I think the reviews have shown that a lot of people wanted the DMC stuff. But there are only so many PS5s out there, and we live in a world where PC market share has been steadily rising for over a decade.
People would often respond to me with the sentiment that "games aren't fungible", which is true, but there's so much good stuff out there that something else will be pretty close to the itch you're looking to scratch, great in its own ways, and you don't have to feel lousy about supporting it. Like if Diablo IV feels scummy, I hear Grim Dawn is great. That kind of thing.
I'm still working my way through BG2, but even watching main story quests in BG3 in the footage that's coming out around launch, the thought frequently enters my mind that the Witcher 3 looks better, like it got better touch-ups beyond what the engine automates for them.
I'd recommend against piracy in either case. Part of the action you take as a consumer is not just refusing to give Bad Company A your money, but you're also giving Bad Company A's product less attention and mindshare while spending money and attention on Good Company B's product, encouraging more of Good Company B's product to be made. The likes of Ubisoft, EA, Activision-Blizzard, etc. used to be the companies that made games that a lot of us loved, but they trimmed their portfolios of their less profitable (note that I didn't say "unprofitable") games, which means they're not scratching all of the itches they used to scratch, and they've diluted a lot of the games that we still enjoy with business models that encroach right up to the point where they annoy or anger us. So if the business models they're using now piss you off, it's important to stop supporting those and instead show that buying a great product at a fair price is what we as customers want.
For me, if a game requires an internet connection instead of letting us host our own servers or run a LAN or run local play totally offline, I don't buy it, I don't pirate it, I don't play it. I just move on to games that respect their customers.
Sure you could. The Witcher 3 has better production value by a meaningful amount with tons of scenes to shoot and permutations of those scenes. People said you couldn't meaningfully do better than the likes of the Kickstarter CRPGs ten years ago because of how much work would go into voice acting and animating all of those scenes, but BG3 is the better production value version of that.
There is no consistent definition for AA or AAA. It's just an implied level of production value. This game's got the equivalent modern day production value of a AAA game from 15 years ago, but the production value of AAA games like Call of Duty and Red Dead Redemption these days has soared to levels unattainable to most.
I actually go the opposite direction and add CRT/scanline filters, especially since a lot of sprite work back in the day was built to be viewed that way. Those games look much better on CRTs with scanlines than they do in crystal clear integer upscaling.
I definitely organically discovered the cheese you can do with fog of war, but most of the strategies you mentioned were things that I just did not come across organically. I would love to have more of the debilitating spells that the enemy NPCs were using on me, and I did come across things like Sleep that would rarely work against an opponent challenging enough to deem it worthwhile, especially considering how many enemies you're likely to run into until your next rest compared to how many spell slots you'll have.
I already started it and bought BG3 as well. I had played Planescape: Torment about 10 years ago, so some of this was familiar, but it and Baldur's Gate have some different philosophies around things like combat and party size. One thing I'm fairly confident will be a thing of the past when I get to BG3 is trash mobs. BG1 at times feels like it's being run by an asshole DM who's out to kill the party with tons of trash mobs between rests rather than providing a good time.
Imagine you're at the table with your friends, and the DM says, "Then, from the darkness of the dungeon emerges...6 Kobolds!" You beat them, the party is pumped about it, and then the DM says, "As you press further on across the bridge, you come across...7 more Kobolds!" I'm not exactly sure what the thinking was, but between the aforementioned trash mobs and the magic casters who attack you with debilitating adverse affects that do tons of damage and take you out of the fight for like 20 straight turns, BG1 can be cheap as hell, even on easy difficulty. I get the sense that BG3 will still be difficult, but from my brief time with Divinity: Original Sin and what I've seen of BG3 footage, I'm expecting them to have more consideration for each combat encounter.
And oh yeah, BG1 also had a few areas with really narrow passageways that the AI pathfinding was not really able to adequately handle, as friendly characters would bump into each other and not be able to figure out how to move.
I just started Baldur's Gate recently and beat it minutes ago. It's not the first D&D game I've played before, but I'm far from well-versed in it. I had to Google "THAC0" a couple of times to understand what the game was trying to tell me, as well as understanding certain status effects. There's a presupposition of knowledge that the game has with its players, but it's still fairly okay at initiating people to D&D.
But see, Dark Souls is very much an RPG but uses more western RPG design axioms than those of a JRPG, which is why this genre is not at all about being made in Japan. Disgaea, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Fire Emblem often get linked together as a strategy RPG or a tactics RPG. Kingdom Hearts is a real-time or action JRPG, Persona is a turn-based JRPG, and the "active time battles" of the late SNES and PlayStation era from Square sort of straddle a few of those lines, but there are commonalities among all of them that a fan of Earthbound could reasonably be into. Likewise, there are commonalities between western RPGs and JRPGs where someone who's just into "RPGs" would be into. These are just genres and subgenres.
The other thing too is that the definitions of these genres will change over time as more games come out that can be grouped together. When games inspired by DotA started getting released commercially, some tried to call them "Action RTS" games, but then you'd have games like Smite and Super Monday Night Combat that no longer have anything to do with the RTS genre, so Riot's coined "MOBA" stuck because, even though it's kind of a lousy name for that genre, it doesn't contradict itself by calling them a derivative of RTS games.
But then it's only informative to people who've played that game, as opposed to people who've played that genre. Far more people have played a JRPG than people have played Earthbound.
I shortened the definition for the sake of not writing a book, but the point is that no one game will satisfy all of the criteria of a genre, but they evoke a common set of responses and scratch a similar itch. The genre would be more anchored to early Final Fantasy titles than Earthbound.