One thing I just haven't been able to get out of my head with Baldur's Gate 3 is how absolutely messed up it is that Larian managed to create something this old school, complicated, and deep while also having it look so goddamn gorgeous. Seriously, Baldur's Gate 3 is a stunner. It feels like the next-gen Dragon Age I always wanted, while being as complex and surprising as anything that came out of the late '90s—how is that possible?
I like my RPGs big, weird, and hardcore (to the mega). Usually, that requires some compromise. Even with the herculean effort to fully voice Disco Elysium's one million lines of dialogue, or the lavish pre-rendered environments of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, they rely on your imagination and walls of text to convey large swathes of their stories. Larian's own Divinity: Original Sin 2 deployed huge text dumps to deliver key moments like companion romance scenes.
