Every major problem with BG3 can be traced to the limitations of Larian's home-brew engine: cannot pause the game during real-time exploration; no day-night cycle; toilet-chain party movement; inability to do reactions properly; etc. Everything is because of the Larian engine's limitations.
Is it, though? What makes you think that if Larian were working with other engine, they wouldn't still design the game with multiplayer first in mind. Game with far smaller budget has stuff you mentioned - seems more like a design decision then an engine limitation.
But Larian's choice of MP first was not there in my list of BG3 game design limitations due to their engine (the very part of my post that you quote in you post).
It seems like Wormerine's point is that Larian's desire for MP first that is the
cause of these problems you list, not engine limitations.
Ah okay. Fair enough.
I still stand by my assessment. I recall even seeing articles from way back where someone from Larian said something to the effect that not being able to pause in exploration and the party movement mechanic (at least those two things) were because of engine limitations (I tried re-finding those articles but couldn't).
In any case, the point about Larian's game design choices being driven by MP over SP is itself an excellent point, one with which I complately agree and have said so quite strongly right from their very day announcing the game. What Larian is claiming they're trying to do is to create effectively two games in one: a SP classic cRPG videogame experience, and also a coop MP tabletop D&D sim gaming experience. But, even though they won't admit to it, the latter clearly is dominating the former. Meanwhile, across the RPG genre with most major developers, the trend now is to go for one or the other, SP experience or MP experience, and not try to have both in the same game. All the big-name, big-budget RPG projects from Bethesda, Bioware, Obsidian, inXile, etc. are declared to be exclusively or mainly SP games. Even CDPR has now declared they're going to make three separate new Witcher games (the first game in the new trilogy plus two other standalone games), two as SP games and the third as a MP game, having explicitly abandoned their previous plan to create one big SP+MP game. So Larian is pretty much alone as a major RPG studio still pushing the "SP and MP games in one" idea. And in the end, my prediction is that it will leave both groups of fans disappointed.
But returning to the OP's question, 2023 is shaping up to be a banner year for RPGs. And especially among AAA big-budget RPGs (but even some small-budget RPGs), pretty much all of them are using UE5, except for BG3. So people will surely compare and judge on that basis, I certainly will, and BG3 will end up being found wanting in many areas.
