But D&D always had silly stuff like that. Essentially the prequal to BG3, Descent into Avernus has scenes where you talk to a brain damaged Bearded Devil and his pet hellchicken or a Night Hag named Mad Maggie who can sell you cars to have mad max fights in against a talking pigman with a big hammer, or a cute talking flying elephant who shoots sparkles out of her trunk. Sorry but D&D is kinda silly and it has been like that most of its existence, Baldurs Gate 3 is true to what the Forgotten Realms actually is. The interpretation of FR being dark and gritty was made up for the story of the first 2 games. and its also why alot of NWN is far less serious by comparison.
can you in all honestly say that if the classic games had full animal speaking that they wouldn't have animals properly talk? Why do people keep warping the perception fo BG1 and 2 as super serious gritty games when they had tones of funny moments and down right campy stuff and that was one of the many things that made it great. It had a sense of humor and was silly at times. Is BG3's tone different from the past games? ABSOLUTELY but thats because they aren't the same people who made those games and Larian was smart and made sure to distance its story from the originals.
If you played any recent module from 5E then you'll know for sure that BG3 is as in line with Forgotten Realms tone as you can get.
Of course D&D can have silly stuff. Real life has silly stuff. Forgotten Realms has silly stuff without a doubt. No need to argue that.
Lets separate two things here. Silly stuff in character is different from silly stuff as gameplay mechanics. D&D combat is not about constantly Shoving your enemies into lava or pits. You can do it, but in BG3 it has been exaggerated to a silly level. It's not about plopping down explosive barrels from Magic Pockets and blowing up entire encounters. D&D combat is not about everyone and everything spamming poison and acid surfaces everywhere and jumping all over the map like teleport is a basic skill. Solasta plays like D&D while BG3 plays like some silly aberration between Divinity and Super Mario.
The only in character silly that bothers me are the ridiculous backgrounds like Gale's and Karlach's. I can't begin to understand why new level 1 characters must be portrayed as legendary and amazing when honest inexperienced aspiring heroes would make more sense in the context, be more believable and thus resonate better with the player.
20 year old games with pixelated graphics make a poor comparison to BG3 in terms of breaking the fourth wall and such. Much is forgiven when the game has such limited visuals. But BG3 is close to photorealism. When the characters look like in real life, they also need to act more like in real life. It becomes more of a cinema comparison, than a 20 year old game comparison.
As for the animal speaking, Speak with Animals communication should be limited by their intelligence level, as per the spell description. They wouldn't suddenly speak in perfect eloquent sentences and act cutesy like Bambi or Chip and Dale. They would be animals conveying meanings in a more primitive fashion. Which frankly would be much more interesting gameplaywise when you would still have to interpret them.
