(Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion)
Personally, I lost all my faith in Larian the day I saw the interview. I start to ask myself what will happen with the next game? What if they also lose their passion for it and I'm enjoying the game and then they drop it just as they did with BG3? Honestly, I'm not going to buy the next game, I was always interested in trying a D&D game, I loved Larian for DOS2 and I was really hyped for what they come up with next. I was sad when Divinity: Fallen Heroes got cancelled but when I first heard about BG3, I was totally hyped and couldn't wait for it. I played EA asap. Sure, the first downer has been how long EA has taken, but I was fine with it as I knew at the end I would see a fully fleshed out, polished game. And lets be honest, EA was fun, Larian even added stuff based on fan feedback and such, everything seemed like we are on the ride of our gaming life. I was defending Larian several times, for sure. I was expecting the next big thing, something like Skyrim or Witcher 3, a game for a century. I expected Act 2 and Act 3 to be at least the same as Act 1 and that's was easily enough for me.
Then we got the release and it brought just disappointment to my doorstep. So many things changed from EA to release (e.g. Omeluums ring), the writing got changed for the worse (characters and main plot), Tav still looked so artificial and moved/stood/used the same facial expressions no matter what gender/body type you picked. I can pick a voice for the Tav and still Tav doesn't talk? The character creator is a joke (and a bad one), the game is oversexualized in many ways, the jokes are sometimes hurtful towards other chars (and subsequently their fans), not really funny and overall immature, sometimes they used Forgotten Realms lore, sometimes they simply ignored it and added homebrew where it was convenient for Larian, the list of bugs could easily compete with the length or LOTR and so on. I never expected the release to be that bad, I was under the impression that Larian can do better (at least from DOS2), especially when it comes to the extreme immaturity in BG3. It felt like a teenager movie at times.
BUT! Everything was still fine for me on release, as I was sure they will totally work on that. Why else would we have the feedback channel on Discord, feedback threads on here and the official feedback form on their website. Lets be real, bugs are normal and I can wait for them to be fixed. Also, each game has plot holes or contradictions and there have been so many good, well written feedbacks to point them out. None of them (or at least the most) were offensive in any way, you could just see how important the game and the content has been for so many players. Just imagine all the time they spent to write all that feedback in hopes of it being fixed or added (if said feedback is written frequent enough).
And til this day, we didn't really see a lot of that added (beside the epilogue, which is something Larian has been working on before the feedback, at least they said so). Instead, we got some mediocre solutions like the Karlach ending or the addition of kiss animations while there were still way more important things to fix.
I'm really sorry for everyone who spent time writing feedback (who might realize now that nothing of that was never even considered being added in the first place, which hurts and is an insult) just to read that while they wrote feedback with passion the team lost their own passion for the game.
Of course I would've liked to see a DLC, but what I was always hoping for the most was a good ending to the game, just a polished version with at least two (good/evil) routes to take that both feel worthy to play (beside Durge), but now it feels like this will never happen.
So, as I said, I lost my faith in Larian. Of course, it's bad if you lose your passion for the game you are working on and even if I hate the fact that the game is being dropped, I still can understand that they didn't want to go any further. It's just the timing and they way they communicated it, that's cruel.
But to end this on a positive note: Hats off to Swen Vincke, he had to decide between acting professional as a company/keeping their reputation or risking the mental (and physical) health of his team and he decided to take the more human path, which is great. Maybe, if some time has passed, they will look back at BG3 and question themselves if the game itself maybe has been a bit too huge and ambitious for them and they do more what they love. In that regard, I wish them the best.
All of this is on you, not Larian.
Yeah, totally not. There are way more people than just the OP. Their PR is bad, just throwing out some interview saying how elated the team was to not having to work on BG3 for a longer time while the game itself is still in a state far from being finished or polished and not even releasing a proper news on any of their platforms is just bullcrap. Even more if they praise their next project, feels like just talking bad about their child while the next bun is in the oven.
I never saw anything like this, never have I read about developers feeling elated while the game is still within it's first year of release and very bugged for a lot of people.
