Interesting question.
To be honest Larian in my opinion tends to fall victim to a process I struggle to name -> Their characters tend to explain everything. It's not always the case but it happens very often.
Essentially people, when you talk to them, don't explain everything. They might tell you something and won't always explain what made them do it. If you ask them about the reason they told you something they might come up with a reason on the fly. The kind of reason that will leave you wondering how are they feeling because clearly they didn't say everything. The implicit aspect of human interactions is completely lost in BG3 in my opinion based on pre-Paladin build.
When writing a dialogue sometimes you might be tempted to give a bit more info about the story , the lore or the talking character. And you end up with longer and unnatural dialogues. There are two solutions to this :
1) Shorter sentences but longer dialogue sequences(While this wil create a bit more work when creating dialogue trees we're not talking about branching those dialogues endlessly. On multiple occassions a few choices will lead to the same answer. The point is only to make the communication flow more natural ).
2) "Show don't tell approach". Larian is already doing it quite often with their cinematics so there's that.
Btw Larian's CEO is responsible for this to some extent , Shadowheart got linked to the main quest on his demand together with her artifcat. The objective was to pass the main story in a natural and seemless way. It ended up mixing a side character with the main plot making her essential to act 1 story line . Her artifact could be an awesome way to make a player-made character unique but it's too late for that i guess. Regardless of what you do Shadowheart will be in your vicinity on some occassions due to this artifact being linked to her story line and the artifcat story line being linked to the main character. And there are consequences to this.
All artifact dialogues seem just "glued" on top of the existing plot in a weird way with shadowheart being like " No no, it makes complete sense, let me explain". Which goes completely against what was suposed to be her " secretive nature" .
Gael is the main offender. While this might be a way to demonstate his " scientific" approach to most subjects on various occassions Larian goes over board with this and makes him sound like a tutorial.
Similar issue arises with Astarion on a couple occassions, his sentences are way to long.
Best dialogues i've seen so far came from Auntie tbh.
I agree with most of what you've said here. We have a narrator. Let the narrator handle exposition. We have a PC. Let the player character figure things out in an internal dialogue. Then we have companions. Dialogue from companions should serve their characterization, and some of their connection with the world (so some exposition), but they shouldn't be the focal points of exposition. I'd prefer more characterizing dialogue and less expository dialogue (not 0, just less).
