Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Is this a joke? No, really, where is the punchline?

Did they patch out all the crappy low effort filler copypasta combat in the meantime? The unedited walls of text? The quests and areas that oft seem barely iterated upon, but finalized as they came? Currently Owlcat's 70s to low 80s approval ratings seem just, unfortunately. WOTR is the only major CRPG of the past ten years I'm likely never gonna finish. Most of the time I fire it up again, I'm like: "I can't do this anymore."

To quote Obsidian's former Eric Fenstermaker: "Balancing polish and campaign length on a budget is a zero-sum trade-off". Owlcat have released three massive 100-200 hour games, numerous DLC plus Enhanceds in the space of ~five years. If they'd patch their clearly "quantity over quality" stance, iterate and throw out the trash, they would easily climb to the top tier. I genuinelly hope they do... because the good parts of their games are real good. But canned Solyanka is evidently easier and quicker served than a nice Filet Mignon. So you're getting a lot of canned Solyanka in between bits of Filet Mignon. And you oft have to grind hard to get them.

Recently checking for Rogue Trader being on sale again, but my conflicted experience with both Pathfinder games coupled with the by far most upvoted Steam review had me going for Wartales and SKALD instead. Now I think BG3 is oversold a bit. In parts due to it being the first proper RPG in the big budget space in generations of hardware. However, Owlcat games are inherently stretched beyond outstaying their welcome with low effort content and low polish design -- and unfortunately, that seems ingrained in a business model of knocking out massive epics nobody else does as quickly as possible. I mean, even if their games were half as long, they'd still dwarf them pretty much all.