Thought it was interesting that testers didn’t respond well to danger zones where you can’t long rest. I thought that would add a fun challenge to the game but I guess if you can still backtrack far enough to long rest, it just becomes a nuisance.
Sadly many "gamers" do not want challenge. They want easy games that still tell them that they are hard so they feel powerful and accomplished. Thats why everything gets dumbed down, including WotC with D&D 5E and OneD&D.
I personally am unsure what being a "gamer" means. But many who go to Role playing game are not here for the successor of War games, but for the Story it tells. So battles are reduced to an element, which should not be too long are tiresome, that is there to improve a story and not to, in lack of a better word, gatekeep it.
Other people like D&D for the tactical and stat based combat. It is always a challenge to balance between those two crowds, true. But just dismissing the more story-inclined group as "not wanting a challenge" and the games as getting "dumbed down" is unfair and, in my opinion, completely missing the point.
Thats what the story mode difficulty setting is for, or in PnP a very lenient DM. But instead everyone gets dragged down because games now are designed for the lowest common denominator.
And its not only D&D/BG3. Except for a few games which use difficulty as a way to differentiate themselves like Souls games everything gets more and more easy to "broaden the appeal". So much so that you often have to try very hard to actually lose.
