They also admit that they are only adding things they feel need testing so EA is not even a useful measure of anything really. They also admit that people misunderstood many characters. I'm ok with all of this actually. Maybe it was a lowkey nudge to the Haslin/Astarion worshippers lmao.
I hope some more start to see the bigger picture. EA is skewed pretty much entirely I can only assume. Its not the full game. Just a playground to test things. How much can change is unknown, but what is known is that it has. I can't do anything with that info one way or another.
I think I'll stick to just browsing datamine.
5e phb puriest will probably raise hell though.
I would say that this is pretty much where I'm at too. Larian probably isn't very interested in giving us an accurate representation on what they're doing, they want us to test things while obfuscating things for the sake of keeping things a surprise. The gaming community as a whole is used to this kind of behavior, so Larian keeping up the image of being a now successful indie company that occasionally engages with the community compared to the big bad publishers gives them a lot of points among the wider community for... Basically doing the same thing as a fair amount of other larger developers out there. The only real difference is a very goofy company face, who to be fair is actually invested in the company and clearly not faking it.
Perception is everything, however true or false it may be.
That said, keeping things a surprise is a valid concern, especially for a huge project with this many eyes on it compared to virtually every other cRPG. But it also means everything gets tested in a vacuum, and the context of certain things gets completely changed when seen within the rest of the package - kind of like how blessed/cursed surfaces may have been a novel idea during the EA phase of DOS2, but in actual practicality, blessed surfaces were pretty much never worth the effort as soon as you stepped foot past Act 1 into Reaper's Coast. This was because the game's enemies got so many free ways to generate cursed surfaces, some even outright bleeding it when you hit them with a physical attack, while virtually every method of generating blessed surfaces to counter them that players had access to ate finite and precious source points that could otherwise fuel your strongest attacks in comparison. So instead of even engaging with the field effects system, most players would instead just turtle down and keep movement to an absolute minimum within those surfaces, or invest in the many mobility skills to immediately eject themselves from such a situation.
One should also note that with a project of this magnitude, actually changing core aspects of it like the combat becomes a lot harder as development progresses. So, the more analytical side of me recognizes that what we see is what we're getting, especially now that Larian is absolutely doubling down on everything with every communication we've had from them as of late. I'm still on this ride because I want to see how this turns out.
When you get feedback like
this, you know what direction the community wants this game to go towards. But few have the foresight to consider the long term consequences. What one sees as 'rewarding creativity', I just see 'just use consumables and certain highly busted spells, don't even bother with martial classes on tactician/honor mode', and I would not be surprised in the slightest if that ends up becoming a very common phrase. At least DOS2 tactician was legitimately hard within the confines of its own rules when you were actually trying to play it with minimal cheese, because almost every skill in that game was busted when used properly. The effort of using raw cheese tactics in DOS2 outside of the standard stealth ambush was generally not worth the time it took to set them up if you had a well built party to begin with (unless you were really so bad at playing the actual game that you couldn't come up with ways to beat certain fights head-on). The big distinction is that BG3 in comparison currently is literally just a couple homebrew mechanics completely overshadowing everything else in the game, a lot of fights feel like they're straight up balanced around their existence (whereas no fight in DOS2 really felt that way at all aside from burning undead scarecrow lady for reasons that don't need an explanation), and the combined effect of every other action or ability cannot even compare to the effect that the homebrew mechanics have on the current encounter design. I mean, the complete context whiplash between both games despite their core similarities could make the more pessimistic among us start believing that DOS2's brilliance is looking more and more like an accident.
(I mean, really, I'm quite sure Larian at one point also even admitted that sticking a
bunch of grenades into a basket and throwing it at the final boss of DOS1, with the combined effect resulting in a cascade of field effects spreading all over the map was an unintentional thing, but they applauded that person's creativity and decided they wouldn't do anything to rein it in. So expecting BG3 to take a different stance in the long term is, quite frankly, a futile effort.)
But for people like me, at least Solasta exists for the tactical turn based combat enthusiast itch, and that means I'm ultimately okay with BG3 being a game that I will undoubtedly enjoy for many reasons
despite the combat design (especially the whole stealth ambush mechanic which basically means that BG3's combat cannot really be considered true turn-based, if your other party members that are sneaking around outside of combat can literally insert themselves into a fight anywhere there isn't an enemy sight cone at any point they want - BG3's current definition of tactical really just boils down to figuring out how much you can ignore the normal rules at the moment, because the implementation of everything that makes DnD tactical to begin with is either incomplete or straight up missing). As it will likely be for a big chunk of the community.
(On a different note, DOS2 ironically had a strange issue where the game was most arguably balanced during the level 4-8 phase of Act 1. After that phase, it quickly spirals into damage race rocket tag as a new tier of skills become available and every boss fight suddenly shifts towards 'nuke or crowd control them as hard as you can during turn 1 or else you were guaranteed to have a dead party member'. BG3 has the opposite problem of DnD in general feeling pretty awful at low levels, and one could think that the homebrew mechanics are an attempt to make low level combat livelier for the whole year that Larian insists on having the community suffer through being capped at level 4, while masking the lack of core mechanics like ready actions and proper reactions - but all that really did was throw conventional DnD strategy completely out the window.)
