Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Are Larian in a crunch rush prior to Full Release?

Seems very quiet since the Druid came out a while back. Do we think EA has served its purpose and Larian are now heading for full release, or is it just a natural lull?

(Apologies if this is a question already answered, I couldn't see in in the first three pages of posts and I haven't fanatically followed every news posting.)

Likely just a natural lull, I'm hoping it's the calm before the next patch.
However they haven't started talking up the next patch yet. Hopefully soon.
EA won't be finished for at least a year, since they are still working out so many bugs and tweaks, fine tuning things and working on the rest of the story (acts 2 and 3).
I do hope we hear some news soon. The silence and crickets are deafening!

Its very unlikely that they are anywhere close to a release.
If there is a crunch then only to get the next patch out.

My take is the game is absolutely nowhere near done. Larian are busy adding content and don't want to do any further balancing until that's all in place. They'll update the demo every now and then just to get odd publicity spikes but those are going to be small and infrequent because the focus has shifted from getting feedback to just working on the game.

Its not so long (a month ago?) when i readed some Article about them didnt even started to create final part of game ...
Plus many things are not yet there ... i mean, yes it was never confrimed that we shall have all races, classes and sub-classes in EA, but still there are some people ingame that are clearly not implemented. For example that paladin i still cant remember his name in tollhouse is still not actualy paladin.
Karlach still dont have her model replaced (she is suppose to have single horn), so i presume that her look right now is just placeholder.

And one argument abowe all ...
In last Panel from Hells they specificly told you that they will reduce size (in matter of Gigabites) of all future patches ... so i dare to presume, they would not say it if there was not at least Patch 5 planned.

//edit:
Thrust me ... it could be much, much, and even more much worse.

'Sandbox' for EA is not equal to original client for release. Stop comparing progress in EA and client that main Larian team is working on. There are a lot of restrictions in EA, and maybe they don't just end in acts. We are given access to test different functions and search for bugs, not for content. All I heard was that they finished working on the second act, which was just really huge.

This game is not even close to a final release... So many mechanics are just plain unfinished or missing, not to mention classes and races.

The earliest this game is being released is end of Q1 2022, and that's being extremely optimistic.

There's no way they are already in crunch mode.

It's definitely a lull, Larian on-boarded new employees (opened a new office) at around the release of patch 5. As far as projects go, this one probably has more scope creep than Larian anticipated.

Wishing the devs all the best tbh. I am really enjoying the game, its not perfect of course and tons of people in this forum bring up very valid criticisms (and other's don't, but let's not get into that :P) that I think Larian should pay attention to, but overall I am very impressed with this title.

They are most likely hardly at work, but don't delude yourself thinking they are in a "RUSH FOR RELEASE".
This is NOT releasing anywhere near 2021.