So to Brewman's point, I've put several hundred hours into WotR across like, five or six paths and I play on a really easy difficulty and I LOVE the crusade manager, I'm always excited to play around with it, it doesn't feel clunky or like a chore at all. That's not what makes the story feel meaningful. To me what makes the story feel meaningful is that each playthrough I get to create a different character and give them a unique journey with various choices to make. The choices don't become meaningful just because they lead to vastly different outcomes (even though yes, your choices can actually lead to surprisingly different outcomes along the way) but because they were made by your character and you got a bunch of options for expressing your character's personality and ideas. And no, the story in itself isn't that engaging, but that's because the story isn't meant to be engaging by itself. It's meant to be a vehicle by which your character can experience things and do things and have change and growth. The story centres around your character and so requires you to engage more with the characters you create. One of my problems with BG3 is that it feels like our character is an afterthought compared to the story Larian wants to tell, and the kind of person our character is able to be is curtailed so they can tell that story.
I'm not hating on WOTR btw, my only playthrough was an angel playthrough and it was sufficiently epic, but I wouldn't play that game again, because it felt like a chore a lot of the time.
Another example I like to bring up is Knight of the Old Republic, which is a well known, but rather old game. I still love playing that game, even though it's really not too complex and it has only 2 ending. I think the reason that game works for me is because it really comes down to meaningful choices at the Temple or at the Star Forge. The game doesn't even have epilogue slides like Fallout New Vegas, so you have no idea how quets affect the universe after your adventure is over. What is even more funny is that it's a game that doesn't have an "Im gonna become a God", like most RPG seem to do these days.
