EGM scores. Some pretty big games.

[A Black Falcon]

I've already explained this in depth. Both can influence games but since games are a visual medium only movies can be recreated in them.

But whenever a game comes out that is too non-interactive, like a movie, it gets greatly criticized... yes, games probably have been more directly similar to movies. But when that happens the game gets hammered for it. As for books, they can have a great influence in how the game goes, just like movies do for most games...

KOTOR has an insane amount of recorded dialogue in it, and the acting is done well for a video game.

I'd have to know the exact amounts of speech in other adventure and RPG games to know the exact quantities, however. KotOR certainly has a lot, but so do other games... adventure games and RPGs often have lots of speech and when it's all voiced it can be quite a bit. But I don't know exactly how much speech was in, say, The Longest Journey...

Most of the story in BG is told through boring conversations with NPCs and scrolls and crap. That's not good storytelling, as hard as you try to convince yourself otherwise.

Oh right, that arguement. Uh, scrolls? How much of the actual main story is told in scrolls? Oh yeah, almost none. The main purpose of books in the BG games is not to tell the main story or anything relating to the main story but to tell tales about the Realms. As I've said before, that aspect of the game is there for people who want to read more about the Realms, but has no direct or indirect impact on the main game story.

What does then? The (very few) scrolls you run into that explain story elements, generally as part of a puzzle. Fine, those are story-scrolls. But they also are usually there as clue elements in puzzles, so they serve other purposes as well...

And as for conversations, complaining about that is just incredibly stupid. If you dislike conversations, don't say that BG has bad storytelling. Say that you dislike its storytelling method. Because telling a story via conversations is a just fine way of doing it. Okay, if it's a game like The Longest Journey with frequent extremely long conversations I could see how you could say that you felt they were boring, but Baldur's Gate? They aren't particularly long or anything so I see nothing to complain about for anyone with the remotest intrest in games having stories.

Oh yeah, and KotOR is identically designed in storytelling terms except for the addition of speech. The differences other than that are minor and don't greatly affect the tone of the storytelling in the game.