Especially in an industry that gives players choices, but rarely is able to truly build a story around their lasting ramifications, players who can't appreciate the level of work that goes into creating a game like The Witcher 2, with two entirely different second acts, I hope don't impact game development (looks at Witcher 3) nevermind
And considering the numbers I've seen thrown out about how many players 'finish' games at all, I don't think efficient use of resources should either. The most efficient use of resources then would be making interactive movies.
I don't know what your viewpoint is, but knowing a game is too big to experience in one go adds a lot for me.
My viewpoint is I prefer to temper my expectations to avoid disappointment.
The poster I was responding to brought up the possibility of completely separate storylines (as per Larian's words), I only described why I think we shouldn't expect too much branching. Since we're mentioning CDPR's games, the stated reason for the shortened main story of CP77 was that the developers saw how few players finished TW3, and wanted them to experience the full story of Cyberpunk. This statement was made during the pre-release period, so it's not a case of them promising too much and then finding an excuse when they couldn't deliver. Whether we like it or not (I don't), developers do listen to the people who don't finish their games, or don't finish them more than once.
While I think we shouldn't expect too much, it's too early to say what the exact level of variance and consequencecs in BG3 is going to be. There is, I think, a decent amount of responsiveness if the player decides to act outside of the scripted interactions, like how every NPC who gives you something has a special line if you pickpocketed the item beforehand. If nothing else, it's more than most other RPGs let you do. Whether that level of attention to detail will be present within the actual story is hard to tell.
