BG3, in my opinion is currently the World of Warcraft of CRGPs and that is bad thing.
When WoW released, MMORPGs already where a thing but they where a bit more hardcore, lacked real polish, they where not as pretty. This meant they appealed to a smaller, more involved RPG audience. Blizzard to the premise, dumbed down the game mechanics, made the game pretty and represented to the world. The world EXPLODED. WoW was not the best MMO from a technical view point and only fair from an RPG angle at all. However the pretty colors and simpler mechanics gave the game a larger appeal. What followed was the slow, inevitable decline of the MMO. Every new MMO tried to follow the base model of the WoW (EVE might be the one exception) and catch the same genie in the bottle. They of course all failed in that final goal and the result for gamers where MMOs that catered to trying to please everyone instead of having a well defined target audience.
Fast forward, the CRPG genre was doing, well not great. We had some solid offerings with Divinity, Pillars, Wasteland, Pathfinder and others keeping the genre alive. However none of them was a breakout hit that made genre changing audience sizes. Then Larian, either on purpose or accident, stumbled on the Blizzard model with BG3.
They took the DnD franchise and BG name for instant recognition. They took the already fairly simplified 5E game system and dumbed it down a bit more, for wider appeal. They threw high visual production value at it and made the game with enough teen angst that the proper name of the game should be Baldur's Gate: As the Wrym Turns and market it as a soap opera.
At this point they could have and, in my opinion, should have thrown the hardcore RPG gamer a bone and given us the option to turn off some of the simplification, give is a more "pure" 5e experience. Instead they doubled down on the teen approach with a near idioticly simple character creator that of course took the time to add genital modification but could not give us decent voice options or more than a couple of body types.
Reading this you might think I loathe the game, you would be wrong, I have had a blast playing it. Bad a true fan of a game or even a genre does not settle for mediocrity when they know greatness was so close.
All this then leads back to the original question, "Is BG3 bad for the genre?" There is no singular answer. On one hand it has parked interest in the CRPG style of gaming in a way that has not been seen since the early days of computer gaming and all the DnD geeks migrated from table top to computers. However it has given the industry a formula for success that is not great for the industry and the CRPG community as a whole, when looked at from the perspective of the core RPG gamer. The POTENTIAL for it to be bad for the genre is real, but if that potential is realized will have to be seen.
RPGs are not inexpensive to create, especially a game with this level of polish. A lot of devs will still avoid RPGs because of that extra cost and complexity in design. The bigger studios will likely try to duplicate the success of BG3, however the CRPG genre has left the bigger studios behind some time ago. The hope for the genre and the hardcore CRPG gamer has for a while lay in the hands of the smaller studios. This level of polish will be beyond most of their resources, so perhaps we will still see a more rough, less polished game that goes back to the RPG roots.
