AwesomeButton
Proud owner of BG 3: Day of Swen's Tentacle
I'm not forgetting them, that's part of my point. With full character creation, and especially if you have two sexes - you have to spend twice as much on voicing the main character; the voiceover tone will less often match the player's intended roleplaying character than if the game was with a predetermined character; you have to plan conversations with NPCs differently, as no NPC has the same amount of knowledge about the main character as it would have had if the character had been predetermined.Custom character creation + open world + narrative driven main story (+ anything else than isometric perspective) - a recipe for massive compromise with reactivity and C&C. This game just proves it.
Don't forget the fully voiced characters on top. Honestly, I still don't understand how anyone can fall for it, but I probably shouldn't play the devil's advocate.
Bottom line - if you're going to do an RP G(ame), do an RPG, if you're going to do an interactive movie with token RPG elements, then do that, but don't try to mix the two things. That's one of the reasons why The Witcher games worked well as interactive movies, and the first one was even a good RPG with bold forays into interactive movie turf. It worked because the main character was predetermined, the world was not fully and not really open (in Witcher 3 the openness was masked behind the player's level) and because the third person perspective in coversations lent additional help to writers in order to bring out the individuality of the main character and the supporting cast.
That's why Badowski buried Cyberpunk 2077 if he decided to make it first person - he immediately took all the aces from the writers and quest designers' hands. The best he could replace them with was a wooden action figure resembling Keanu Reeves.