Excellent summary, except you barely mention expectations about faction states and quest design.
What do you mean by "faction states" though? For quest design complexity - who knows really. I'm going off of what I've seen in Deadfire and TOW, so anyone is free to speculate. I played TOW up to the part where you arrive to the second planet, and then a bit more to explore the city.
Going on a tangent about systems... What we can say is a "scientifically established" principle in RPGs is that if your systems are weak, or meaningless (be awesome with blue magic spell or be awesome with green magic spell), you are constricted in how you design your quests, because the player's toolbox of skills to use to solve problems is too limited. The extreme example is Disco Elysium - the only systems present were dialogue, inventory, and skillchecks. Quest branching was next to none - who brings down the body, do you sleep in a dumpster, and what ending slides you get. If I'm missing something it's not much.
The kind of good example (and an ARPG example) is Witcher 3, where quests were engineered to include "a little bit of everything" from the systems - some talking, some haggling, some fistfighting, some riding (tactical use of horse-sprint), some combat, some "follow the red line on the screen". In the end the player is left with the feeling he used his character's "skills" to get from point A to B. Of course in Witcher 3 that was permitted by the luxury of having a fixed main character.
Imagine that Xaurip camp encounter and imagine you are the "gameplay director". You have to provide for this encounter to be challenging but fun for player builds starting from arbalests, going through estocs and greatswords, to halberds, to mace and shield, to wands, to matchlocks, to magic spells. And this is just the weapons. Let's consider the effects that armor should have on the player and all the other stuff he can equip. No fucking way Obsidian can implement
and playtest all of that. It made Josh go crazy and Josh with all his faults has more brains and RPG design experience than Patel and that Paramo guy put together. They are at the stage of showing off "we have weapon sets implemented", and they are 8-9 months to release? Bitch you should be telling me how many weapons and spells you have implemented because your area designers should be busy populating areas with encounters and balancing those encounters for the existing abilities. Basically that is why I expect combat to be a huge disappointment for anyone above the "couch console gamer" level.
Yep, I was expecting that argument. But what you have there is Swen Vincke. Another dinosaur.
Swen is old meat, but BG3 is new money. Other money will chase after it. Probably in a cargo cult way, without getting what made it good, but even cargo culting BG3 will result in tabletop system and tabletop pop-culture aesthetics. Its too on the nose to get it wrong.
I think the success of that game will move capital to release another dozen tabletop system games, with varying funding and quality. So, right in this moment, its looking on the up, not dying, as you suggested. Your argument would've been solid a year ago, though.
And hopefully it won't be solid in 5 years, when the diadochi come out and maybe fail.
But do you see the talent to pull off something like BG3, anywhere? I'd be happy to play a more sober, "dryer" BG3 set in the PoE setting, with main quest and C&C revolving more around politics than fantasy tripe, but such a project will never get funding even if Feargus gets Microsuits drunk on his grandfather's Scotch.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1064120/Unforetold_Witchstone/
