i honestly dont see how PoE had the best lore of any non liscened CRPG.
but i guess that reayl depends on what you call a CRPG.
I would say lore is good because how closely tied it is to character arcs and themes. I find central moral dilemma of the series to be fascinating and it exploration through Dyrwood and Huana history is engaging. Again, moment to moment storytelling isn't great in PoE - I feel things are introduced out of order, too many things are included through books. PoE is a great I fully appreciated on my 2nd playthrough, but I am not blind to it's many flaws. But I find it's ambitions far more interesting and I find Sawyers historical obsessions to give PoE a fresh and authentic quality. PoE definitely isn't approachable, and work that came into crafting each culture can be a barrier. I think PoE2 showed that if properly explored in-game, rather then in-books it can work well, but then again PoE2 spent most of its time exploring sociopolitical situation of Deadfire with little time for actual story with themes. That I blame on change on narrative lead though, whenever fairly or not - without insight into game development one can only guess.
There is one part of PoEs that I would praise to no end - that's White March expansion. I think that is a bit of content that to me shows what PoE could have been.
If I were to nominate best world building in recent years, that would be Dark Souls - completely unintrusive to gameplay, puttings atmosphere and "feels" over dry history with world, history deeply tied to the gameplay loop.
Disco Elysium is half of a great game, I didn't get too invested in the lore - I personally think that if it was set in real world setting it would be more compelling to me. Need to give it another playthrough at some point.
