Just to the 'say my name' point, I wish a game would come along and really lean into that idea instead of working around it, or just giving it up as impossible. In many ways BG1 was ahead of the curve there, where at least one could record their own custom audio for barks and import a portrait. Sure it was limited by the tech then available, but it definitely felt like forward progress and at the time it was way cutting edge. BG1 was the first CRPG game I ever played where it felt like the custom PC truly could be customized. I think it's a big part of why the game was so compelling, completely independent of the actual story and such. Like it was just so much more ambitious in that regard than any CRPG had really dared to be before it.

Rounding out 2021, where we all have microphones and cameras in our pockets, and voice modulation tech exists at a pretty high level now... I can easily imagine a D&D game where our Companions actually could say our names out loud, and that would feel like a real watershed moment in a modern CRPG. Like I can imagine "Who are you?" as a custom character suite, where the player feeds in all these inputs with prompts for recording and a series of selections, and the game then amazes us by actually having our companions take that ball and run with it. But I just know that we'll never get anything approaching that when the custom PC is all backburnered in favor of Pre-Gens.

I'm not sure that everyone has the same ideas about made BG1 so fucking cool in 1998, but that was a big part of it for me. That unlike every other D&D crpg that preceded it, Baldur's Gate went out of it's way to promo that idea. The idea that actually Customizing a PC might be a real possibility on the horizon, rather than a complete pipe dream. I'm sure it would be quite a bit of work to find what the next iteration of that looks like, whether in a 3d portrait suite that includes stuff like Voice or tragic flaws as part of the character 'portrait' but I think that's the sort of excitement I want to discover again. Not a pick from 5 or pick from 8 type scenerario. I don't disagree with any of the points being made about how a custom falls short compared to a fully designed and professionally acted performance, but I wish that they'd try for it anyway, like really take a couple moonshots on that score, because I think it brings us closer to my ultimate goal of seeing D&DVR in my lifetime.

I'm for the custom PC all day, all the way! Hehe