I’ll admit, when the announcement came last week, I was angry and it took me a few days to cool down.
See, Baldur’s Gate helped me get through a particularly tough point in my life, something I’m still healing from, and I realize now that the hope of an expansion or continuation of the story was really keeping me going more than I’d expected. I’ll get over it of course, but right now? I’m just sad.
I think the way in which we got the news of the cancellation was poor. Swen’s immediate pivot to the next new exciting project, along with the IGN article confirming that an expansion had been started but canceled, left me feeling like Larian really didn’t care about the feelings of the fans who wanted a continuation. A company like Fromsoft would have made those announcements over several days / weeks, taking the time to lessen the blow by showing empathy / understanding that this was going to be disappointing news. The last thing I wanted to be told was how great this next new thing is going to be and how it’s going to blow my previous experience out of the water. It’s a bit tone deaf. Frankly, hearing about how the studio was supposedly elated at the decision to abandon something I loved also sucks!
I hope some lessons can be learned on how to better handle PR in the future.
Now, regarding the game itself. Larian, I enjoyed my experience in spite of you. I bought this game on release. I finished the game by Patch 3. It was rough. I had some major bugs and performance issues, but I found workarounds and pushed through it. Then I got to the ending and…wow. It was legitimately the absolute worst wrap up to a game that I had ever played. Some of it was my choices, but those ending sequences showed such a lack of polish and planning that I can’t believe they were made by the same studio who made Act 1. I felt so let down in fact that I refused to touch the game again until Patch 5. I walked away feeling like I’d wasted hours of my life.
So, Patch 5 roles around, and you know what? The epilogue is pretty good! The prior dock scenes were still kinda bad, but they'd been ironed out a tad. The party? Great. It felt like an apology, or an acknowledgement that what we got wasn’t appropriate for the level of quality that had come before. On top of it, the game starts hinting that there is going to be more! Heck yeah, I was getting excited!
It’s a very different experience getting to see an ending 2 months after you finish something. You don’t get the same kind of catharsis that you would, had you experienced it back to back. I wish I had, because upon seeing that epilogue, all I wanted was one last hurrah adventure with these companions that I’d grown to love so much. To give me one more chance at that catharsis I hadn’t yet felt.
Honestly, I could overlook the months it took to get the epilogue. I could overlook the poor release state of Act 3. I could even overlook having my multiplayer games repeatedly delayed MONTHS due to mac / PC version mismatching. In fact, I still haven’t gotten to experience a proper patch on the day it was released, and I doubt I ever will at this point.
I’ll wrap it up. Larian, you haven’t earned me as a repeat customer. I might consider buying your games when they’ve been on sale for a good year, and all the issues have been patched over, but I’ll lever touch a title of yours on release. I may have loved this game, but I don’t want to have to go through such a rollercoaster of disappointment and mixed emotions again.
Best of luck to you! I hope you enjoy working on this new title you’re excited about.
