I wish game like kingmaker, tyranny or wrath of the righteous had similar budget like bg3.
I do not. If they had a higher budget they would need to be "more accessible" and "streamlined" to sell enough to turn a profit which would destroy everything that made them far superior to BG3.
Thats why nowadays actual innovation and masterpieces are created in the indy sector while AAA gaming are bland and soulless sequels to existing IPs, spiced up with a combination of engineered "awesome" moments, pop culture references and sex.
And Larian has joined the AAA club, the video game version of fast food chains.
I doubt adding full voice-over would make wotr or kingmaker "soulless".
You can clearly so improvement between kingmaker and Wotr, mostly because owlcat had more people are budget. So doubt bigger budget always means soulless games.
I think someone else really gave the reason. It's not that BG3 did any one thing exceptionally well. Success in these kinds of things are alchemy, not science. There's no set of ingredients that you can put in that will guarantee results. There's just some tried and true aspects mixed in with luck, creativity and even more luck. If you ask me, I don't think there's any part of what BG3 did that a different game hasn't done better. But maybe it's just that they did enough things good enough.
Simplicity and boredom are two entirely different things. Simplicity means that things are easy to wrap your head around and you can launch into it straight away. It means there's minimal extaneous elements to worry about. Simple can be boring, but so can complexity. Just look at any board game with a huge booklet of rules that are super complex and intricate and lead to people just zoning out or getting frustrated. there's a sweet spot of simplicity vs complexity, which is different for everyone and also varies depending on what you're trying to do. As I said, making games is a process of alchemy.
Theoretically, it doesn't, but practically it does; At least it is my experience.
Blizzard has been pruning people abilities for years in wow, same goes with wizard of the coast when it comes to the difference between 3e and 5e, Bethesda does it with every version of their game - they removed some features when going from daggerfall to Morrowind, same goes from morrrowind to oblivion, wasteland 3 removed it fallout like feats system which was the main reason I stopped playing the game.
I had to say I enjoyed "complexity" of Morrowind when it comes to leveling skills to advance within guilds that you joined. I love sitting 2 hours in front of wotr character creation to choose the best class to fit my tastes.
From my point of view, nearly every time a feature is removed cause of streamline or so called "boredom" is rather a detriment to a game rather than a bonus.
Despite skyrim is better looking game than oblivion I couldn't give it the same amount of love I gave oblivion despite oblivion is worse game overall. I remember constant crashes in oblivion that drove me nuts but despite all this I got immersed into oblivion and didn't into skyrim.
So you answer why bg3 was a success is caused by several factors that wouldn't meant success if other game did what larian did.
I was rather looking for more "scientific" approach like you put it.
If you toogle boxes of a, b, c it will translate to a success in form of d.
Sometimes it feels like karazhan paradox in wow. People love that raid but no one at blizzard managed to duplicate karazhan success.
Same goes with witcher 3, I have no clue why witcher 3 was a big success on western markets and witcher 1/2 didn't achieve the same success despite witcher 1 had better dialogue from my point of view.
