Baldur's Gate 3 - Full Release in 2023

I think it's easy to agree with the fact that BG3 EA was a huge mistake for many reasons.

Firstly, they shouldn't need the funds to make the game, so it feels kind of greedy to milk more, at the expense of exposing their product to the rabid masses.

Second, their excuse being that they need feedback is either extremely worrying or a lie. Extremely worrying because if the gating factor to determine that your feedback will be taken into account in the development of the game is forking in some cash change, then the game will be all magnitudes of dumb and unplayable, and I'll definitely stay away from it. Only seeing what some people in this site want from the game makes me glad nobody who matters in the gaming industry listens to anyone here.

If that they are listening to feedback is a lie, then it's dishonest. I prefer this, to be fair because I want to play a good game, but taking money from fans with dishonest premises is still a very poor practice.

Last, it's a story-heavy RPG, and in my opinion, this type of game doesn't work well in EA, simply because all it contains is glitchy gameplay and spoilers without culmination. In an online shooter, an EA gets a pretty full representation of the final experience as it gets tweaked, balanced, new maps/characters/weapons added etc. A roguelike, sure. A MOBA, sure. That's what EA was made for, not for reading the barebones, sketchy first chapter of a fantasy book. The results are for all to see. I don't think I've ever seen so many pages of whine about release dates, development progress, requesting features or general animal noises about a game in EA as I hear from BG3. An EA should be reinforcing the hype towards playing the final product, and I feel that every additional day BG3 spends in EA, it loses hype.

Larians success in recent years is related to crowdfunding and feedback from audience and it makes lots of sense they dont want to loose this connection to their audience/customers. Swen apparently enjoys development under media spotlight and if creative atmosphere in the company is anywhere near what media picture suggests it must have positive impact on the result. Hopefully they will not loose their creative vision under the weight of tons of feedback information, but everything has pro and con in this world. Im looking forward to play it as soon as it gets out of EA.

As far as I understood it, the main reason to use EA are not so much the words people type as 'feedback' (although they probably use that as well), but the anonymized data they receive from those playing the game, which records their choices in the game, the builds they make, what they do, what works and what not, etc.
Perhaps almost nobody gets to a certain spot in the game, which would be a feedback to Larian that they need to improve upon. Perhaps a large amount of people have extreme difficulties with winning a fight, which might need to be toned down a bit perhaps.
Partially they get stuff like this from their own testers as well, but there is value in having larger volumes of data to work with during game development.

I don't have BG3, but this is what they did in their previous EA, so I assume it is the same here.

Exactly.
Larian know themselves that written feedback from social media (forums, discord etc.) is hardly usable. You never get a clear picture of the community's opinion and it wouldn't be smart to naively listen to it. (Imho the only exception would be surveys, where you get systemetic answers. But then again their results should be normalized etc.)

The data from game telemetry is a lot more useful.

We already talked about that IIRC.

They use both types of feedback, they've mentioned that a few times in their Panels From Hell, or during interviews, like for ex. at PAX East:

Matt: We're always open to feedback and that's mainly why we're going into early access for but we'll always take it into consideration no matter what feedback we get.

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For example, the party chain gadget, the RNG and other features were adjusted. Sometimes they don't change it but they acknowledge the feedback and respond, like the fact the companions were perceived as more evil than good.

Talking about feedback, the initial plan was to cap at level 10, and following the reaction of the community, Larian said they would increase the cap.

I see Mortismal just released a video about that, but as usual he doesn't give any source so I'm not sure it's correct. According to him, it's 10-20 but definitely not 20.

Anyone who's following them has more info about it? 10 seems pretty low indeed, it's usually only getting fun at this point (this was a big limitation in Solasta).

I've stayed away from EA for this game and the forums. Has made the last few years more enjoyable. So much to play right now anyway. I will definitely get this in 2023 if that is the true release date.

JFarrell71 said:

What do you mean "nothing about Planescape"? Did you expect Larian to suddenly move their game to a different setting?

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As JDR pointed out, I was referring to the fact that people were discussing Spelljammer being brought back. Sadly, Planescape seems to remain dead.

Maylander said:

As JDR pointed out, I was referring to the fact that people were discussing Spelljammer being brought back. Sadly, Planescape seems to remain dead.

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Yeah, I didn't read the whole thread and originally thought you were responding to the OP.

I brought up the return of Spelljammer to a group of D&D playing friends the other night and they just laughed and made a joke about the "5 people who care". With Starfinder already out there, the consensus was too little, too late, not appealing enough.

Have you ever taken a look at Numenara? It's similar to Planescape in many ways. Not surprising given that it was designed by the same guy (Monte Cook).

JFarrell71 said:

I brought up the return of Spelljammer to a group of D&D playing friends the other night and they just laughed and made a joke about the "5 people who care". With Starfinder already out there, the consensus was too little, too late, not appealing enough.

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Starfinder doesn't seem very similar to Spelljammer imo.

I agree with it being too late though, and I think that's going to be the primary challenge here. Spelljammer hasn't been a thing since the early 90s. I don't understand why they waited so long to bring it back.