Does anyone every saunter over to Larian's forums? There are a few BG fans in attendance but mostly it's a lot of people hoping that it becomes DOS3. Given that Larian has said that they pay attention to what fans want in their forums that's pretty damn discouraging.
Based on my experience with DOS2 and its Kickstarter I can safely say most of the feedback/comments on their official forums will fall on deaf ears.
It's quite funny since Swen Vincke frequently mentioned player feedback when he did a DOS2 Retrospective speech at some video game convention. Almost every time he referred to some aspect of the game that he admitted could've been handled better (armour system, companions, crafting et cetera) it was usually one of the things there were endless threads about during the game's kickstarter period.
I think when they say they use player feedback a lot they're mostly talking about hidden data collected behind the scenes such as encounter TPK rates, amount of players who find/interact with a certain NPC, locate a certain treasure or something else.
What Larian is interested is primarily User experience and UI stuff + content that people want. But Larian made already bigger changes to BG3 than to DOS 2 during all of the early access since they changed every single line of player dialogue from past to present (everyone hated it already in DOS2 already btw) + changed from first-person narration to narrative + Change from team-based initiative to character-based initiative. So who knows what they really want this time.
The things you mention from were part of Larian/Swen's core design and would have never be changed:
The companions in DOS 2 were never intended to be a big aspect since Swen is convinced that everyone plays this game in Coop. Therefore if you
have a problem with the singleplayer Swen will probably ignore you just get used to that. Probably the biggest change from DOS 2 to BG3 narrative-wise is that companions actually matter and can be interacted it's almost like Swen found out that not everyone wants or can play this game in Coop or something.
About crafting it's the same Swen is convinced everyone likes collecting junk and experiment with the crafting system though of course even he got bored of it rather quickly and crafting becomes useless extremely fast in the game. I'm kinda shocked at there seemingly is no crafting system in BG3 since he was so insistent that garbage collecting was such an important and popular thing in the DOS games.
About armour: Swen dumb strawman argument for it was always "people don't understand percentage-based spell system" , therefore, everything has to be in numbers" Of course no one has ever heard of this complaint ever before. So it cracks me up a lot that the game they make next purely completely built around percentage chances.
BG3 is a game unlike any other he made, which makes it so fascinating to me who has been playing his stuff since Divine Divinity. So much of D&D 5e goes against Swen's gameplay design like his love for randomly generated items.
It should be obvious to anyone but .... No Larian is not going to change core aspects of the game no matter how many people complain about it.
He is not going to remove Coop or feature that require coop, he will not increase party size and certainly no RTWP combat or whatever. Larian isn't interested in your vision for the game they are interested in adding stuff to improve their vision of the game.
Also, it's really funny that some people act like Larian is making a playable movie because of the last two updates when we already have more than to 2h of combat and exploration footage. Some have been complaining about the
lack of dialogue in the gameplay streams which is why they made two videos about it. The next one is probably going to be more popular here since it will be about character creation.
