For the latter, depends on the game. If the game's design supports it, it's fine for it to be ironman only.
And that's my point. The design and the ruleset are the problem. It's a 100+ hour cinematic game where you can screw up your build very easily if you're a new player.
This is not a roguelike. This is not a random D&D campaign with friends. You cannot simply die, reroll a new character and continue the campaign with a wink from the DM. The design makes features like respecing and savegames almost a necessity, especially for newer players.
You didn't need a feature like this in BG1, since it was 2e and very simple. What were you going to respec besides weapon proficiencies or thief skills? And when were you going to do it even if you needed to? Probably the early game, at about 5 or 10 hours max. Not a big hit if you just restart, and frankly, the game was so easy and builds were so straightforward you probably wouldn't need to.
Mostly the same with BG2, although I could see a justification there. Unless you picked a sorcerer or were unwise enough to hit the dual-class button, you were probably going to be fine no matter how you built your character. Apart from proficiencies, everything was on rails until TOB, and even there, there weren't a lot of either-or choices for HLAs.
I don't think broad build options & rerolling your builds on a whim are reconciliable design goals.
It depends on how it's implemented. We have no word on how many times you can do this for free (that I can recall, at least).
It's likely a one and done option, since otherwise you make class meaningless and people will just respect 100x to get all the quests etc. Don't have high CHA? Just respec and then reverse it after whatever dialog choice. That's not a charitable interpretation of the feature to say the least. This is hardly the first game to allow respecing, and I've not seen any of the other games that do allow it do it that way, so I'm not sure why anyone would assume it, other than "Larian bad". And if that is how it is, then, yes, that's stupid, but no, it doesn't make respecing in general a bad feature to have in a game like this.
This is also my bone to pick with the proliferation of splash builds. A character with 5 classes's identity is diluted so hard it starts to make it hard to write a story around them. Which just makes me assume if a game allows this + respeccing there is no story around your identity, and hence roleplaying is meaningless.
Multiclassing is gay and dumb, yes, we can agree here. 2E mitigated it a bit with the rules around dual-classing and multiclassing, but then 3E came along and ruined everything. This is half of what I was complaining about.
Again, not a charitable interpretation at all.
This is a 5E game built for the masses. The devs, and WotC, want people to "have fun" - ie, larp whatever they want and not get bogged down by restrictive rules. That's why they did the appallingly stupid thing of removing attribute restrictions from multiclassing (I expect this will get patched out when they see how many games it ruins on day one). That's why Wizards told them not to implement an alignment system, even when the characters themselves seem like they were written to have alignments. That's why Wizards made all those changes in 5E I linked at the top of the page. That's probably why (and I'm guessing Wizards asked them to) they removed specific racial attribute bonuses and gave races a flat +2 to spend.
They aren't lying, the roleplaying still exists, it's just watered down. It's watered down by 5E and it's watered down by trying to market the game to clownworld. But it's not a lie to say it exists.
