Hello Forum,
I am curious what the overall opinion on Early Access being released so early is. When Baldur's Gate 3 first went into Early Access I tried to give it a go and it was too buggy for me to enjoy. I tried it again after some patches and absolutely love the game - I ended up having to stop myself because I didn't want to go too far before actual release. So this is not a knock on the quality of the game or how good it will be upon release...
But do you think Larian releasing the game into Early Access that far in advance is a bad business decision and/or bad for the game? The main questions I have around it are...
1. Does community interaction and involvement make the game that much better? Is there a chance it could actually hurt the game? I am not in game development, so I am curious how much people think player feedback will impact the final product.
2. Based on player feedback and wanting to keep some things, even in the early part of the game, a surprise - how much do you think the full release of the game will actually differ from Early Access?
3. Do you think it will ruin the experience of the game and thus overall reviews/player perception when it comes out due to burn out or "bad experiences" during Early Access? As an example if you look on a lot of review sites there seems to be a ton of negativity because people don't "get" Early Access... or on forums people are posting about having played through Early Access ten times already and wanting more.
4. Isn't 2+ years of Early Access a long time to have a half baked version of the game out in public? Is it going to kill the hype for the full blown release of the game or do you think marketing and word of mouth can get people hyped up again?
this is just probably my own opinion. the way i see it larian put it to EA was a form of marketing. they wanted to show they have community engagement. i'm not sure how much did they take community feedback to heart. and how much was actually implemented? just take for example 6 party characters, reactions, day & night, DOS like artistic style, RTwP and the toilet-chain UI implementation.
so was it a mistake? i think not. they are pretty successful in gathering attention.
