Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Poll: Are you playing BG3 the way you wish it could be played?

It's brought up constantly even OUT of this forum, as are reactions and "barrelmancy" (even if this admittedly became less and less of an issue over time). For context I've seen plenty of conversations elsewhere (like on a popular italian gaming forum I've been following for almost 20 years) where *I* was the most positive voice about this game in the entire discussion.

The naysayer argument in these cases is usually something that boils down to "If you let few casual players who don't really understand balance and mechanics fool around with the game on a superficial level for few hours, chances are they won't notice things that are wrong!".

Which is at the same time mostly true AND hilariously misguided, because that's not a solid foundation to build your systems over.
In the same way you don't put together a proper design document for a game while asking a bunch of random people "What would you like to throw into the mix for this one?".

Incidentally that's terribly close to what actually happened with the Armor System in DOS 2: "We tried it at PAX and people understood quickly how it worked and thought it was fun!".
Except these people didn't stick with the game for dozens of hours, enough time to see all the (nefarious) implications that system had on the encounter design of the game, while users on this forum did and talked about for months, while being ignored and dismissed.

Something that even Larian had to admit in a post-mortem, almost two years after releasing the game.