But I've never once felt the urge to replay it. Its story suffers from tremendous pacing issues, the characters are largely shallow (propped up by phemonenal voice acting), the core plot collapses in on itself because it implies an urgency that never, ever, ever manifests, and the core system of 5e is just tremendously simplistic. In BG3 you can see the foundation for something much, much greater... but it's never realized. Where I detect ambition in the project concerns the voice acting and visual appearance - which, again: they absolutely knocked it out of the park. But almost everywhere else... it's a phoned-in story with phoned-in resolutions and by-the-numbers protagonists. I've seen all of these beats before.
There isn't enough in the main story to keep me interested in 'but what if I did this...?'; nor is there enough in the companions to suggest that they'd vary wildly between playthroughs; nor is the system deep enough to at all interest me in another go-through, when a single run suggested both what was obviously the optimal builds and that they were endlessly better than suboptimal ones in such a manner that there's genuinely no reason not to go for the best of the best.
For reference, after Dance of Masks released (a dlc), I replayed top to bottom WOTR and had an absolute blast. Immediately afterwards, I picked up the rest of the DLC and I've been playing through it (less fervently) on the side, and having a great time. I cobbled together a new archetype introduced in that DLC with an old prestige class alongside a chosen mythic path, which now allows me to fire off multiple chained-lightning effects with ~7 sneak attack die on each hit that affect multiple enemies at once with a litany of other effects that get applied through the cast to all affected enemies... plus a massive cast of characters who I've made wholly-distinct builds for in this particular run-through that vary wildly from my last and at the same seem significantly more impactful, all while I'm pursuing the polar-opposite alignment choice from my prior run.
By contrast, if I were to replay BG3, I would be briefly tempted by the evil route, realize how much I'd give up in terms of content for so little (and how little sense it would make), and tap out somewhere after the tiefling village.. because I don't care. Illithid are boring. Faceless, nameless characters with zero stakes are boring. Stories which take place effectively over the course of maybe a week are boring. Game systems in which I can either play the classes "as intended," wholly cheese them, or be complete dogshit... are boring. That blurb above, above being a magic deceiver -> rogue -> arcane trickster? It's an inefficient way to play byfar, but it's tons of fun. I made Lae'Zel and Eldritch Knight and Astarion an arcane trickster in my BG3 run, and wow: it was amazing how I made two utterly useless choices because 5e sucks balls.
S1: game systems / pacing
