I think the first issue was trying to break things into 3 Acts, and then having Early Access be only the first Act. I wish they wouldn't have framed it like that initially, cause now we are stuck with this stage-play language, which is really insufficient for describing what cracks off in this game. I'm not sure there's even broad agreement about where one act ends and another begins hehe.
"Chapters" titled but left unnumbered, would have been better for an EA, and then there might have been more opportunities to preview and shuffle stuff around to make sure it would click. Since mostly the kinks are in the transitions, and the through lines, perhaps what they needed was to insert a couple chapters, or the copy/paste reorder some of the slides.
I have no clue how one even begins to approach this kind of story writing, how they would workshop it internally, or manage to respond (or even review) the feedback they've received on it over the past 3 years.
The DOS2 feedback section has what, like 11,000 posts? BG3's has 88,000 lol.
This section already has 6,000 posts since it was created, a little over a month ago.
They'd probably need to hire an entire team of people, whose whole job it was simply to summarize what other people were saying here and distill that into something usable. I can't imagine what that would feel like for their writers. Like 'OK we got some notes, please clear your schedule for the next 19 weeks so we can discuss them' hehe. And that's just here. Feedback on Steam, add another zero, and they'd probably have to give pay raises to the team on that one, just to compensate for the mental trauma they're likely to endure sifting through it all.
EA was a bit of a double edged sword here in my view. It probably invited too much input and critical feedback into the process at a point when the developers would have had a hard time incorperating or even reading most of it. Would also be easy to dismiss, since feedback was only sought for the first portion of the game, like a film review that only covers the first 35 minutes of a movie. Now though, because it was done that way, I think the game has Early Access sorta baked in. Meaning that the EA will just never end, even though the game is ostensibly complete, people will still be looking for the director's cut or the fan edit, or the missing act. I guess that's alright, if they just keep chipping away at it. I think EA continues now, so it'd be cool if they put out an expansion that could sort of revisit the whole thing. Ideally with some new boards here! That would be cool!
Ps. When I picture what things must have been like launching EA in 2020, with everyone working from home for like 2 years, this game seems like a total triumph. Frankly I'm amazed that they pulled this off. Now I think, just keep it going, right... EA remastered? I mean why not?
Last edited by Black_Elk; 16/09/23 01:59 AM.
