I hope the codex lasts for at least 10 more years so that I can see revisionist threads about games like Outer Worlds and Tyranny made by people for whom they are classic crpgs. Worth sticking around just for that imo.
If you treat trash like BG2 as an old-school classic, you have no right to complain about Obsidian IE inspired cash grabs.
DA:O has worse itemization, fewer spells, less variety in monsters, fewer quests, yet it is better than BG2. Why? Because it was designed with RTwP in mind. The melee feels engaging and the spell combos are more pleasurable to play with. BG2 in comparison is just a mess.
I think people have difficulty dealing with something as simple as this because BG2 has more stuff, and more stuff is associated with more complexity, which should be interpreted as proof that is inherently superior.
It would be if all that complexity had a meaningful impact on the gameplay. As things stand, it doesn’t. The gamers who get any enjoyment out of this either are larping, or using the game as an excuse to spout their useless D&D erudition. Hence, the praise that BG2 receives is hypocritical. Players love the game because they love their previous experiences with D&D and their larping stories involving the game. It is not real in gameplay terms. It is made up. It is fiction inside a fiction. It is self-delusion built on a fiction motivated by cretin reasons.
If you are not satisfied with this argument, look at it this way: which game has more complexity, PoE or IWD? The first, hands down. Now, which game is better? The second. It doesn’t matter how much stuff you throw at a cRPG. You can have the most complicated list of options ever conceived by mankind. If the gameplay is not conceived with these options in mind, you have a confusing game. I have the impression that the gameplay of DA:O is better than BG2 because the developers were doing their own thing instead of copying D&D. Egotistical fans of BG2 got disappointed because they can’t brag about their useless D&D knowledge anymore.