I like how all this started because someone couldn't resist getting a chance to sass over god damn suggesting to try something else next week to pass the time if you had Gamepass, which I'm pretty sure a good chunk of us do. Because there is no way in hell patch 5 is arriving any earlier than mid-June now.
That said, I think it's fair to point out that all this falling back to cinematics and writing does nothing but muddle the waters, because hardly anyone legit has any problem with those. Of course those have mainstream appeal. Reverse the roles a bit - would you guys actually be here if say, Pathfinder had those, and BG3 didn't? Bringing that up is a much more reductionist argument than you guys realize and says quite a lot about you individually, that you guys only care about things with flashy AAA budgets rather than the gameplay itself - when the latter is rightfully more important for some of us because all of gaming at some point in time did not have the capability to support such visuals, so we realize that it is the gameplay that makes up the core of the game.
The grievances are focused on the combat for a reason. Or are you guys going to try to argue with a straight face that things like barrelmancy and height advantage and backstab advantage are suddenly mechanics that are crucial to appealing to a mainstream audience? If so, the future of RPGs is truly dire.
(I see mirrors in this type of argument within the DA fandom, with the jump from DA: Origins to DA: Inquisition. For all the latter did to try to appeal to a mainstream audience, the former is widely considered to be the superior game by the fanbase, despite almost everything about it supposedly being a much more niche game, if we were to use the arguments in this thread as a metric.)
