While I do think encumbrance in a Bethesda game is pretty pointless I do believe it serves a purpose in BG3. Barrels full of all sorts of liquids are extremely useful, their drawback is that they weigh a ton. Encumbrance exists to prevent you from being a barrelmancer. I think you can also pick up any chests, so you can just carry away all the chests you can’t unlock and then break them somewhere safe (or move them to you lockpicking character etc).
I don’t think the lack of choices is necessarily a bad thing. The original Doom had no story choices (it barely even had a story) and it’s still pretty good even by today’s standards. Half-Life 1 and 2 pretty much had no story choices as well (there was 1 at the end of the first game) and the first one in particular is considered revolutionizing how stories are presented in games.
What I do think is an issue is when the game presents you with a choice that doesn’t matter. Bioshock Infinite is the first that comes to mind as the game puts quite a few options front and center, but really none of them matter (except the very last one) and the game even implies that the choices deliberately don’t matter because “constants and variables”. Thus those choices, at least for me, detracted from the story because there was never no need to make me make a choice.
In that sense I agree that choices should matter, but I think a better wording is that if you’re going to have choices make them matter or don’t have choices in the first place.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Quake 2 RTX is my go-to recommendation if someone wants to see what raytracing is actually about. Not only are there some built in tools to fiddle with lighting but the end result makes such a huge difference that I can’t see myself playing Quake 2 again without raytracing. Out of all the RTX supported games Quake 2 was the one that blew me away the most. It makes bright areas bright and dark areas actually dark and you can see how light sources, in real time, change the look of the environment.
I felt like Dune needed some prior knowledge of the books to really follow the plot. Not because the plot wasn’t cohesive, but because so much plot was condensed into a movie that was already 2 and half hours long. It’s not the fault of the movie, the book is just dense. But it does end up disorienting for the average viewer who can’t instantly adjust their understanding of the universe to fully follow the plot.