Baldur's Gate 3 receives critical acclaim from everyone who's played it and even more from those who haven't. I found it frustrating and boring. None of the praise it gets is deserved. The plot is tired and boring and reminds me a lot of CP2077. BG3 combines Dungeons & Dragons with modern computer RPGs, and in doing so takes the weakness of both and the strengths of neither. It kept the terrible DnD combat system with computerized "RNG" while removing the total freedom and improvisation of a tabletop game. Without writing an entire essay about it, it feels like a shittier version of Divinity: Original Sin 2. Plays almost the same outside of combat with a few shitty additions like rolling for everything under the sun and hording food for rests the player rarely even needs anyway. The characters are all shitty bland sluts who practically force themselves on the player. The player character doesn't have a voice so player can roleplay how he speaks but can do nothing about the body language of said character, which the camera focuses on constantly. The game also has a number of bugs and the inventory UI pisses me off with how garbage and broken it can be. The list goes on! BG3 is popular because it's cool to like DnD and this is a much more accessible and acceptable DnD for the masses, not because it's good.
BG3's basis is on 5th edition D&D and Forgotten Realms setting. While I do plan to play it through twice someday (once custom, once Dark Urge naturally), the fact it uses that edition and the bog-standard setting (especially because we already had Neverwinter Nights cover that setting - where's my Greyhawk and Spelljammer 3D games?) automatically puts it a few tiers down to me. 5th edition is extremely straitjacketed compared to older editions, even with all the content that's been released since (one of the big design philosophy issues with D&D over the years is the reduction of instant-kill effects - 5e basically has none except at levels above what BG3 reaches, Disintegrate's as close as you get).
However, I'd like to point out that Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Baldur's Gate 3
have the same developer. So I suspect it keeping that bad combat system (and a lot of its story flaws, now that we're on that subject) is because of executive meddling more than anything - try to imagine someone
other than Larian developing BG3 and I get the image of a TOTAL dumpster fire. Larian did what they could.
I can't answer you on the horniness of the NPCs - I'm wondering if that's also on executive meddling given the state of Wizards of the Coast these days.
I am tempted to browse the mods when it comes time for Dark Urge, see if I can find an exotic race like the thri-kreen.
Helldivers 2.... I have accepted that I'm one of those people who are never going to be completely immune to FOMO and premium microtransactions. However, my space for team shooters is completely filled and (given I'm moving towards completing games and eventually will stop with the online team shooters entirely) will be filled for good, so I actually avoided that game like the plague. "Huge amounts of completely useless weapons" sounds a lot like my experience with Payday 2... allowing progress to be bought rather than earned is practically a criminal offense.
I will disagree hard when you say it casts doubt on the average consumer's critical thinking skills though. A barrage of truly terrible games has caused the bar for "quality game" to be driven
so utterly low in modern gaming that those two wind up rising pretty far.
I feel like in 10 years those two games will have more of a retrospective of "this is as good as we got at the time". Similar things get said of Rise of the Triad's remake in perspective of first-person shooters.
