It's all Larian, although I have to admit that BG3 is the first Larian game I was actually able to finish (kay, that's a lie, I finished Divine Divinity once agees ago), I made multiple attempts at DOS1/2 and nearly finished them but the tone of those games didn't sit well with me. Not to mention the barrelmancy and over the top surface effects (which Larian has reaaaaaaally toned down in BG3, they're still present ofc but nerfed in comparison to DOS2 especially).

And yes, BG3 is the type of game that doesn't know what it wants to be. Especially in act 3 after the event you mentioned. The narrative and story really fall apart after that.

Add to that Larian's loose interpretation of established lore. Eg. mind flayers HAVE souls, there is a mind flayer god called Illsensine for crying out loud, it's never been implied before BG3 in any other D&D material that mind flayers are soulless.

Originally Posted by Niara
On top of that, their story writing has never been very good to begin with, and they seem to have a philosophy that plot holes, non-sequiturs and disconnected nonsense lacking overall coherency can all be covered up and ignored if you make it bombastic and over-the-top enough, which they earnestly attempt to do.

Yep, 100%, very good point. I'd say their writers range from decent to pretty good, but it entirely depends on the character/quest. There's very visible discrepancy in the quality of the stories told, for some they accounted for the most bizarre of outcomes, and for others there is only 1 or 2 ways to finish a certain character story arc or a quest at best
cough cough the Emperor vs Orpheus cough cough
.

I have to say, back in the begging of BG3's EA, I was bamboozled at first thinking that the game would turn out to be more akin to NWN2's expansion Mask of the Betrayer (NWN2 itself being meh at best, but MotB being 10/10 would replay over and over again), that it would spin a more personal story of a struggle of getting the damn worm out of your skull or succumbing to it's power. Y'know, slowly uncovering what is preventing the ceremorphosis and what to do with the gathered information, and it somewhat holds true in act 1 and 2 despite the massive rewrites (and yes the quality of those rewrites is... eh, not so good).