In my view, one of the best games in recent times that actually fuses story-telling and roleplaying with roughly equal weight is Disco Elysium. In that game you don't get to customise your appearance (beyond choosing your clothes). You don't get to create your own backstory either. You definitely weren't given a blank slate.
DE is an excellent spiritual successor to Torment. I am looking to update later this year - I hope it will address the underwhelming 2nd half of the game to make it as good as it can be.
I was thinking about DE as it's an interesting one - especially with full VO patch incoming. When we get to control Harry he is a blank slate - whenever you accept his past is up to you. That's why RPGs loved the amnesiac trope after Torment - you keep a cake and eat it too.
As far as VO is concerned DE should be an interesting one - I don't expect Harry to be voiced, but I assume that his his skills will be. That should give Harry "a voice" while it still being dependent on what character you built.
Additionally, I thought it was impressive that Disco Elysium is all basically just one game -- unlike Baldur's Gate which essentially has two main gameplay modes: the combat game mode and the story/adventure mode.
Well, there are different ways of handling that. DE uses systematically simple dice system to simulate everything - and considering it barely has combat it works alright. The problem is that it is content dependent - system is so basic and it requires writing and clever implementation to make it work - unlike a full on combat system, that once finished can provide more hours of systemic fun. That is visible in 2nd half of DE where hand crafted content is more spread out and overall weaker - resulting in far, far weaker game as the result.
BG1&2, PoE1&2, Kingmaker - do have a bigger seperation between different systems - combat, dialogue, exploration. PoE1 here is the weakest with the three being very seperated with little skill overlap between each of three gameplay pillars.
Larian, honestly, is doing quite well here. Especially D:OS1&2 smartly used the same skills for combat and exploration making the whole thing more intertwined - dialogue was just part of the quest, rather then main way pf progressing the quest. In BG3 so far the division seems slightly more pronaunced as well, though it is still not as constrained as those previous games I mentioned. I was disappointed though, to have no reaction when I nicked the idol from druids (I did use exploit to not trigger hostility, though it would be nice if the game still recognised that the idol was not there). I didn't trigger the "steal the idol" quest, so that might have something to do with it. Though that is a problem that dates back to D:OS2 - in spite of freedom the game chooses, the reactivity seems to be tied to specific quest progression rather then what you actually do. For example in D:OS2 I killed both the Shadow Prince and the Mother Tree and game failed to recognize it, as the quest didn't complete. That's a big "nono" if you design systemic game like that. I should make a
post about that.
As far as "RPG-ness" goes I still think Tim Cain's RPGs (Fallout1&2, Arcanum, Bloodlines) are kings when it comes to mixing playstyles and character builds into quest design, allowing for dramatically different progression and gameplay style depending on your character build.
