Honestly, the stream didn't give me much faith on this topic. Larian doesn't seem to be interested in making any changes to rein in things like jump/disengage and high ground advantage/low ground disadvantage along with the lack of proactive defensive options like ready actions and dodge, judging from the idea that they just completely dodged literally any mention of these. This, despite the community giving them about 2 months worth of focused feedback since the last patch. They were more interested in showing off the flash rather than going into a deep dive on the mechanics and showing that they actually understood how everything they were creating worked and interacted with each other.
I mean, let's be real, adding in stuff like reactions and the dodge action wouldn't detract from the out of the box design at all, if anything it would give more variety and an extra layer of strategy to the combat. I legit don't understand why a portion of the community and even Larian themselves appear to be resistant to this topic. The game as it is now is too reactive, there's hardly any proactive planning besides pre-battle setup or coming up with a way to cheese the fight in the first 2 turns, because otherwise the absurd action economy that everyone has access to means your party is most likely to be completely overwhelmed in longer fights unless you're taking advantage of choke points or high ground or something.
It certainly could be done, but I just cannot see there being any 'political will' to do so.
At this point, this is probably the most accurate reason as to why certain concerns are just seemingly ignored.
Watching the hag fight go sideways in the stream was rather entertaining, and some would say it's rather endearing to see 'realistic' gameplay. At the same time, it also gives off the impression that they don't really know how to balance things, because their core design philosophy has always been about letting players experiment and figure it out for themselves, which may have lead to one of the lead directors themselves forgetting certain basic mechanics in their live demonstration mid-fight. But at some point, that endearment should turn into actual concern.
The sandbox 'cobble everything together enough to have a working combat system and then let players figure everything out for themselves, and hopefully enable out of the box strategies' philosophy has now only become a shield to deflect criticism, as one can see from a portion of the community just straight up refusing to care about our feedback and deflecting any and all criticism on this topic, without the introspection needed to see that the game CAN be better if the design were to be a bit more focused. As it is now, the combat just looks like a lot of disconnected ideas coming together to form quite a mess, hence one of my earlier comments basically considering the game's combat to be akin to a puzzle game that just happens to have RPG mechanics, rather than an actual strategic RPG in its current state.
