And this highlights two separate niche demographics of players: Players who think D&D is the rules and players who think D&D is about the story you tell (focus on companions, romances etc.). Probably the healthy demographic here are the ones who put equal value in both and tbh that makes the most sense to me personally.
Pretty much. I still value Solasta slightly higher because I'm of the opinion that it's harder to create a cohesive combat system and a functional UI than it is to create a good story. Larian had 2-3 games to figure out the UI part especially, so I'm not really expecting anything further in that department. That said, cinematics are hard too, but also in the realm of 'obscene budget' territory, so I naturally weigh that far less than everything else. I read something in another thread that put it best - Larian has great ambition and their projects have a massive sense of scale, but compared to every other cRPG developer, they really stumble on the fundamentals.
WotR so far blows BG3 out of the water on a writing level anyway, at least when it comes to character interactions (which I weigh much higher than stuff like the background details and main story, because you are going to be spending most of the game interacting with your companions to begin with). But Solasta and WotR are currently far more feature-complete, and it's unlikely that BG3 will be full launching anywhere before Summer 2022 with the scale it has. So Larian at least has the time to see what both projects do right and maybe improve on that.
I am sure once BG3 is done that I'll regard it as the better game than Solasta overall. Especially if they actually rein in all the questionable combat mechanics.
But in a direct comparison to WotR... It's going to be hard to determine, and largely going to be a comparison to whether people value cinematics or party interactions. It's currently shaping up to be something that has the potential to revitalize the RTwP scene, the same way DOS2 did for turn-based games. Perhaps even beyond that, with its hybrid system. And the companion writing is so exceptional that we'd be lucky to see future cRPGs taking cues from what WotR does to add a lot of hidden depth to its massive cast of party members. (Turns out actually designing the companions from the ground up to talk to each other and work as pieces of the larger narrative instead of only reacting to the player is the key!)
