I think you’re coming up against the genre there. Folks who love the themes enough to make an entire game out of it aren’t going to dump them for mass appeal. Much like how Lovecraftian horror ends in the madness or death of pretty much anyone involved, or how in high fantasy practically no major “good” characters die at all, unless it drives the plot (the classic “plot armour” that sours my experience of such stories).

In what I’d consider the happiest ending, you’ve bought V time to enjoy the remainder of their life relatively stress-free, surrounded by family, their love, with all escaping Night City with the distant hope of a cure. That’s about as peaceful an ending a Night City Merc can hope for, and I find it hard to believe that it was pointless fighting for that.

I went all in with Glut because his story would have resonated with my PC, but all you have to do is finish off the other Sovereign and the fight ends - Glut takes control and only one myconid goes down, the rest all start hailing their new king.

Speaking as someone who really enjoyed DOS2, I do have plenty of issues with its mechanics, with the movement ability problem you mention right in the thick of it.

Once you learn the game systems a bit, you will always gravitate towards a similar set of skills. Mobility is so important in the game that you will frequently find yourself in situations where your character’s survival depends on it (and the AI abuses these skills constantly). So everyone gets a jump skill, two if it fits the build - and many of the jump skills are just teleports with rider effects, so everyone’s teleporting around. All builds tend to gravitate towards more damage, because you can’t apply CC without nuking their armour down first, and CC trivialises fights when it comes into play. Optimisation isn’t straightforward, and skills aren’t really on an equal footing. Maximising Warfare is how you become the best Necromancer, and the best Rogue, and the best Warrior, and the best Archer. Meanwhile, all the other skills (with the notable exception of Summoning) you can generally just leave between 2-5 to unlock their respective abilities, regardless of your build.

The ultimate end-game of this is that loads of characters end up feeling very similar, even if they appear to do very different things on the surface. Once you get past much of Act 2 there’s very little variation in how you play the game and approach combat, and the story becomes the main driver for completion even as the core gameplay loop stagnates. I think I completed the game on my fourth attempt, but that was largely through my stubbornness rather than other factors.

In a bit of paralysis on build options at the moment. Played a lot of 5e in tabletop, but BG3 looks to be adding a lot of fun to playing martial characters, so I’m keen to give a Gish/Martial pure class a go. Options include:

• Wild Magic Barbarian/Battle Master Fighter (Angry Exploding Hoplite! Double up on Duelling and Rage damage, Polearm Master spear with shield, Tank-ish with lots of utility from subclass features)
• Totem Barbarian/Thief Rogue (Feral Wilder with two daggers, dual wielding and reckless for easy sneak attack - lots of off-hand strikes with Thief’s overpowered extra bonus action - there’s something visceral about a raging dagger barbarian that I want to explore)
• Half Orc Drummer Valour Bard (Full Strength, expertise in Athletics, jump on cliff, kick folks off cliff, or blast them off with Thunderwave if there’s more than one, plus full spellcasting for shenanigans)
• Acidic Dragonborn Spores Druid/Ranger (wade in with Shillelagh and spread the rot with staff and breath - depends on Spores implementation and need to maintain druid-level-dependent temporary health, otherwise barbarian would also be fun)
• Half Orc GOO Warlock/Fighter (“I’ll give you something to be scared of!” - get big weapon, drop darkness with Eldritch eyes for advantage, get big crits which scare people, then use tentacle powers to restrain folks and crit them again)

I think the main concern I have is that we’ll have all the tools to make a great looking gruff half-orc or ancient witch, but still be stuck with the option of two soft-spoken voices that sound pretty much exactly the same.