I honestly tend to agree with you about all that, my issue is that a) people are praising the story a lot when I dint think it's deserved.
I agree. What I try to think is what people mostly compare it to.
Baldur's Gate3 is a AAA RPG, and I don't think many people stack it against small or AA projects. Most will stack them against what passes these days for big production RPG - recent Bioware output, Bethesda, recent AssCreed etc. In that crowd I think Baldru's Gate3 stand out well. There is of course CDPR - and while I thought Cyberpunk also has a lot of narrative issues, there is still consistancy, worldbuilding and tight character arcs that BG3 could only dream of. HOWEVER, aside from Bethesda none of those have interactivity and scope of BG3. So it is also tough to really put one against another.
That Baldur's Gate3 aimed to highly systemic, story driven, coop and singleplayer, adaptation of D&D but also mass market clicker not requiring much investment, and they succeeded and received super high critical and player acclaim is a staggering achievement. But the downside of doing everything, is that every single thing has glaring issues once you stare at it long enough. Get inversted in narrative, and you will see inconsistencies, and odd character behaviours. Pay attention to combat, and you will start noticing how unbalanced and exploitable the system is. Start pushing systemic reactivity, and you will clearly run into unimmersive absurdities.
Honestly, after 3 years in EA I am positively surprised how the thing came together - I was fearing the final result will be much messier. I do hope Larian will manage to improve the game even further before fully moving on to the next project.
