I feel as if you responded to the wrong post? I didn't mention "true RPGs" or give a definition of what makes something an RPG?
Not exactly. I think you're continuing a theme here.
You're lumping Baldur's Gate together with Skyrim (a fantasy open-world first-person action adventure sandbox with little actual roleplaying once you're finished with the character creator) and D&D (a pen and paper RPG) to me shows that you're a little too fixated on the concept of the RPG. These games have very little in common in practice.
Yes, I understand the systems and lore for Baldur's Gate are taken from the pen and paper D&D -- but systems and lore are not the game.
I'm not comparing the games, I'm using Skyrim to show that you can have an insanely successful release (well beyond what pretty much any dev could ever dream of having) without player VA, or a focus on extravagant cinematics. CRPGs in general are a fairly niche genre so there isn't really a huge, explosive success to compare to that way. Kingmaker and DOS2 both had restricted VA I'm fairly sure, but neither were big in the casual market the same way TES games are.
I wasn't making an argument about quality at all, simply financial success. The argument that you need PC VA for a game to be mainstream successful just doesn't really hold up, and fallout 4 adding VA doesn't seem to have been a crazy huge resounding successful decision either, though it did sell well. People don't really seem to care that much about silent protags, from what I can tell sales wise.
