Originally Posted by Imryll
Originally Posted by ArvGuy
Larian has a history of not being that damn incompetent but so far all they've managed is a decent first act. They haven't managed to get the ruleset sorted out, their approach has some tangible problems, their user interface is making naughties games look good, and their communication about what they want to do and how they want to do it and when they want to do it is pretty much zilch.

So am I worried? Do I have any bad tingling in my gut that the company that gave us toilet chain movement and drag-to-group and frustrating camp mechanics and incredibly unreliable party dialogue triggers and origin nonsense and three-quarterlings with giant heads and an aggressively cramped map that doesn't convey adventure or exploration or really any care or effort to build a nice word is going to phone it in a little too much? Yeah, I do.

What makes you think all they've managed is a first act? They told us that that was all they intended to share in EA, but we've no idea what how much progress has been made on things they don't intend to show us until the game is released.

Personally, I'm still as interested as I ever was, but I'm only playing the game if there's something specific, such as the new approach to camping, that I want to test. Not wanting to play the game constantly just means that I don't want the first act to feel stale when I start my first real playthrough.
I don't know what they've managed. They're not really telling us, after all. But if act 1 is indicative of how they've decided to do things then it suggests some design choices that I, and probably a fair few other people, would find less than optimal.

The complete radio silence indicates that they're not at all concerned about hyping up EA at the moment. And that has me worried that they feel they're beyond the need for regular feedback and are confident enough in their design choices to push ahead with intense production of the rest of the game. If that's the case then i suspect they'll give us a fall patch to maintain the appearance of caring about EA, but then one more update in March or so, and then nothing until second half of 22, in order to get a feel on priorities for polish. But more depressingly, it means the rest of the game will probably be very similar to act 1.

So no time mechanic, buggy dialogue triggers, characters everywhere that just repeat their lines over and over and over, a ridiculously compressed map, and along with that also extremely nerfed ranged attacks. Along with that comes other necessary homebrew rules to maintain an illusion of balance. This has the potential to be a fine DOS game, but an exceptionally awful Baldur's Gate experience.