Speaking to the Dungeons & Dragons YouTube channel, Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke admitted that the developers feared some low scores for Baldur’s Gate 3 due to potential bugs encountered by reviewers. This explains why review codes were only sent a handful of days before the PC launch.
We were worried, like, they’re gonna score it six out of ten, seven out of ten. There’s going to be a bug, something’s going to happen, it’s going to break down, everybody’s going to hate it. So that was literally our mentality going in, knowing that the content was good, but we were afraid of that. That was the thing that frightened us the most because it’s a very big game, and so we know that stuff can go wrong, although the game usually finds a way of settling back on its feet.
It takes like at least 20 hours to get out of the first area which was extensively tested in early access and has very few and mostly minor bugs. Withholding review codes on a game like that as a deliberate delay tactic is a very shitty thing to do and as much as I like the game, I like Larian a lot less for admitting this.
I already regretted buying this while it was in EA due to their strange restrictions on it and I won’t be giving Larian that kind of up front good faith again.
They didn’t admit it. OP added that part. Every developer is going to fear their product isn’t well received or will have technical issues when it matters most.
This is a sandbox that allows ridiculous amounts of way to solve problems. Testing the interaction of the game’s systems in every permutation of circumstances isn’t really reasonable.
FWIW, I didn’t add anything. That’s a copy-paste from the article.