Well, as for Larian's next title, I suppose the one thing they shouldn't do is Early Access. Like, at all.
Their development has always been tumultuous and messy as-is (what with constant rewrites and redesigns very late into the cycle causing everything to come apart at the seams, BG3's just the most obvious example because of how oversaturated it is), and if BG3's EA has shown anything, it's that they can barely maintain a stable vision of what they are trying to cobble together, and you add the player feedback on top of that which they stopped giving a crap about around a year before release, switching to appeasing the "slobbering over a somewhat poorly written globule of pixels" crowd instead...
This, 100%. All those rewritings made me feel like playing a different game on release with characters who pretend to be the same as in EA but simply are a version you can order on wish. The moment I saw the last PFH I had a real bad gut feeling, as people went crazy about "whoa you can f*ck a bear, nice" and "whoa so much gore and blood, nice". Sadly, my feeling was right and what they delivered wasn't a good, deep story but more a shallow story only used as the groundwork for some abysmally bad narrative choices and sex-driven characters just to please the part of the crowd that can be pleased easily whenever they see pixel nipples or nude stuff more down south. Yeah, I get it, it's easier to go that route than to actually come up with a story that's so good that it sticks in your head for a long time.
...Oh, right. Remove romance entirely, please. Altogether. Either make a full-on Subverse-like if you're so commited to slapping sex on everything and everyone, or ignore the subject altogether, because BG3 certainly was anything but a smooth mixture of tones.
Exactly, the romances itself, if you compare all the companions, show huge differences in their quality. There were some good moments, ngl, but overall it played on a American Pie-level with all those teenager horniness and the lack of a real adult romance. When I heard Larian talking about their vision for romances for the first time (like grown-up romances, sex should not be a reward etc.) I felt like this could be really good, because I hate how relationships in games are either depicted somewhat childish (like Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons) or way too focused on sex. Makes me question if the developers ever had their own one.
If they decide to add romances again, please tone it down, make it slow burn and less about sex but more about how important compromises are and how you evolve together as a partners.
