I expect that what is gradually happening on the subreddit is the people who were only participating for one or two playthroughs to see what it is like, or only participating because its the new thing on twitch have been falling away and so their voices on social media is slowly giving way to the same crowd on the forums here. Hard to prove overall, I guess you could try to do some correlation based on the themes of what is posted at different time intervals by scraping the subreddit, but thats too much work for a mere idle curiosity. Looking at what stats are already scraped was somewhat amusing, especially for
top keywords.
The same thing happened on the forums, although it happened much faster. Most people don't care to argue the same points over and over in circles for months on end, so after they have had their say, they just trot off and do something else. If you look at the forums now, by and large the people posting on every thread are the same group of people and the discussions inevitably fall back to the same topics. I was half tempted to make a bingo card of the threads here, but I thought I had better not because someone might get offended. Still, you could make a drinking game out of these discussions quite easily where you take a drink every time someone calls BG 3 DOS 3 or they make a comparison to Solasta. You might want to pick a drink with a very low concentration of alcohol though or you might die from alcohol poisoning.
Early on there were quite a few people constructively arguing different viewpoints, but they have since moved on.
I actually would be pretty interested in seeing the bingo card, if only because it'd be something to lighten the mood, ha. I don't think people here really have that much of an ego to be offended by such a thing.
That said, there is a certain context to everything, and I choose to believe that it's not just that the more casual crowd has moved on, because something like this is rarely explained by a single convenient factor. I think that also among the more hardcore players that remain and love the game enough to continue replaying it, opinions have been slowly shifting in an unfavorable direction in the background, if only due to the very nature of how the EA is structured. There's hardly any new content to keep everyone's attention, so naturally everyone is going to start questioning
everything. Especially when you look forward and realize there's at least an 80+ hour game ahead of us. The EA is structured to be repetitive, so one
really shouldn't be surprised if the overall discourse around it behaves the same way too.
People have always had grievances with the combat design. It's exactly why the vast majority of the criticism is solely centered on it. The events of the past two days have just proven that people actually believe that the problems with the core combat mechanics
are real, and we're not just a small group of DnD purists/Larian haters/whatever perceived insult of one's choice shouting into the void. And if Larian doesn't take this seriously, I'm not going to hold any sympathy for them if the general public lambasts the game over it come full release, because we would have spent an entire year or longer trying to warn them at that point.
By all accounts, people raised the same types of concerns with the DOS2 armor system, and it resulted in an endgame that was universally considered so imbalanced (and coupled with a disjointed final arc in terms of pacing because several things were clearly unfinished, like the possessed girl quest) that it took a definitive edition to fix it, as much as it could be fixed. And it sounds like the current situation with BG3's mechanics are starting several degrees worse than that when it comes to public perception already.
At this point, I realize that I am also saying in a roundabout way that some of the hardcore crowd would probably benefit from simply stepping away from the EA process altogether, because as it currently is, continuing to play has a far higher likelihood of souring your overall experience in the long term. But that doesn't help Larian gauge actual feedback on the game, does it?
I think several months ago, I did say that I was going to leave this community alone in acceptance that if Larian didn't make any changes in their latest patch and indeed doubled down on these mechanics, and wait for final release in acceptance that I'd still love the game for numerous reasons that have nothing to do with the combat. I've since decided that such a defeatist stance helps no one, and the ultimate goal is to recognize that the game can become
better. It's not like people's thoughts are narrow enough to attach criticism of BG3 to their very identity, or at least I would hope that's not the case.
