After announcing that Larian Studios wouldn't be making Baldur's Gate 3 DLC, an expansion, or Baldur's Gate 4, director Swen Vincke revealed that Larian had actually begun work on planned downloadable content before ultimately deciding to cancel it because the team's heart wasn't in it.
The implementation of long rest was very poor. Short rest I like because it’s a precious resource that you really should be conserving. But the punishment for abusing long rests was basically nonexistent outside of a few specific cases, so for 95% of the game you can just use it with impunity and not worry about basically anything. Short rests were just a convenient way to keep playing without spending the time of doing a long rest.
Bu the food limit is trivial. We get enough food in the first couple hours of the game that you basically don’t need to think about it again until probably deep in act 2. I can’t think of a single moment in both playthroughs where I even had to remotely consider short or long rests as a resource in any sense of the word. The only issue I ever had was starting a quest and needing to take a long rest, but knowing that it would advance it to a failure state. That is more of an irritation than a mechanic to create urgency. Especially since they’re so infrequent and often telegraphed well in advance. Not to mention the game floods you with enough money and free potions laying around that a lot of times you can just heal up and keep moving without using rests of any kind.
Combine this with camp casting and the ability to change out party members nearly at-will and it makes the entire rest system basically moot.
If you didn’t need to rest to advance some of the stories, then people would basically never consider when they take long rests because they’re abundant. This leads to the next issue: If you blow a few spell slots being sloppy, you just take a long rest. Problem solved. You have very little reason to conserve abilities. For 80%+ of the game you can blow all your abilities in a fight or two, long rest, keep going.
The implementation of long rest was very poor. Short rest I like because it’s a precious resource that you really should be conserving. But the punishment for abusing long rests was basically nonexistent outside of a few specific cases, so for 95% of the game you can just use it with impunity and not worry about basically anything. Short rests were just a convenient way to keep playing without spending the time of doing a long rest.
I disagree that it was badly implemented.
They wanted to put in a way to put pressure on long rests without a strict time limit frame. I feel that the food limit was the best option.
Bu the food limit is trivial. We get enough food in the first couple hours of the game that you basically don’t need to think about it again until probably deep in act 2. I can’t think of a single moment in both playthroughs where I even had to remotely consider short or long rests as a resource in any sense of the word. The only issue I ever had was starting a quest and needing to take a long rest, but knowing that it would advance it to a failure state. That is more of an irritation than a mechanic to create urgency. Especially since they’re so infrequent and often telegraphed well in advance. Not to mention the game floods you with enough money and free potions laying around that a lot of times you can just heal up and keep moving without using rests of any kind.
Combine this with camp casting and the ability to change out party members nearly at-will and it makes the entire rest system basically moot.
If you didn’t need to rest to advance some of the stories, then people would basically never consider when they take long rests because they’re abundant. This leads to the next issue: If you blow a few spell slots being sloppy, you just take a long rest. Problem solved. You have very little reason to conserve abilities. For 80%+ of the game you can blow all your abilities in a fight or two, long rest, keep going.