The previous games certainly had their wacky or funny moments but I never felt anything but immersed in the game world. The game worlds in BG1 & 2 felt alive and believable, not a bizarre cramped theme park where everything is on your door step and you can simply jump into magical way portals conveniently and liberally littered around the map. The combat didn't involve an endless scramble for higher ground or Super Mario style leaps and the story was a little more concise, clear and not riven with quite so many plot holes. I feel like everything reminds you this is a video game. Out of sheer curiosity I replayed BG1 recently and sure it is flawed and dated but it still holds up remarkably well and it wasn't long before I was lost in its charms once again.
In BG3 everything is exceptional, from the Michael Bay-like prologue where we find ourselves hurtling through the realms on a flaming Mindlfayer ship being hunted by Githyanki and dragons to the OTT backstories of all the Origins companions, bar Lae'Zel. I liken the tone and writing of BG3 to contemporary Marvel/Star Wars films; it is hard to describe succinctly but I always think back to that awful cringey opening scene of The Last Jedi where Poe Dameron is alone in his X-Wing facing off against a Star Destroyer (or whatever ship it is). The dialogue Is terrible and tries too hard to be funny.
In my opinion BG3 suffers for a lack of coherency and immersion; I appreciate I might be in a minority but nevertheless it is how I feel. Probably went off topic a little bit there so I apologise.
I don't think it's off topic. The lack of direction is also why BG3 lacks immersion compared to 20 year old games.
It's probably a younger dev team who were influenced more by MMO's than BG, IWD or NWN. I remember Swen saying in an early dev video that half of the dev team didn't even know what BG was. That's probably why we have the theme park design, repetitive high ground combat and teleport systems that don't make sense in the game world. There seems to be a lack of understanding what it takes to create an immersive world, or a principle that gameplay comes first and has to have A, B and C to be a "good video game".
I think there's a clash between these video game tropes in gameplay and powerful immersive storytelling in an RPG. Would be interesting to hear RPG game devs talk about that. Previous D&D CRPGs or spiritual successors like Pillars of Eternity did not have theme park maps, teleport systems or surface spam / high ground race for combat and they were great. Why does Larian feel like we need all that?
