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.
Well, here you go. I did start running out of ideas for some repeated topics around about number 19.
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.
The forums have a rather small userbase and you can more or less keep track of the people who actively post a lot. Their opinions have been entrenched since the beginning (yourself, sludge khalid, Maximuuus, tuco, KillerRabit, etc) and have not shifted much over the course of time. There were some contrarians who also posted a lot but they have disappeared (firesnake, surfaces_R, etc). They also had their own list of issues, but they disagreed with the first group on quite a few topics and there was some back and forth discussion about it without going into mud slinging. I would strongly bet on the shift of discourse being the result of the disappearance of the latter group leading to the creation of an echo chamber here, similar to how reddit is the echo chamber to go to when you want to discuss Helsin's body.
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.
They have, but not all grievances are the same. I personally think the weakest part of the game is the fact that it uses DND combat and would throw the entire thing away and use something else (I don't think Larian's system is a better alternative), but hell would freeze over before a completely new system was ever implemented.
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.
Just because people are right about an issue in 1 game, does not mean a different group of people are right about a different set of issues in another game. An easy example of this is the vocal crowd in the Path of Exile community who pretty much wants to turn the game into a clicker and forget about the aRPG.
Anyhow, I am not going to get into this argument again. I had this argument when the game first came out with Sludge Khalid and nobody budged, repeating the same talking points again isn't going to get anyone anywhere. I have no intention of being Don Quixote here.
Hey, to my defense I'm perfectly aware of how much I tend to repeat the same complaints over and over.
It's not by chance. It's a deliberate strategy because you have to hammer these points at home to have even a remote chance that someone will start acting on them, otherwise they will dismissed as "a concern no one talks about".
You either try to control to a certain degree what the "public discourse" is about, or you could as well give up and leave the entire feedback about the game being dominated by the Thirsty Army simping HARD for Halsin, Minthara, Fezza and the kinky masochist priest, under the assumption that the ultimate goal of BG3 is to compete toe-to-toe with Dream Daddy Simulator or some of that shit.
And just to be upfront about it, I have no clue nor a single care in the world to check if I wrote any of these names correctly.
Whilst I agree that the way party controls are bad, I don't think constant repetition of feedback from the same group of people is going to change their minds about anything. Were I a developer, it would not change my mind either. If I was gathering feedback from the forums, I would use a tool to condense all the posts on a topic from single users and then measure the sentiment from the condensed post, then look at it based on the number of people complaining as well as what type of player they are. Multiple posts on the topic from a single user would be completely discarded, because I would only be counting the user's opinion on the whole. We know Larian is big on using data analysis, so I would not be surprised if they did something similar.
The best way to change their mind with such a system, would be to get lots of outsiders who are not currently complaining about it, to join in on the discussion, which would mean promoting the topic in places where it is not heavily discussed. Examples of such being on youtube, steam, twitch, twitter, etc.
![[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/kUAPWeV.png)
