No one is saying that a game is expected to be bug free. What is the issue is how many bugs are being fixed in every major patch. 1000+ fixes everytime shows a game that was not tested properly.
Your statement saying "solved through fan mods" is all well and good, if you are on the PC. That doesn't apply to those of us on the PS5.
Thus why I feel we need a separate forum for PC and PS5 because we are not talking about the same game experience in all of these threads. Hell, one look at the UI of both games clearly shows it's different.
I fully agree, but it is a bit more complicated. As Halycon says, there is no bug free game, or even bug free software. But there is damn lot of software with bugs we know will never occur in real life in software probably more complex than a game. That's why aircrafts are allowed to fly, we know, the software has bugs, but we also know that they don't matter.
Games are a special thing in software, as people tend to be more lenient as they are "only games". To a certain degree that is correct, in a text heavy game typos occur, but they don't matter or ruin the fun. But each typo is qualified as a bug. There are a lot of other minor bugs that are acceptable, like a bit of glitching, a slight frame drop in an especially crowded area, stats on a single weapon not displayed correctly, a book with a bit of lore I can't open... in short, anything that is not locking the player out of content, breaking his game, corrupting his saves or ruining his experience on hardware that should easily run the game according to the developer.
Over maybe the last 10 years delivering games with bugs of the latter kind has been quite a trend. Everybody is used now to "day 1 patches" so big, you essentially have to download the game twice. Followed by an orgy of patches. Just look at Cyberpunk, it took well over a year until the game was deemed playable and there are many examples like that. I stopped playing Lords of the Fallen, I think, it is an amazing soulslike, but they currently release a patch once a week fundamentally changing the game. It is very clear that not even the design process was finished on release day.
Back to BG3. As Tom Imp says, the amount of bugs fixed with every patch is truly disturbing. And it is not only that, every patch needs several hot fixes to get it to work. We currently have a situation, where each patch and hotfix probably breaks more, than it actually fixes. One character behaves, as he should, 2 others bug completely out. While most of the bug fixes address typo level things, we are well in the area of "not acceptable bugs", because players get locked out of content they payed for. That is like buying a car but being unable to use gears 5-8.
I'm in the software industry for way over 20 years and I have seen a lot of what is currently happening to BG3. And it always boils down to a mixture of 3 reasons. A sloppy and hasty development process with absurd deadlines. A bad architecture with a lot of stuff being hardcoded all over the board. Unstructured code with lots of (unknown) dependencies. That always lead to the phenomen that you fix one thing and another thing, that is logically not related at all, breaks for reasons. It also show as a lack of proper QA. Will Larian be able to fix this? Yes, but only with lots of time and a major internal overhaul of the game. Do I think they will fix it soon? No, because due to their communication they are more interested in the positioning of trees and other minor stuff, than truly working on problems for players.
That's why I stopped playing the game, or even downloading patches. Unless Larian announces a major overhaul e.g. in form of a definitive edition with enough additional development time to truly fix and test things, it won't get better, only different. Unless they land a lucky punch, miracles do happen and we are approaching x-mas anyway.
What I would really like Larian to do is get better at communication. Hell, you guys are nominated for the community award at Games Awards, better start talking to the community!
