Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Why did Larian promote cut content?

Why does Larian get a free pass? I'm curious about this. On June 12th, it was said in community update 19 that there was three parts of the city to explore, including the upper city, that was less than two months before release, the exact quote from the blog is that below.

" This weekend, we unveiled the city of Baldur's Gate for the very first time, with a glimpse behind its walls and around its familiar labyrinthine streets. It's been about 20 years since we last had a pint in the Elfsong Tavern or crawled through the sewers beneath the city streets and, as you might have spotted during the PC Gaming Show, many of these locations are back, and many news ones are waiting to be discovered for the first time - giving you a chance to explore the menacing roads of the Outer City, the opulent estates of the Upper City, and the dark alleys and pubs of the Lower City. "

Right there, above " the opulent estates of the Upper City, " the upper city was cut at the last minute and as people have mentioned other things including companions like Karlach were likely tied into it, which would explain the dismal endings for Karlach. If Activision Blizzard did this for example we'd have a riot on our hands, like when OW2 cancelled it's PvE mode, so why is it okay for Larian to do similar things under the justification " oh well, they must of had a good reason i guess! " when other companies are hosited right over the spit for similar things?

Besides the cut content, act 3 is completely broken. Another testament how unreliable reviews are. If this was a EA game they would be under fire with the state of Act 3. It feels like I'm playing a alpha. I didn't touch early access to avoid this situation. Larian did a bait and switch with releasing review codes late.

1000x this.

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And my favourite reddit post about the cut content was nuked after 4,400 upvotes so here it is in pastebin because Larian can take away our endings but reddit mods can't take our complaints!

https://pastebin.com/5w87XD12

EDIT: apparently the reddit post was a copy of this: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1086940/discussions/0/3812913565885064204/

I believe that might of been because youtubers were uploading and giving credit to the guy from the reddit post not the guy from the steam post who actually made it in the first place, there's a second thread.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGat...all_cut_content_spoilers_nonplagiarized/

People keep saying this but I've done my own look into BG2's history, and I'm not sure it's the case? A bunch of romances got cut, some quests were not completed in time, some ideas were changed (Irenicus was supposed to kill Imoen in Spellhold), and I've never seen evidence for some of the bigger claims like Sundesselar was supposed to be its own hub.

The cut content is more of a consequence of a significant change in story very close to the end of development, in plot and tone and themes. Changing Daisy and either inventing the Emperor or shoving him into that role is massive.

Lazy to complete it? Are you okay, lad? You've said more than enough to ensure me that you've no idea what you're talking about.
They were forced to cut content, at least because they were runing out of time, not because they are lazy, jeez...I assure you, Larian couldn't afford lazines during BG3 development, too much at stake, BG3 is like all or nothing for their future.

As for Act development in 1 month...you've made it all because everything or at least major assets, etc was already available to you & quality of everything in BG3 Act is on completely different level in comparrison to such mods as yours and I'm not trying to offend you, it's just an obvious fact.
To create an Act, obviously, they've done tons of preparations but still they need some concept arts, maybe even tons of them in order to create 3d assets and not just architecture ones, quests, tons of scripts, tons of writing\voice overs, some animations for a special cutscenes, visual stuff for atmospehere\immersion, like shaders etc, polishing + remaking\rewriting some stuff they are not fond of which will require some additional reworks for other Acts and many, many other stuff\workflows.
You just can't compare it to your moding experience, you can't say that Larian is lazy and all of this is easypeasylemonsqueezy and can be done in 1 month, it's just pure ignorance and boasting.

They decide their timetable, Swen mentioned as much recently. Larian could of delayed the game a couple of months and released it with Act 2 + 3 more polished than what they currently are, the whole " they ran out of time " excuse only applies to companies like Activision Blizzard/EA and other triple A studios who have the corporate overlords wanting that sweet sweet money regardless of the games quality or readiness to be released, Larian is an independent studio a 2 month delay would not of killed the company and some of the cut stuff could of seen the light of day.

The big thing is that Larian, despite the state of act 3, moved the release date up and used cut content for advertising.

And that they now boast that their first patch will contain 1000bfixes shows how much sticking to the original release date would have helped.

So, you think, that they could've easily continue development of this game for like half or even year but simply decided to cut off so much important content, broke some promises, leave behind not a small amount of effort, just to release it a bit earlier and be done with it? I doubt it.
Some ppl say that they released it earlier because of Starfield. Who knows. We don't know everything about Larian agreements with WotC etc, nothing about their finances, problems to make such conclusions.
What I can tell for sure, is that Swen care about quality of his games, especially BG, he and his team are passionate, you can see it easily, it's in their interest to release a game in a better state possible, if they decided to cut content and release BG earlier, with unpolished Act 3, then there is a serious reason to do so, don't you think?

All I'm getting from your post is " Here Larian, have a free pass " I'll mentioned something I mentioned earlier. If a AAA game company released a game with this much cut content or said all three parts of the city would be playable in a developer update and then quietly kicked it to the curb, that developer would be hung, draw and quartered by people as a result, Larian have done the same and your response is literally " they get a free pass they're passionate about BG " being passionate doesn't excuse what they've done.

And yes, Larian could of delayed the game if they so choose, they are Independent and not beholden to angry investors to quite the same level as the big AAA companies are, if they were as passionate as you like to believe they would of delayed the game so they could have more time to create the best possible experience this game could be and thoroughly test content so we don't have the problems we have now ie Act 3, buggy companions etc.

It's very funny considering all the free marketing and hype Larian got from developers insisting that BG3 was going to be so incredible owing to Larian's unique position that no one should expect other games like it, and then Larian ended up falling prey to the same issues. Had this been Obsidian or Bioware or anyone else, people would be pitching a fit, there'd be blood in the water. People are coasting on expecting Larian to fix so much with a definitive edition, when we have no idea of it happening, and Swen saying they have no expansion plans. Like, do people think crunch wasn't happening when it seems like massive changes were being enacted maybe twelve months (or less!) before release?

Okay folks, let's recognise when we've made our points and it's time to agree to disagree.

Looks like you're the one who knows all about their finances, problems, contracts etc, tell us then why they decided to cut so much content...

To me, it's obvious, that at least Swen care a lot about BG, which means he didn't want to cut his brilliant in half, brake promises etc, but running independent studio, developing such complicated game is a huge risk and my bet is smth went not how they expected, so the only decent solution was to release it earlier and polish cutted content to introduce it in Definitive Edition...we'll see.

Okay, looks like we're starting to go round in circles here. There's another thread about cut content over at https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=886139 so I'm going to lock this one so we can focus discussion in one place.

If anyone has any posts (that are talking about the game rather than bickering!) they want me to move from here to there, drop me a PM.