The fact that you didn’t find it fun is totally valid. BG3 is a very opinionated game that gets a huge number of things right for its target audience - the people who really enjoy CRPGs, branching paths, and choice driven gameplay. It does sound like that you’re really not into those things, so BG3 could never have been an excellent experience.

The games that you list are designed to be mostly linear experiences, so it was possible for the devs to make the core gameplay shine because they had time to really polish those systems and interactions. There was enough people and time to really tune RDR2’s gunplay, the horse riding, the hunting and tracking, and make the world feel organic.

BG3’s dev time was spent on tuning the combat encounters, tuning the class building options, and making sure the world (almost) always made sense. While baking in hundreds of stories about your companions, side characters, abusive store owners, and lost puppies. The game never holds your hand, only asks “here you are, this is what you’ve done, what do you do now?”. The amount of effort put into respecting the moment to moment choices made by the player is staggering.

The complexity in these systems in BG3 left preeetty clear issues with things that would otherwise have time to be polished out of a game before release (animation jank, visual bugs, pathing, pausing). For me, they were more like bumps in a very scenic road. But I hear you when you come in expecting a shiny polished RPG but there’s all these fourth wall breaking bits that kind of stall the whole show every like 5 minutes.

I think there’s enough nuance here to have both sides of the coin be true - it’s an absolute masterpiece for the players who enjoy the specific experience it offers, and it only makes sense to feel it’s overrated when you’re coming in expecting a cinematic or visceral experience.

If camping is a problem, it’s almost always a system issue.

I can’t think of a story focused game that fits any of these points… has OP played many story driven games before?

I suspect they’re talking about the desktop computer

That’s definitely something to consider. In my head ‘JRPG’ was used in the same vein as ‘manga’ and ‘anime’, where it’s used to group games that share a ton of stylistic choices. Stuff like being particularly plot-heavy, some sort of level progression system that leads to a grind, lots of secrets, intricate combat mechanics.

Didn’t realise there was baggage behind the term for some of the devs. I’m thinking the term ‘JRPG’ doesn’t mean what I think it means - perhaps for a lot of people it just lumps together all RPGs from Japan.

Hard for me to say. And to be honest, it’s been a long time since I exclusively thought about RPGs as a ‘RPG’ vs ‘JRPG’ kind of deal so the term actually hasn’t popped onto my radar unless I’m talking about squeenix/monolith/etc. games.

beauty

Ironically I think GTAV did a pretty decent job of this - you can pause at any time during the single player, however I don’t remember if it requires a connection to play single player mode.

Imo if a game has a single player mode, being online for it should never be a requirement.

glad to have helped

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You can find more details here

I could never get into Animal Crossing for this very reason