Honestly I don't think I would be so upset if the problems of the game were contained to the development process. There's places where every game falls short, and this is certainly no exception. If for example you look at the Witcher 3, you'll see that a common thing pointed out is that the end of the assassins subplot feels very anticlimactic considering how important those side quests are to the main ending of the game. Yet, that stands out in a wonderful game as merely a place where the developers dropped the ball and didn't get a chance to polish things up, it doesn't feel like something that NEEDS to be addressed because it's a problem in the game. In BG3, there's very clearly a lot of situations that resemble this one. Obviously in Act 3, it's a bit of a letdown to see that the conclusions of the stories for many of the recurring npcs suddenly feel like there's no consequences from your prior interactions, leaving you to just have a brief chat with them where they say "look I'm here at the end of the game too!". But despite it being a letdown, at least they're there, with some form of conclusion to that piece of the narrative. Situations like this really don't upset me as much as other issues I've come to realize in the year since the game's release.

The reason I'm upset about the end of post-launch support is at it's core because I feel like we haven't gotten ANY post-launch support. Everything we've seen in the major patches has been essentially just Larian Studios finishing the game after it was released. On the launch of the game, the whole third act was riddled with so many bugs that it was practically unplayable for a good chunk of the playerbase. For those lucky enough to make it through that, they would come to discover that the game doesn't even have an ending. There was simply a brief moment of falling action after the final battle and then the credits started rolling. In a game like this that tells such a wide story, that absolutely counts as blatantly not having an ending for the story. It would be like if Return of the King ended and went to the credits as Frodo and Sam are carried away by the eagles after their brief moment of celebrating that they had accomplished their goal. All of the things Larian has been doing since the launch of the game has nothing to do with giving it more polish after release, they've simply been bringing it up the state that it SHOULD have released in in the first place. I'll admit that I do find it puzzling that somehow during this time, the Larian decided that an equally important goal to actually giving the game an ending was... adding several brand new animations for kissing. I'm just bothered to see that Larian's understandable excitement to work on new projects has seemingly 100% eclipsed their desire to actually have complete, polished games and to stand out in the gaming industry for putting the player first. They've left the game at a point where as they've said it "has a beginning, middle, and end" and actually works more often than it doesn't, but don't feel any need to address the other points where the game is outright not a fully finished product. Sure, we're never going to get a real evil path or an adventure in Avernus because those ideas were left behind a while ago (I think this is caused by a very fundamental issue with Larian's development process that has affected all their games and will continue to do so unless they stop to rethink how they approach their project. But that's something I can talk about later.).

The things that feel genuinely unfinished now are mostly to do with the companions. They've given the main narrative a fully fleshed out conclusion and made sure it flows well despite some pacing issues that are due to the aforementioned development issue I discussed, but almost half of the companions in the game are still stuck in a phase where they probably needed several months more of work to be even remotely on the same standard as their peers. Astarion, Shadowheart, Gale, and Lae'zel all have complete, functional stories that add a lot to the game and feel satisfying both in terms of their narrative and their in game quest. Astarion and Shadowheart certainly had more love and time given to their parts of the game because they were the clear favorites among both developers and the fans, but Gale and Lae'zel still feel like they hold up to those two golden children. Compare this to Karlach and Wyll, who were added to the game later in development and underwent a complete rewrite later in development, respectively. Their characters frankly feel like they're still from a Beta playtest where we don't have access to all of their content. Both characters whole personal quests are simply conversations that are tacked on to places and encounters you would already be dealing with if they weren't there. Karlach only needs to grab some random bits of iron from chests and chat about them with Dammon (A regular merchant you meet anyway), and then her only relevance for the rest of the game is to have her big cathartic moment after killing Gortash, who needs to be dealt with regardless as one of the game's main villains. I'd imagine that the rumor of "cut upper city area with a Karlach quest" likely are false, but there are visibly places in the game where it's clear there was meant to be more for her to do. There's crazy amounts of enriched infernal iron found in Act 3 that serves no purpose, and there's a clear story building up with the Iron Watch/The Gondians about their infernal engines that suddenly vanishes into thin air and isn't addressed. Poor Wyll suffers from the same problem, as his whole story is about everybody except for himself. The first part of his story is about Karlach (who's not actually tied to him in any way beyond the immediate circumstances. Then in Act 3 he gets totally sidelined in favor of his father (who's still relevant to the plot even if Wyll's not there) and the Emperor (Why is the giant bombshell of his identity related to Wyll's story in any way beyond Wyll wanting to go find Ansur just because his dad said so?). His whole personal story just amounts to his two important decisions where you as the player get complete control over binary options that decide how his story ends. Minthara and Halsin are in even worse states, and I don't even expect them to have as much as the others in the first place because they're not origins. Halsin's entire purpose and life goals are resolved before he's even a full party member, so all he gets to do in Act 3 is sit around as likely bait for Orin or become a sex object for you to interact with because he's only in the party anyway to satisfy people's horniness. Minthara, just like the end of the game, was basically unplayably broken at launch, and clearly hadn't had a huge amount of time dedicated to developing her after it was decided she would be a full companion instead of just an npc who you have a one night stand with in Act 1. She outright doesn't have a cutscene (romance or not) for herself once she's joined your party, and even compared to Halsin, she's absurdly lacking in dialogue and reactivity, always greeting you with the same one line and not even being able to have a conversation about your supposed romance if you are in one. Sure she's generally functional and more easily accessible now than at launch, but a couple of lines about Orin (again another already established antagonist) and a mention of you bonking her on the head don't classify as her own personal journey as a member of the party.

So yeah, generally there's just a bunch of stuff that should have been addressed in patches even if Larian's only goal for post launch was to make the game actually finished and functional.