Follow up post, take 34.
Ok.
The difficulty in assessing Larian’s stance toward their own community is that we must infer, deduce or just plain guess what their intent was at every step of the process. We could take them at their word, but their words are sparse and not always reliable.
I considered not writing a follow-up post but I called Larian negligent, exploitative and adversarial: Them’s fightin’ words. I don’t wish to renounce them, so I’ll try to briefly explain how one might come to that conclusion.
[guesswork]
Larian relied heavily on their early access audience to make BG3 because it wasn’t designed as much as budgeted.
Their initial early access offering had
- a hook Swen thought of in a hurry on a plane to meet Wizards of the Coast
- Larian’s map design (hand crafted and densely packed)
- Larian’s dialogue (few options, full animation)
- DnD 5e’s combat modified to leverage any feature already present in Larian’s Divinity engine
- Marketting targetted at fans of DnD and Baldur’s Gate.
Larian planned on using the early access community to guide them through BG3’s design because they had no vision. Their communication wasn’t to the community’s benefit: They needed to keep feedback flowing for their own sake.
Panels from hell were about hype, selling games and generating feedback (exploitative); the handful of times they directly adressed community concerns was to get the conversation unstuck and the feedback mill going again (adversarial); they never definitively said features wouldn’t make it in BG3 because dissapointed players stop providing feedback (negligent).
[/guesswork]
That’s how one might take a dim view on Larian’s communication. Of course, I don’t know for sure Larian added features to their games by counting how popular each one was and calculating the profit in implementing them, but that take is not incompatible with the facts as we know them.
Let’s compare two features that were requested during early access: Salami as a weapon & settings for the colorblind. Salami had many fans while gamers who couldn’t play the game didn’t provide as much feedback (go figure…) Larian released BG3 with the popular feature, not the one that would have supported their community.
How do we feel now about the effort they put into implementing feedback?
