Still breaks my heart that Owlcat didn't get this shot. I was impressed with Kingmaker and I was blown away with Wrath of the Righteous. At this point I'm looking more forward to Rogue Trader than I am BG3.
Funny thing is: in terms of tech, production value and budget this blows anything Owlcat ever did out of the water.
The only things that make this game situationally inferior are the consequences of EXPLICIT and DELIBERATE bad design choices Larian did.
Like skipping a day/night cycle as "superfluous fluff" and then wasting a lot of money on the questionable concept of "Playable Origin characters". A feature that the gaming press praised to the heavens in DOS 2 despise the fact that these people don't actually play these games to completion.
It's puzzling to me because I never once went through BG1 and 2 and found myself thinking "Man, if only I could re-experience this entire story from the point of view of Jaheira/Viconia/Minsc" (putting aside that if you are playing as an established character you are implicitly overwriting their personality with yours, so it doesn't even work as intended) , while the idea of playing a D&D game in a world frozen in an eternal noon and where night and day aren't a factor in encounters is a genuine bummer.
Also, fuck whoever at Larian came up with the idiotic chain/unchain control scheme and decided to ignore two years of feedback on their official forum with 95% of the users telling them the system is simply bad (and the other 5% being the usual suspects, groupies who would praise the studio even for shitting on their mouths).
It's somewhat funny to me that they opened EA almost bragging about how much they had to change "Because D&D as it is wouldn't work in a videogame" and then most of the actual changes they introduced in the following two years consisted in... Reverting some of their most questionable changes closer to the source because everyone and their grandma spent months telling them their custom solutions sucked unwashed ass. Meanwhile Solasta adhered to textbook D&D almost religiously (with the sole exception of stuff they didn't have license for) and the result is mechanically far more enjoyable when it comes to tactical battles, despise a low production value and an overall budget that wouldn't cover even the BG3 CGI intro.
P.S. Long story short, what I find the most jarring about BG3 is that a lot of details that would make it better wouldn't even require a larger budget, just a better use of the current one. In some cases the solution would arguably even be cheaper than their current implementations.
