What I would like a future Obsidian PoE or fantasy rpg to take from BG3 is pacing, quest design, cinematic dialogue, and handcrafted combat encounters. Things such as flying, jumping, and environmental reactivity are great but are not the core of a game for me. I started but didn’t finish PoE2. I felt it was really lacking in pacing, story, and quest design. BG3 did a great job at these things!
I'm really curious what you mean by quest design? I can understand why someone would have an issue with the pacing of the game (I personally loved it but I think it just scratched a particular itch for me) and I can sort of agree on the handcrafted encounters (PoE2 technically did that in so far as there aren't really random encounters I don't think, but there was room to improve) but I'm not sure what BG3 did with its quest design that was radically different from PoE.
On the question of handcrafted combat encounters, I wonder if maybe those sorts of encounters are just easier to do in turn-based systems? Because Solasta I think did pretty well at that too. I think BG3 goes a bit far at times making what should be straight forward encounters more gimmicky than they need to be, but in general encounter design isn't something I have an issue with overall.
