Making such stunning visuals and Voiceover you simply can’t have a comparable content. Even if 5e wasn’t a simplified ruleset there would be no way to implement that number of features and still making such awesome visuals. As a developer you have to make a choice between visuals and content focus.
There is no such choice. Games with high budget can have great visuals AND great gameplay as there are separate teams for each section. If the gameplay is underwhelming, it is their fault, not that they wanted to have great graphics and animation.
Kingmaker only has great gameplay because they only have money for that.
Agreed, with the size of Larian's expanding team no choice should be made, and ideally you want both to be good or a balance to be achieved.
All games have limitations due to budgets, and almost all developers want to do more than they actually manage to deliver.
Low sophistication A/V games such as, say, Solasta can prototype and modify gameplay much more readily, because they do not also need to reflect/integrate that in the way the game/characters/environment react; generally they use text/prompts and screen-aligned VFX.
In contrast, it is much more costly, in development terms, to rework systems in games with more sophisticated A/V. That development cost is probably why we have so many hold-overs from D:OS and why they want to make the reaction system automatic.
It is, of course, perfectly possible for Larian to change the entire mechanics of the EA experience, but that would be at a significant cost to the breadth or depth in the game ( less races/classes/monsters, less story content/sidequests ).
What Larian are doing may not be perfect, but I would much prefer they deliver as much of their game vision as possible in the direction they are heading, rather than alter course and run aground ( or get wedged in the Suez Canal
).
