Yes, it appears that something happened during development that caused Larian to flinch away from a more genuine sense of choice and consequence. Notably, Gale's magic hunger is reduced to any three magic items instead of three major ones. But there are a lot of smaller oddities, too. The one that stuck out to me is the Mind Flayer corpse that Dror Razglin communicates with -- in early access, if could and would recognise you if you killed it on the beach. Now, the narrator goes "This is not any Mind Flayer you recognise, but maybe it can identify you?" I just got a message from a friend who did not play EA asking me what the point of that scene was.
Between the Daisy changes I outlined in another thread and all these small elements, it is clear Larian had a really big shift in narrative tone at some point and all the interesting material was cut and replaced for something more typically heroic. It's a real shame. I genuinely don't understand why they'd change so much. This isn't unimplemented content, this is implemented content that was altered which involves a lot more work than just not finishing something.
