some " we are looking into all possibilities and will change things to suit as many players as possible" crap, but Sven said what he really thinks - It's impossible (yes, impossible) to please everyone and to only thing to do is to make the game you would want to play. And I'm sorry guys, but some of the things you hang on to here (six members party? really? this is the difference between legend and meh game? wow if it is that easy I wonder how come Baldur's Gate never had any successors) are not even remotely in a consensus as you think they are. It's not the topic of this thread, but a shortlist of things people think are a must and I disagree with completely (and sure I'm not the only one): 6 members party, day-night circle, more faithful D&D rule adaptation, removing camp, hp bloat (didn't even know it was a thing, pretty sure most players are on my camp on this), action\bonus action things I really don't understand much about (and lo and behold, I still enjoyed the gameplay, strange world).
Other than that, people seem to comment on the fact Sven addressed the issue with the RNG but not much else, which is not true as well. He did address the evil path and the companion choice, which are also a big point of criticism toward the game. Of particular interest is what he said on the evil path:
"The writers have a tendency of being good and not putting in the evil options,” Vincke says. “We had to actually force them to go through everything and put in more contrasting options so that they could put the evil ones in there.” It’s all about offering the players “real” choices, he explains - a variety of options falling all across the spectrum of morality, rather than just slight variations on ‘the good one’. “For choice to be there, you need to have the ability to do good and evil and things in between, and edge cases, and stuff like that. That is a modus operandi for the remainder of the game.”
There is nothing specific here about whether there would be changes to the evil path, but keeping the honesty title in mind, I simply think he doesn't want to commit to anything yet, probably because they are still debating about the nature of changes they are gonna make.
In the end, I am still very happy with this interview. My feeling is that there is still an internal debate in Larian about how to proceed with several issues that we raised during the last month and that Larian is not willing to commit to changing anything that there was no decision about yet.
a word about solasta - it's much easier to take feedback from 10 people than from 1000 people I think. And I honestly think solasta can be as faithful to D&D is it wants, but a short playthrough proved that you need much more than this to create a good game and many many games before proved it.
