I hope that not only does BG3’s success mean more games from Larian, but more high budget CRPGs in general. Maybe in 4 or 5 years we can see more from this genre than just the small studio and indie projects which just don’t do it for me.
Really looking forward to Broken Roads next month (Aussie post-apocalypse with some fascinating morale mechanics attached, pascifist playstyle possible and Colin McComb on the writing team)... Demo's out on STEAM.
But, yeah. The thing is that CRPGs too are really really really complex games. And even on moderate budgets and production values, there need to be a lot of cuts to be made (which is why Pillars Of Eternity had that one standout branching questline in the Raedric quest... trumping all else).
It needn't necessarily be in the super high budget AAA space, with dozens of people working on audiovisuals alone, and generally hundreds of people working in the game. But there's still plenty middle ground left to cover in between those behemoth projects and say, Underrail.
As for the high budget AAA space, there's not going to be any massive shift, even moreso not in the forseeable future. Firstly, the few AAA studios doing these kinda games have specialized themselves on the kind of games they do just as Larian did (also in terms of personell... and that's hundreds of specialists). Secondly, contemporary AAA projects take half a decade+ to develop, and there is few developers capable of doing that. Thirdly, unless BG3 in the long haul breaks Witcher records in numbers shipped (which it obviously won't do), nobody will worry much.
The only thing I can see happening here is Bioware
dialing their ever present "streamlining" a tad backto the kinda games they did with DA Origins and Kotor (which essentially were simplified BG-Likes with less class, spell, party and combat complexity alongside to more linear hub-style maps and critical path structures on purpose). That is, if EA would allow them to do that. There's a crossover audience now either way with BG3 having gone the DA Origins style of cinematic presentation. In that sense, BG3 has bridged a gap that's existed ever since between the CRPG and the AAA space (whilst also generally exploited that there hasn't been ANY Dragon Age game in a decade now running).
