Yeap, that's true. I also didn't expect the D:OS (2) reaction and sales. However, my opinion is still that Larian's recent offerings aren't very good games and are painfully average. Marvel films are painfully average too, but they are much more popular than Larian's games. Popularity =/= quality. It's telling that you yourself are trying to convince me of BG3's virtues without naming anything that the game itself does extraordinarily well.
Imo what this game did the best isn't in any way revolutionary. It's mostly about polishing things that universally are good in rpgs but might be not easily accessible for average gamer. I am talking about things like:
- character building - you have variety of classes that are distinguishable from eachother. Take for example any 'hardcore' crpgs like 2e infinity engine games or even pathfinder km or wotr. There are so many classes, some of them extremely similiar, that you can really get confused if you don't want to spend hours on reading descriptions and other fuckload of texts. Bg3 classes are very easy to distinguish but they still retain a level of complexity by having for each of them three different specialization and other flavors
Classes being distinguishable from each other is expected. It doesn't indicate whether or not a game is good. It's the bare minimum to expect from a game. Even in a bad game, I'd still expect classes to provide differences in gameplay.
Take for example any 'hardcore' crpgs like 2e infinity engine games or even pathfinder km or wotr.
Most of the 2e games, even the infinity engine games did not have kits in them. It was mostly just BG2. IWD1 and BG1 did not have kits on launch. It's only the EE version which use BG2's engine that have kits. Most of the earlier 2e games did not have kits either and mostly had just the standard classes and some of their multiclass options. IWD2 was a 3e game and really only had the phb classics. You can have a noticible different experience in those games playing a paladin as opposed to a fighter since the paladin got spellcasting after level 9, turn undead at level 3, and lay on hands, cure disease, and smite. It also required high charisma unlike the fighter. Ranger of course could also provide a different experience from Paladin and Fighter if you used its abilities. When you compare all the base classes, they were all noticibly different to play. As said earlier it's only BG2 with it's kits that add a plethora of subclasses that are all extremely similar.
KM and WOTR are of course their own weird thing since they incorporate a large number of the variants from the supplments to 1e. Without those subclasses to muddy the waters, most of those classes play fairly differently though having all these additional supplement classes on top of the phb classes can muddy the waters. If it was just the base phb classes there and only a few of the supplement classes, this wouldn't be a complaint. It's only that there are variants that are just a couple base classes combined that are better than all the other variants and even the base classes that just make everything else look redundant. Of course, the fewer classes you have, the more easy it is to make each of them distinct and the more extremely you can make their distinction. i.e. cleric, wizard, fighter, thief only.
That being said, BG3 has the subclasses like KM, WOTR, and BG2 and they do present a very similar problem as most of the time playing them is fairly similar to eachother with the exception of a couple different abilities (like the kits and variants in 2e and pf1e). That's if you even have to ever use their abilities. If you don't use their abilities, then you'll never notice the difference between the subclasses.
- likable companions - I know that it is controversial and paradoxically I don't like a single character, but because they are very humane and have a modicum of complexity, they make gamers invested in their stories. I am pretty sure that reddit crowd was more willing to finish this game simply to uncover what sh hides about her past or to fuck a bear
Why not read an adventure novel instead? A story and characters do not make a game any good and BG3's story and characters are certainly lacking. I wouldn't consider any of the companions likable as the females are the most masculine companions and the male companions all come across as effeminate beta male faggots. They don't really have very much complexity at all. They are fairly simple marvel movie characters. Plus there are no Gnomes. Of course I would never expect Larian to write a good Gnome. It takes a special talent to really write a good Gnome and there are Gnomes in BG3 anyways. Only halflings LARPing as Gnomes and a deficiency of Turnip plantations.
The writing and characters detract from this game.
- interactive world - probably one of the most important factors. The amount of different approaches you can have during combat and all kind of silly things you can do outside of it is so entertaining, that people are willing to play this game simply for the sake of finding out anything new about this. It less on rpg spectrum and more on, well, being a videogame. This is really a simple ingredient for a good game - having lots and lots of reactivity.
This is certainly a good thing, especially if the game is designed around it. But BG3 seems a little closed and tight to really take advantage of its interactive elements and unfortunately many of its useful interactive elements amount to oil barrels and barrlemancy/groundfire for silly gimmicks. BG3's interactivity is pretty much just Bethesda's interactivity except that you can move chests and barrels instead of just forks and knives. Outside of that, most of the interactivity serves a mostly decorative purpose. It doesn't necessarily serve or detract from the main gameplay loop.
Similarly, Bethesda did some of its radiant AI reactivity in its games like dropping items and npcs tell you to pick it up or asking if they could have it in Skyrim. The C&C dialogue has been present in rpgs for decades and there is nothign Larian could ever do to improve this. The big difference is that Larian's reactivity is more concentrated into tiny maps with a much more limited set of possible scenarios (helping its reactivity be more noticible) and pretty much predetermined whereas Skyrim's is very diffuse because the playable environment was much larger and much more random since an NPC just draws from a spreadsheet of reactions at random. The reactivity in many cases just comes down to some storyline/writing quirks in specific places such as moving certain things before a fight or doing certain things that results in some different dialogue. However, outside of that, it just comes down to throw grenade into group of enemies then they get mad and attack you. Even for the things that aren't the latter, its often meaningless to the actual gameplay loop of explore, find quests to do and things to kill, do quests or kill things, get rewards, repeat. Really only a relatively small portion of those things matter as far as the gameplay loop is concerned. Everything else is just there for flavor. Only that this is a crpg, the small portion of reactivity does help the game a little bit.
So these imo are qualities that make this game good. It's a case of combination of good elements, nothing especially original
What fundamentally makes a game good is how enjoyable its core gameplay loop is. The writing, the flavortext, etc. are fundamentally secondary. They can improve your experience during gameplay and something like the story can help direct the gameplay. Or they can take away from your experience as nothing but annoyances. They do not make a game good in itself. In my opinion, BG3's gameplay loop is decent but not good. It's pretty boring in the long run and starts to fall apart in act 3 where there's really no reason to do anything but try to get the story over with. Most of Act 3 was pointless fluff just for experience points I don't need, characters and scenes that add very little to the game, and maybe a few good magic items if you're lucky and that's where I completely lost any interest in playing. The end of Act 2 is really where the game should have ended since everything was much more substantive and more appropriate for what was going on.
