I think bg3 was partly so successful because it has the illusion of depth. It feels like you have all these mechanical choices and your character is really yours, but because of how the math works out it's hard to make a character that's remarkably weaker or stronger than the average. Gone are the days of 3e feat chains and prestige classes. Or wacky dual classing.

That's always the risk with this kind of game. If you make it so players have a lot of freedom to build, some players will end up dramatically more powerful. And then the other players either hit a wall, or end up following guides. That's not fun.

I did get to end game path of exile 2 just by picking what looked good, but most people will recommend following a guide.

Maybe you can build around it by funneling the obsessive players into Maps in poe.

Maybe it's just me who twitches at the thought of a glut of modern AAA crunchy RPGs.

Some sort of open letter theoretically aimed at AAA developers or publishers is stupid and comes across as (and is) just "I, personally, like this thing and you should make more of this thing with big budget." Write an article to genre fans and point them at existing titles to give those titles needed sales bumps if you want to see more crunchy RPGs.

Baldur's Gate 3 did sell well. It was also anomaly resulting from a perfect storm of conditions to set it up for success. That doesn't mean it's a great idea to prod Ubisoft or EA to start making RPGs on an assembly line.

The author seems a little bipolar in their assessment of what they want. They don't like action RPGs but they also celebrate Borderlands 4 having more RPG elements. They celebrate The Outer Worlds, which I at least say sits more on the action RPG than the crunch RPG side of things. It's closer to Skyrim and Witcher 3 than it to some classic high crunch game, and last time I checked Skyrim and Witcher 3 both sold pretty decently.

There is both an appetite for and a supply of more crunchy RPGs. It's exists in the indie and AA space. Money talks, and instead of complaining people can put their money towards smaller developers making RPGs so those devs can make more RPGs. Nothing is stopping people from buying Age Of Decadence, Colony Ship, Underrail, ATOM RPG, Encased, Wasteland 2, Wasteland 3, Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader, or Kenshi. You can just buy them right now.

Heck I'm currently playing Death Trash. I don't consider it very crunchy, but if, as according to the article, Borderlands 4 makes the cut as "crunchy" then you know, whatever.

And this is ignoring the decades worth of older RPGs and fan made stand alones that are all perfectly playable today.

As I see it, there's a common thread that binds all of the success stories in this article that "prove" that people want RPGs with "crunch": they can all be brute forced at a surface level, but they all reward you for going in deeper. You can just shoot a thing in Borderlands until it dies, turning it into a mindless co-op shooter with some jokes from time to time, but the game is much better when you're creating a feedback loop of different effects that interact with your active ability and proc abilities that proc other abilities. You can play through Baldur's Gate 3 by doing little more than your basic attack and an occasional AoE spell, or you can get really creative with spells that grant flight or stack damage from other spells. So my answer to this author would be that these games serve both masters effectively, which is not an easy trick to pull off.

As someone who is exhausted that all modern AAA games have to have an RPG element… why??

Why do we have to have games that try to do it all, just try to do one thing well.