I am not in total agreement here. Yes, work needs to be done on Bg3, especially ACT 3 and the Multiplayer system, as well as Modding tools. However, the bones of the game are very strong, and - unlike Starfield - I can see, feel and hear the work that was put into Bg3. I am confident that within 6 months to a year we will have a more polished game with additional features at no cost.
I'm not. And the reason is simply: Regardless of the amount of extra work put into the DE of DOS:2, they never really managed to make the back half of that game feel good.
Your reasoning seems a little odd to me. Both Starfield and BG3 have people who have really enjoyed them while also having humongous, glaring flaws. You seem to think that there is some fundamental difference between these two games for reasons I cannot really understand. I think it's very likely that many people at Bethesda DID put a lot of work and a lot of love into the game. Bethesda had a larger team and more resources...but then again Baldur's Gate is a much smaller game. (Honestly, in many ways, BG3 is even small compared to the originals.)
In my view both Bethesda and Larian have the same issue. They both suffer from the same thing. There is no real fundamental difference between them that makes one company good at making games and another bad at making games (because I don't buy that premise to begin with.) The simple fundamental answer for why *no game* seems to be able to release in a complete state is this: We *do not have institutions capable of creating games that want to be as ambitious as Starfield or BG3 on release.* They simply *do not exist.* The cost and challenge of making games this complex has simply not been mastered *by anyone*. Nobody has a good roadmap for creating games like this. So companies frequently stumble on release and find themselves patching things in as the game goes along. It's why the best purchasing strategy may be to evaluate a game 6 months to a year after its initial release. By then, you can probably better evaluate its potential. For better or worse, some projects are so ambitious that the first year of release essentially acts as an extended EA period for them. Of course companies don't like my conclusion, because they would rather tons of people buy the game when it drops for the hype.
But I think this isn't simply a problem that throwing more people and more resources at a game can solve. It's the sort of thing that can only be mitigated by accumulated institutional knowledge and experience.
