People call crpg's Choose Your Own Adventure because of the way the narrative branches apart and then is twisted back together, often inelegantly. The few minutes of gameplay we've seen from DA4, reveals almost nothing about what the narrative will be like. The combat seems to be a more streamlined rendition of the already hyper-streamlined version of the last game. But for anything else, we'd be extrapolating about the game a lot of things from essentially the Nautiloid tutorial level.
I think BG3 was in development for too long, long enough that the scope of the game was expanded, then had to be cut back in order to ship the game. They rewrote Wyll from scratch, a whole section of Baldur's Gate was left on the cutting room floor, and we can see the artifacts of older narrative choices throughout the game, but especially where the narrative hits rough patches.
The reason the EA was so big is probably the same reason for this mission creep. Covid. They'd already made so much money from the EA alone, they probably felt safer working on the game for as long as they did, on the whole it made a terrific game, but I'm not sure giving more of it for us to bugtest would have addressed the problems in the later Acts. I could be wrong, I am curious to know what this forum would have been like if we'd gone through the second act with the same fine toothed comb as we did Act I.
