Normally a game spending years in EA is not a good sign. I'd guess development is not going smoothly.
I think that in hindsight, Larian would not have released EA until 2021. But that doesn't mean development is going poorly, it could just as well mean they did a crappy job of assessing how long the game would take to develop.
I think if we are thinking about things in normal situations that it would 'almost' always be a bad thing for Early Access to drag on for years. I think the issues with it are both in that it seems to usually point to development issues and could also lead to your most hardcore player base burning itself out on the game before release.
But in this case I imagine a lot of what is taking so long is:
1. Baldur's Gate 3 is a massive undertaking. It would not shock me if the game offers hundreds of hours of gameplay while also containing branching story paths, player choice, tons of classes, spells, races, etc. while also including quality graphics and a lot of little things like every conversation zooming into to be somewhat cinematic in nature.
2. But even more so I imagine that Larian underestimated how much the pandemic, lockdowns, the panic over COVID, etc. would impact their development as it seems to have impacted all development teams. I think if they were able to wrap their heads around this ahead of time we would have likely got Early Access sometime from mid-2021 to early 2022... because I think the game will probably end up coming out late 2022 to mid-2023.
Regarding 1: Pathfinder WotR has hundreds of hours of gameplay, branching story paths and far more classes and spells than BG3 will on release if it actually implement all classes of the PHB, and yet was developed in 3 years with a fraction of the team size and budget.
Right, which is why I added the second point of point one "while also including quality graphics and a lot of little things like every conversation zooming into to be somewhat cinematic in nature.". Baldur's Gate 3 isn't Pathfinder WotR or Divinity 2. The graphics used for the game are far more advanced than those games, the voice acting is on a different scale, every conversation you have is 'cinematic' in nature in terms of the camera zooming in and things like that. So this game is like developing Pathfinder WotR, which took three years or so and released rather buggy... plus then on top of that adding every bell and whistle imaginable that I can think of for a CRPG. Every conversation voiced, every conversation zooming in, higher end graphics, higher end cinematic cutscenes and things of that nature.
Then on top of that when Larian has said that they will not have certain 'bells and whistles' like a day/night cycle, you see get pretty upset that it is not going to make it... even though that would likely extend development out even further.
This is not to say that I back all of those decisions. For instance I think it is pretty neat that every conversation zooms in and you can see the participants up close, but I don't think that is really necessary if it adds a ton of extra dev time or cost to the project.
Also, I am not a developer... but from what I have seen a lot of these extra bells and whistles that were not in a game like Pathfinder or Divinity 2 end up not only taking a lot of time, but a lot of money. I also believe that they take not only voice actors, but actual actors who get hooked up with censors and stuff... and that is rather difficult to do when everyone is locked down with COVID stuff.
I guess I am saying that I agree there could be development issues plaguing this game just due to the sheer scope, size and ambition of it. But I think there are a lot of factors with this game, along with a lot of other hyper-ambitious AAA games that are coming out these days, that point to it just needing more time than a lot of other games.
