Originally Posted by Gray Ghost
So speaking as someone who really just doesn't like this game, each individual act of this game is as large or larger than many other games.

That is really, really not true.

The game is not that big. Maybe if you waste a lot of time trundling around doing nothing for 40 hours... The actual size of the game is nothing special. Neither the actual scale of the map, nor its density are impressive.

Certainly a single Act is not comparable to an entire game. Unless you're comparing to tiny indie games made in 24 hours for GameJams...

Originally Posted by Gray Ghost
The game also has to account for not just dialogue choices, but a number of outside dialogue actions that most crpgs don't try to account for, such as if you pickpocketted something, if you straight up stole it openly, if you've witnessed one or another event first, what direction you may have approached from, etc.

Uhh... Pretty much every RPG tracks those things.

Heck, Elder Scrolls and Fallout actually tracks individual stolen goods permenantly (Fallout also has a Karma system and various Reputation systems that change how NPC's act around you)

The ONLY thing that BG3 does, is have NPC's show up again in later acts. Which is not complex. It's simply state based flags used by many games of various genres (Heck, Skyrim has you make a choice about who takes over control of Whiterun)

None of these things cause BG3 to be complex. At least no more so than any other RPG be it Classic or not.