Not going into the whole wall of text.
We're off to an auspicious start....
You basically suggested they falsely marketed their games
It's not a suggestion, if the label is incorrect, it's incorrect. If that incorrectness is profitable, the incentive is to leave it. That's just business.
Most AAA games treat "early access" as no more than a preorder incentive or a server stress test
And are they accepted to be accurate labels, or do players consistently decry them as abuses of the "early access" label? Because from "no more than a preorder incentive or a server stress test" it sounds like you don't think "a preorder incentive or a server stress test" is really "early access". That doesn't change what the label means, it just means it's often misapplied. Other people lying doesn't make Larian correct. It's a completely different discussion.
Larian announced from the very beginning that BG3 early access was purely going to be Act 1 of the game
If you'd read the "whole wall of text" before responding to it you'd know I literally said Larian was honest about the business model, just dubious with their use of the "early access" label.
They never promised access to the full game before release, nor that you would get it as they develop it, or anything else. If you expected anything else
Not once, in any of my posts (seriously, please read them if you want to respond), have I suggested that Larian implied they would accept more than feedback for the pre-release content, or that they would (or even
should) release more. The most I did was suggest that lacking feedback for release content can negatively impact its quality and that the model that results in that risk is not really "early access", but a demo. Once again, I have even said explicitly that such a model is not inherently a bad one - and that I'm generally
satisfied with the direction of development.
You would know all of that if you'd read the posts before replying to them.
As to what I was driving at about the feedback was when you said this:
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
Because in spite of what you said earlier this particular part really sounds like you are mad about them not listening to your feedback
Did you also not read what was in the spoiler? The one
right after that quote? That whole paragraph was satirically poking at what some people said about DOS2 reviews, because it is so obviously ridiculous an accusation. It's also got nothing to do with the feedback discussion unless you include steam reviews into "feedback", and, for what the average steam review looked like when DOS2 released... I do not. They've improved enough over the years that I think
now they're usable, but DOS2 released to the steam reviews of... six years ago. The most publishers were doing at the time was looking at the aggregate scores, and that's not exactly actionable feedback.
You are reading something into the text that isn't there to retroactively justify an emotionally charged response to incomplete parts of it. You aren't even reading through what you're responding to, though at least you admit to it. I am really, really struggling to assume you're acting in good faith here, especially after the "Larian never promised you more pre-release content" bit. If you want to respond to someone saying Larian did promise that... please find someone who's actually saying it first.
