Regarding WotR (and KM, for that matter) - I get why it is not everyone's cup of tea. Truly! The games are very long - to a point where it grows tedious for most players - and it makes the replay value lower for more "casual" players as just two playthroughs will be an extreme time-commitment. At the same time, WotR has so many choices that matters which makes increases the replay value - but it is simply too much for most people. Myself included - I played through both WotR and KM *once*. I have so many great ideas I wanna try, but there is *no way in the nine hells* that I go through all that time again just to experience the differences.
I am fine with the time commitment - with PoE1 I immediately jumped back in for a solo Trial of Iron run after 104 hours of my "canonical" playthrough, same with PoE2. It just shows that one team knows how to pace a large, open-ended RPG, and another doesn't. Owlcat's main problem is that they pick too big a scope for how messy their games end up being on release and afterwards. Sure, there are plentiful choices and consequences - but for every well-implemeted choice there's a plotline or a character that just gets outright forgotten, or dumped, or is forced on you regardless of your desire to have them around (Tristian...). They create a massive framework but when it comes to smaller details, you find out that they don't really work together particularly well.
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...because I do like Owlcat's writing
Well... agree to disagree. To each their own, but to me the obviously originally Russian (sentence structure, punctuation, emphases) long and unformatted sheets of text that they try to mash into a single dialogue line / paragraph, which get especially awkward when you hear voice actors trying to go through the whole thing in one take (often screwing up pronounciaions and delivery, which isn't really entirely their fault) aren't really the finest example of writing. You can adapt/translate something with far more finesse. As for companions, their arcs feel really forced and artificial. Can't really refer to WotR here, but in Kingmaker Valerie's questline (for example) left me more confused than anything about what the point it wanted to carry across was supposed to be. I also didn't like how rigidly scripted they were, with me having Kanerah/Kalikke die on me because my LG paladin didn't want to do anything with their devil sire.
Larian are to be commended here with how untethered the plotlines seem to be in BG3, inheriting that from D:OS2. You can easily skip, miss, avoid, or kill things - but the plot, apart from a few exceptions, finds a way to move on, like how you can
not snuff out the souls imprisoned by Adhramallik but still kill him and keep Lohse in your party if you fight him without her present on the battlefield.
I am really looking forward to seeing what the player can get away with in BG3. Like, what if you don't interact with the druids or goblins at all, or slaughter everyone rather than side with them? It's the emergent plot and situations that Larian have been prioritizing in their games since D:OS2 (and even D:OS1, to a degree), and it certainly resonates with what I wanna see in RPGs, rather than them re-iterating on what already worked well 20+ years ago. If I want to play an old CRPG with old-timey gameplay and design, I'd take the original BG games or NWN over the Pathfinder stuff on any day.
