As I always said...Larians decision to go full on Witcher 3/ Dragon age/ mass effect AAA cinematic dialogues is slowing game development to a crawl...and in my opinion ( and as tons of other recent games as proof..)getting other more important content stuff cut out of development.
Barelly any news, nearly no updates on gameplay/ui , only bug patching and cinematics content fix/add on.
They had less money, a smaller team and way more community updates during the DOS development cycle.
This is exactly what it is. The game is turning into a hand-holdy JRPG because it's being packed to the brim with filler cinematic fluff moments for everything.
Vendor conversation? Cutscene.
Random person on the side of the road with one line of dialog? Cutscene.
I don't know when this company started equating quality with production value, but I'd like to play my game instead of watch it.
I'm praying that some exceptional modder finds a way to gut the entire game of bloat and just turn conversations into dialog boxes.
People can say that "they're separate teams" and "it doesn't affect the budget" all the want to, but the fact that every single thing in the game needs an awkward zoom-in to a vignette has likely doubled the production time on this thing and is unnecessarily pushing out the retail release date just so that a minority of people can have a ye olde soap opera fantasy.