As previously stated and easily checked - video games (especially RPGs) have had D/N cycles some 20 years ago
Make it even 30.
Ultima VII, a game that even Swen Vincke knows very well and claimed to love and admire in the past, had it in 1992. And in a fairly complex form too, one that I wouldn't even ask from Larian, with a lot of reactivity tied to it.
Yeah, seems like gaming studios would realize where they have gone wrong over the last decade or so. Back when we had iconic games like Baldurs Gate, Ultima, Planescape, and others the focus was on the writing and storytelling. Graphics were rudimentary because of hardware limitations, so they used what they had. What they had were mechanics and story. Blizzard gets this, Bethesda toys with it, and most other companies ignore it in favor of rich graphical interfaces, flashy moves, and enormous enemies. And yes, I'm aware that there are other companies such as Obsidian who have decent writers.
I'll be honest, I love rich graphical interfaces with flashy moves and enormous enemies, but if that's all you can muster, then your game will fade into obscurity at best, and end up a fiasco at worst.
In order to tell a good story, you need ambience. You never hear of people telling ghost stories on a saturday morning with cartoons playing in the background because the ambience would be wrong. Instead you tell them around a campfire at night in wooded areas because that is when they will have the most psychological impact.
Even in the dark the ambient lighting is too strong. Instead of having Phase Spiders hanging out in the distance shooting poison (which isn't something they can't actually do in D&D) it should be DARK. The spiders can phase in next to your party members, they don't need to pretend they are archers, because they are spiders. Ranged combat in the dark, especially the Underdark, should be far less reliable then it is on the surface. Cave Fishers would be obvious the way the world is lit in BG3, and these are supposed to be incredibly successful ambush predators. Darkvision is only supposed to extend 30 feet, and light sources in dark places rarely extend your vision past 10, yet I can walk into the OWlbears cave and see everything. I hate to talk about Pathfinder, but they did do darkness appropriately. Larian has dropped the ball here.
