Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General What was purpose of Early Acess?

All of this is unsurprising if you followed DOS2 development. "Larian EA" is a mislabeling at best and an outright marketing lie at worst - what they provide as "early access" is a kickstarter with a demo. Feedback outside of the demo itself is nonexistent because no one but Larian has access to it, and the idea that feedback is for the game in general as opposed to the systems specifically within the demo (the "source system" in DOS2 comes to mind as a prime example of this - most of it, and most of its balance, was released without any player feedback whatsoever). This is also something many suspected was the cause for the writing/content quality declining - sometimes precipitously - in DOS2 after Fort Joy: Fort Joy was the extent of the feedback they got about the writing prior to release, and the rest was entirely internal, without a vast array of playtesting and player suggestions to take into consideration. I don't know if DOS1 had similar complaints, as I'm less familiar with the meta surrounding its community.

I'd hoped Larian had finally figured out what early access actually is, but I suspect they know and they're just... profitably dishonest about what it is they have actually released thus far. Creating the illusion of feedback can help create player investment in the game before it releases, and you can just lampshade the lack of response to feedback or the lack of any potential feedback for what wasn't in the demo as "we just can't please 'em all". Unfortunately, this invites portions of your community to dismiss any feedback they disagree with by mischaracterizing anyone giving it as "entitled." I've been playing games with forums for a long time and I genuinely can't recall a single instance of the "you just want your feedback to be listened to and other feedback ignored" accusation being remotely based in fact - except occasionally when leveled as a response to the first person tossing out the accusation. I can recall quite a few examples where it manifested as a sort of projection from people with their own entitled mindset of "I got/I expect to get the system I wanted, so I don't want them to listen to any feedback that might change it, so anyone who disagrees is entitled and must be dismissed."

There's also the more insidious angle of saying that the main purpose is to respond to player feedback in the starter area to put it up to a high standard while skimping on everything afterwards so that initial reviews are positive after release and by the time the flaws are apparent players are too deeply invested to acknowledge them or too disinterested to rewrite their reviews to include them
There is some hope I have that Larian will be more open to post-launch changes than I recall them being in DOS2, especially since the very obvious transition from content that had a community feedback effort and content that didn't was one of the few major criticisms leveled at a game as well-liked (even by those complaining) as DOS2. In that sense, I suspect that the early post-launch period will be, for BG3, more like an actual early access (or, probably more accurately, a genuine "open beta"). Remember, early access isn't a level of polish or quantity of bugs (even if it's often associated with little of the former and much of the latter) - it's a type of content release with high flexibility. If Larian continues to respond to community feedback after launch and make popularly requested changes while continuing to polish the experience, then they've effectively moved from a kickstarter with a demo to an early access.

Unfortunately, given what I know about the industry, narrative tends to be ossified at release for mundane organizational reasons. Management will basically never authorize new VA work and new art assets after whatever they decide to call "release", because these are done generally by contractors who are dropped shortly after release. The only common exceptions are "new releases" like DLCs, for which new contracts are drawn. Few if any studios have in-house capability to improve the writing once the performance is recorded and the art assets given, though more have in-house art asset creation ability than in-house VA, especially if the game is remotely multilingual. I sincerely hope that Larian writers paid close attention to the feedback that it was too late to act on when DOS2 released, and applied whatever lessons they could learn from that to the writing they did without player feedback in BG3.