Just by reading the title, my eyes rolled up inside my skull. How can a critically acclaimed game, both by the public and the critics, be bad for a genre?
The answer to your question is: Tedious gatekeeping.
Well, I don't know about that (though I find the arguments of a lot of people in here myopic.)
On the one hand, you could say that for a genre that has wandered the wilderness as long as cRPGs have, anything with the success of BG3 is great. It will inspire others to make similar games; even if you don't like all of them, you are certain to like some.
On the other hand....
What made BG3 actually good? What made it so successful, where other cRPGs are not?
I've been thinking about this a lot. Because in a lot of ways, compared to other cRPGs....BG3 is actually pretty mediocre. The setting is generic fantasy, not particularly interesting. The story is...I hate to say it, but the story of this game really is not very good, imo. I'd say it's "below average." The combat system copies from 5e and for a window of a few levels it's pretty fun....but it quickly becomes unbalanced, making combat tedious (because it's far too easy), and the ways in which it becomes unbalanced are usually due to very unwise homebrew rules Larian implemented. Background lore is kind of lacking (and a lot of things in the timeline leading up to the game don't seem to make sense.) Romances are...okay, but definitely not anything special. Same goes for the actual character writing.
So in what ways did BG3 excel? Encounter design, at least early on. They give a lot of options for dealing with a problem. It's also just fun to explore the world. The environments look crisp, great, beautiful (most of the time.) VAs and seeing the characters emote breathes a lot of life into the characters. The character writing itself isn't great, but the VAs and just seeing them move and visibly *seeing* their emotions makes the characters so much more expressive and likable. I've said before that, just going purely by his writing, I'd probably hate Gale's guts. But his VA makes him an actual likable character.
The thing is, anyone who makes cRPGs is going to try to learn from the experience of BG3. They're going to ask themselves: "What did BG3 do right? How can we better reallocate our limited resources so we can recreate the success of BG3?" And I think it's not an entirely unfounded worry that, looking at BG3, some people may conclude "You know, background lore, writing, a fine-tuned combat system? These things seem to be less important than hiring celebrity voice actors and having mocap."
And that's not even to say that what Larian was doing was superficial. I think making the characters more expressive exposed a GIGANTIC weakness and blind spot that other cRPGs have struggled with. Static portraits and paper dolls really are just not that good for connecting with characters. But I would actually be pretty sad if other creators of cRPGs focused on that, and saw their writing deteriorate to Larian's level, just because that's what seemed successful.
That's why I hope people don't overinterpret BG3's success. I think the game is terribly overhyped; that a lot of the praise for it comes from people projecting their hopes onto it, as some sort of symbol to rally around, against what they see as the shortcomings of other, larger game developers. I think in the end things will be okay, because the simple success of BG3 will just inspire tons of other cRPGs, and I think it's a clear signal that there's a large market for game developers to be a little experimental, a little less conservative with their offerings. I hope those things happen. What I hope doesn't happen is that people see Larian as a studio to emulate too closely. Because imo, they make highly flawed games.
