Why couldn't the base game launch with a good campaign then?
Same question Mr. developer sir. With all due respect, I understand that game development is the worst, but you guys could've saved a lot of resources scrapping the Tesco ad voice acting and instead focussing on better quest/encounter design, cnc and a decent plot.
This was asked with such candor and kindness (cough cough) that it would be a shame not to answer. Now, remember that I'm not in the design team so take my words with a grain of salt. Actually, grab the entire salt shaker just in case.
When it comes to "good encounters", keep in mind that not everyone's looking for the same thing - fights that some of you experts in RPG may deem trivial can be challenging for newer players. "But Myzzrym, you dumb fuck" I hear some of you clamor, "Why cater to game journalists and those lacking opposable thumbs?". Well my good folks, simply put making video games is expensive, and only targeting certain niche is not enough to actually be profitable - which you know, is kind of important if the goal is to pay your developers and hopefully make other games in the future.
That being said, I'm not saying our encounter design is flawless. There are quite a few fights that would benefit from being reviewed and tweaked - not necessarily just in terms of difficulty, but in terms of monster compositions for instance, or maybe the level design needs a bit of adjustment. So why didn't we? This one comes down to time and budget. You might have heard the saying "Perfect is the enemy of good" - at some point we need to say "alright, this may not be the best we can do but we need to move on, otherwise we won't have the time to finish the game before we run out of budget".
And all of this is before going into the subjective "what makes a good game", which differs from one person to another. So yea, hopefully that answers your question about "I think base game campaign poopoo".
As for the voice acting, it's also one of those subjective things - some people (myself included) think that full voice acting is not necessary in a video games. Other people highly appreciate it. In any case, when we first sat down to discuss the core pillars of Solasta, it was decided that Solasta would be fully voiced acted. Now hindsight 20/20, was it worth it? Eeeeh, debatable. But know that it's something we are putting on the table again internally.