Originally Posted by Brainer
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...
I am not quite seeing your point.

I am sure maintaining Early Access is a big commitment, but whenever it is worth it, or not is really up to Larian. Without EA they could withhold from recording VO so early on, but it seems they have created a pipeline that supports that kind of investment.

I also disagree about feedback. Larian has been responding to feedback - throughout EA and up to 1.0 and after release. They didn't change the game they are making, simply because some playerbase didn't like what they were going on, but they did address criticisms that they found valid. Early Access is a testing ground, not a design committee. EA is not the for players to submit their design ideas, it is for devs to see how players interact with the game they are building. Not quite EA but here is TIm Cain talking about his love/hate relationship with focus testing.

I am mostly surprised you thought Early Access wasn't beneficial. In both of their titles I played (D:OS2, BG3) I thought the opening chapter, which was extensively tested throughout EA period has been the best, most polished and robust part of the title by a large margin. Would BG3 be really better, if whole of the game was as messy as act2&3?

Now, that there is sizable gap in quiality in IMO a concern in itself. It seems like Larian has tendency to overscope to start with, and is unable to keep up with the standard they set at the start of their titles. To me it is not great, and I find all three of their recent RPGs to be disappointing - and they are disappointing mainly due to the expectations they set up for themselves. I have no clue what they should do, or if there is a problem to begin with. Complex RPG as simply difficult to test, and testing part of it, and spending time fixing the rest post release, seems like a fairly decent way of doing it. It seems like a happy medium between releasing whole game in Early Access, and releasing game with only internal testing, and than fixing the whole thing post release.