i unironically feel like the only reason bg3 got so popular is the graphics and voice acting. people talked about it like oh we havent had a CRPG in a decade and now its the renaissance, but in truth there was, not too long before/immediately after:
Tyranny
Pathfinder WOTR/Kingmaker
From Larian themselves, both of the Divinity Original Sin games
And that's barely scratching the surface. Stretch a bit farther and you get Dragon Age 2 (Yes i think it counts as a CRPG, bite me), the new Shadowrun games, Colony Ship, UnderRail, the other Wasteland games.
And you know what? Literally all of those have better writing and worldbuilding (and thus, IMO, are better CRPGs, but that's just my criteria) than BG3, or are at least on par in those categories. And yet none of them have anywhere near the attention. To be fair here, BG3 was working with the disadvantage of having to be based on DnD/forgotten realms, which has some of the worst, most overdone worldbuilding ever, but two of those games are built on Pathfinder and one is built on Warhammer 40k, so I dont think you have a leg to stand on.
Every quest in BG3 has some comically telegraphed good/bad option, where the bad locks you out of a major portion of content. And just to point to one of my favorite games of all time - Tyranny, a game where the baseline is you are an agent of an evil empire, has some of the most interesting, morally ambiguous quests. A better comparison is Rogue Trader, since it takes place in the Warhammer universe, where subtlety goes to die - and yet it manages to have a lot of really interesting quests that are a lot more morally ambiguous, and, sometimes, the 'good' choice is not actually the best pick! And there are, further, consequences to your actions - I don't want to spoil it, but letting characters live in certain places or even doing something as simple as feeding the population or rescuing them from a dead planet can lead to drastic, awful results down the line. And again. That's in Warhammer. Rogue Trader treats the setting so well and in such a morally complex manner that it somehow made me interested in Warhammer, something that I previously avoided bc of all the chuds completely misunderstanding it on the internet.
And then there's companions. Setting aside how Wyll got fucked over and minimized for no reason (which you shouldn't set that aside, IMO), the companions are all so - I dunno. They get along so well with each other that it almost feels stupid. In Rogue Trader, your companions literally threaten to blow each others heads off and call each other (in universe) slurs. In Dragon Age 2, every single companion despises each other, and one of them is a terrorist - and if you don't manage their approval, a lot of them can turn against you in the final battle.
In BG3, there is a guy who is hunting another companion as part of his quest and it all gets cleared up in a jiffy. A companion can tell everyone he's a vampire, and everyone's like - yeah that's cool. Imagine that happening in DA2. Literally every companion would have something extreme to say about it, perhaps even risking them leaving. Imagine how hostile and entertaining their companion banter would be. Or imagine in Rogue Trader, where the Inquisitor companion would probably try to murder them, and would have unique dialogue interactions ('hey, what's with the vampire you brought with you?') everywhere. Similarly in BG3, you can tell everyone you have murderous urges after brutalizing an innocent woman - and THEY'RE ALL SUPPORTIVE! No one's like 'hey we should chain this person up while they sleep.' You can tell them later you are the CHILD OF THE GOD OF MURDER and, despite the game warning you the knowledge 'could turn allies into enemies', NO ONE gives a fuck! 'oh im sorry to hear that' bitch i could turn you into a pile of gore and no one could stop me. maybe have some concern for your self-preservation? (Especially the vampire whose character traits include concern for his self-preservation) But no. No one in BG3 cares.
The idea of their companion quests is good, but again - no one cares about anything important (so wizard you got a thermonuclear bomb in your chest? yes please come travel with us) - and everyone else is so stupid that you get cheated out of the interesting moral quandaries surrounding their quests. Like, just as an example - the Vampire's quest - in my opinion - Astarion would be well within his rights to mercy-kill these people that have been suffering for CENTURIES, in order to get a chance to live. But if you take this option, he fucking turns into a lunatic monster overnight. Sure, make the argument that power corrupts, fine, but one minute he's the affable sassy elf who makes jokes and supports the other companions while comically saying he doesn't care and the next he's a monstrous sex pest. And I've seen some people say shit like 'oh, maybe its because the ritual took his soul as well'. In which case, doesn't the devalue the entire moral concept of the whole thing? It's no longer 'is it morally okay to do this? Does power corrupt?' instead its 'oh the magic ritual makes you evil.' Which just sucks. And similar things play out with the other companions - one becoming a god again turns them comically arrogant and stupid, negating their entire character progression, and the justification is that it's because that's the trait he's embodying as a god? So it's like. it's not really him becoming a god its him having ego death to create an asshole with his face and memory? In every single companion quest, the question is never morally or 'what is better for them', because the options the game wants you to think are bad always come with some horrible 'GOTCHA!' to bite you in the back. The one exception to this is Shadowheart's questline at the end, which is actually a much fairer question, but even that, IMO, pretty clearly indicates which is the 'right' call.
And then there's the overall story. If I were to tell you some of the events of the game, you'd think BG3 was a political, morally interesting masterclass of fantasy storytelling. A fascist archduke takes over a city by promising to keep them safe against a threat he created. A group of people, safe in their enclave, threaten to kick refugees out because they're the wrong race, which is orchestrated as a power-play by a little-man (little woman, whatever) trying to seize control. (this happens again in the city) A cult leads to mass death by promising freedom from traditional religion and acceptance, which in actuality makes the people who join just as enslaved. A grieving father, unwilling to let his daughter go, performs acts of black magic that kill and harm so many people and, in the end, twist the daughter against him - even though the magic did what it promised. There's a lot more, too, that sounds promising. A civil war between a Queen and an exiled prince, in which the Queen manipulates her people so that their labors and lives go only towards prolonging her own. A conflict between craftsmen on if it is acceptable for their products to be used by less-than-moral groups. A newspaper struggles to follow increasingly authoritarian guidelines while maintaining its integrity. So on and so forth.
But every. single. one. of those events. is undercut. ALL of them. The fascist archduke doesn't take over the city by fearmongering and authoritarianism, he does it because he puts fucking worms in the elector's brains to mind control them! The enclave doesn't kick the refugees out because they're racist, but because Evil Druids who like Chaos and Bad and Suffering are manipulating the leader, and actually, said leader is a good woman who will turn against them! The cult is just orchestrated by the same gods to begin with, and, in fact, religion is meaningless in this universe, because the gods objectively exist! This, btw, ruins every single quest in the game to some extent, because the whole reason why religion is so interesting is because it is an entirely man-made thing. Religion is a means of social control, like many other ideologies, systems of governance, etc, etc. Religion is fascinating because it is the idea of spirituality regimented and co-opted to act as a source of cultural hegemony. The idea of rites, rituals, religious laws, etc, is evocative partially because they are a cage people put around each other and then call it holy. That is where the central sting of a character suffering from religious guilt comes from - that that guilt is not actually from a holy source, but the character has been so long convinced of the judgement of God (actually the judgement of their peers) that they cannot stop feeling that dread and fear. In BG3, however, the GODS ARE REAL! THEY LITERALLY TELL PEOPLE WHAT RITES AND RITUALS TO DO! How the fck is this at all comparable to real world religion? 'Oh the sharrans are like Catholicism' does Catholicism have jesus come down and orchestrate power plays between various churches? Does he grant fucking magic powers to those who believe in him super hard? NO! And btw, everything in this game links back to those gods. The cult? Created by gods. The grieving father? Manipulated by gods to grieve and go crazy. The civil war is actually the one section where there isn't gods, and - in a shocking twist to us all - it actually deals with religion as if it were the real world, along with cults of personality!
Do you see the problem? How can this game profess to have any moral or political complexity if every problem is secretly orchestrated by Big Evil all along, and if only they weren't there we'd all be fine? Compare this to the other CRPGs I mentioned - In Rogue Trader, Chaos doesn't cause poverty/insurgencies - instead, the poverty and deprivation of the people because of the structure of crushing wealth disparity and the privilege of nobles leads them to turn to Chaos for salvation. The evil Trader who judges the people with an iron fist, murdering innocents and those with minor infractions, doesn't do it because she is Corrupted or whatever, but because she is overly zealous, dogmatic, afraid, and has difficulty seeing the population of the station as real people. In Dragon Age 2, what happens in Kirkwall is not caused by some overarching guiding force of Evil (ignoring the Veilguard retcon) but instead is caused by religion (actual religion, not the shitty fake BG3 religion, because, in Dragon Age 2, whether or not a god exists is left ambiguous just like real life, and just like in real life, people have lots of opinions!), paranoia, fear, racism, bigotry, xenophobia, as well as strain caused by an influx of refugees and wealth disparity. In Tyranny, yes, everything that happens is caused by an evil overlord - but that is all prior to the game, the bedrock of its setting. You are working for an evil empire, and within that context, how can you mitigate the horrors (or turn them to your advantage?) the conflicts on the micro-level have magic as their 'roots', but the actual causes for what happens are just social strain and panic. There are so many more options. But in BG3 - nope, it's all Big Evil all along. And, in fact, many of the disparate evils in the game are actually all tied up in the Big Evil all along. All the social strain and panic and bigotry that could explain the events of the game are actually covers for the Real Evil, which has been carefully orchestrated All Along. Do you see how goddamn lame that is? Imagine if that was true in any of the other RPGs I said. Imagine if Chaos was really orchestrating all these uprisings, and so giving them food wouldn't matter - you would then be wholly justified to just annihilate the entire planet! Imagine if all the events of DA2 were some ominous plan by the Chantry or the Templars to orchestrate a war. Can you imagine how much that would ruin the interesting complex issues of the game?
So to summarize, so far, BG3 has on the micro level way worse companion banter and writing than the other games, and on the macro level, anything interesting in its plot is instantly killed by its own stupid insistence on conspiracism and the way that religion works in its universe. And speaking of that universe - well we can of course acknowledge that BG3 was played an awful hand. The universe its based in is awful and bland and packed with unnecessary amounts of bullshit and is achingly generic. Now, lets undercut that acknowledgment by pointing out that A - they didn't need to set the game in that universe at all and B - they could've chosen a more damn interesting part of it! And again - points to WH40k Rogue Trader! It managed to make WARHAMMER an interesting and morally complex setting. WARHAMMER. The Owlcat writers deserve a massive pat on the back. As for B - there are so many more interesting settings. The universe they're in has fucking space travel. But if they wanted to stick to the high-fantasy aesthetic, why not do something interesting with it? Imagine a CRPG (and btw this concept has been something I've always wanted) that is set in one single city. Fast travel is accomplished through transit. Different zones are different districts, which you can gain access to due to maybe ridiculous quarantining or having to pay to enter or something that could enrich the setting. Imagine something like that for Baldur's Gate! That'd be a wholly unique and interesting baseline, though it would still suffer from the overload of races and magic types and classes and ufrutrghuriguaeug. But, ack, alas, no.
okay, side diversion! Magic in the BG universe is so so boring. In Dragon Age, magic is dangerous. Mages are a really interesting allegory for mental health, and I mean that in the best, most positive way - they are wonderful, loving people just the same as anyone else who often suffer through no fault of their own, require support from other people, and can quite easily fall into the pits of their own mind - and despite it being not their fault, they are continually discriminated against, which in turn makes their mental health worse, since there are no good resources or ways for them to seek help. Every mage you see that is 'evil' is terrified, trying to survive, or has had a mental break because there is no way for them to get support without being sent to a tower and being locked up for their whole life. Simultaneously, the way that magic works is really interesting - the 'fade', where magic is drawn from, is in many ways an allegory for cultural memory. It records the past, not objectively, but through strong memories, emotions; spirits in the Fade are not reflections of dead people but reflections of what people thought about those dead people. If a bunch of people thought about some great king, he will have a spirit in the Fade who is as idealized as those thoughts suggest, and will have no actual resemblance to the real king. It's really cool! In WH40k, (though my main exposure comes from Rogue Trader) Psykers are similarly dangerous, with a similar mental health allegory, and are susceptible to all sorts of dangers, again, not aided by how everyone fears them. No magic comes without a price in some way. It's really compelling, even if the trope of Mages have Mental Health Issues is by now overdone (I still think Dragon Age did it best). Also, in both of these, magic is a fascinating intuitive thing that is not quite scientific. You can't chant a spell and have things happen; its more like a background whispering or sixth sense. In Baldur's Gate magic is a cool superpower you wave around, that is also highly regimented. Move your hands and say the words and magic happens! Shoot me now. It is such an achingly generic and lame way to do magic, even in a video game. Literally every other large franchise with magic I can think of has a more interesting take - Mass Effect has it just be elements manipulating mass, and they can cause major birth defects and cancer and are given to children against their will and you need implants to control them and they give you massive fucking migraines, Elder Scrolls has magic as music altering reality, Star Wars has the Force which is so much more interesting than fucking wave your hands and kaboom, Dishonored has magic as marks given to you by an asshole elder god who is actually a poor tortured teenager who just wants to see cool things happen, LOTR has the awesome, vague undetailed magic that is more religion than anything, need I go on?
I wont talk about the romance here because that'd be another massive post.
Okay back to your regularly scheduled programming. I personally play CRPGs because i like the story and the worldbuilding. To me, in a CRPG, combat is the context for the story. That to me is their value. If you like combat, then sure, I get why you could like BG3 (but IMO, DA2 and Rogue Trader have combat that is way more fun). But god does BG3 fall flat in every other way. I genuinely feel like its not even the characters, because other CRPGs have characters that are just as fun and interesting with far less attention given to them (see the entire case of Rogue Trader). So what is the difference? It is to me the things i value least in CRPGs - full voice acting and facial animation. this is i guess a matter of preference - but when playing an RPG, i almost prefer text boxes with a portrait at the bottom than elaborate cutscenes. I enjoy the cutscenes, sure, but to me, the idea of having adaptive branching dialogue paths with interesting writing is far better, and its basically impossible to do both. That, to me, seems to be the only thing BG3 has over these other CRPGs - graphics, voice acting, and obscenely high budget cutscenes. And believe me, that limitation shows. People like to talk about the 'branching paths' and 'accomodating nature' of BG3, but that accomodating nature is basically just creating backup characters if you kill someone. How many paths actually are there in terms of major, impactful choices?
