Even as a consumer product it’s not really possible to boil it down to objective measures. Just like clothing follows tastes and fashions that are inherently subjective, or books, movies and TV shows etc.
You don’t need the biggest map ever to make a good game. You do, however, need the biggest map ever to make a good Elder Scrolls game.
No you don’t. The evolution of the Elder Scrolls series proves that, as the map size has been massively reduced. The Skyrim map is extremely tiny compared to Daggerfall.
I played around 20 hours of it at launch, and it was bad. Not just in all the hilariously broken things that were memed all over the place back then, but the fundamental concept of the game just didn’t quite work.
Morrowind was the first of the ES series where they drastically reduced the area but invested more in the content in that area. It had a unique art style and location. It kept most of the complexity of the prior games in the series, while subsequent games heavily simplified things to cater to console gamers. There are a lot of babies that were thrown out with the bathwater after Morrowind. Of course the later games also added a lot of improvements, but I think for its time, Morrowind was a very good game. It depends on preferences, but I would consider it the best game of the ES series relative to when it was launched.
Bioware made BG1 and BG2 and other RPGs in a similar vein, but has more recently made games trying to appeal to the mass market and failed miserably (Mass Effect Andromeda and especially Anthem).
The BG name lay dormant for a couple decades until Larian acquired it and released the highly successful BG3. So they are beating Bioware at their own game.
Given that there’s plenty of PCs out there with lower spec than the S
Not when it comes to memory. The Xbox SS only has 10GB combined system memory and VRAM. The PC version of BG3 requires 8GB system memory plus 4GB of VRAM, so the SS is a couple gigabytes short in total.
Going by the Steam hardware survey, 95% of PCs have at least 8GB of system memory, with 16GB being easily the most common amount. 80% have at least 4GB of VRAM, with 8GB being the most common amount.
Inherited from naval wargaming, where it came about because first rate ships of the line had better armor than second rate etc. so armor class scaled inversely. That meant THAC0 was the best way to figure out what you needed to roll to get a hit.
It’s also not functionally that complicated (your THAC0 minus target AC), just weird and confusing if you try to understand why it works that way.