Actually, that's not what they are saying. In this context "serious" means "important" not "joke free". There is plenty of jokey stuff in BG3.
You are assuming that.
John Hight might mean that. He's been involved with CRPGs before. But he's also been an executive producer for over 30 years (a role which can be close to or very distant from production, more commonly the latter with videogames), so it's also entirely possible he's just out-of-touch and doesn't understand what made BG3 successful, and thinks is it is a "serious" game when it definitely isn't most of the time.
Being real, I don't believe him re: WotC making "serious" AAA CRPGs in either sense. I don't think WotC has it in them to stick through the development period of a "serious" AAA CRPG. To build a serious CRPG WotC would need the following:
1) An engine
And not just an off-the-shelf engine, because they have to build a CRPG within an off-the-shelf engine. This isn't easy to do. It especially isn't easy to do what Larian did, which is to have an engine that has individual objects you can mess with, rather than basically fixed "scenery". They developed that over three games, refining it each time.
2) People who can design gameplay well for a CRPG.
The big issue here is they need to be able to judge this successfully, and how are they going to do that? It's really hard if you haven't been making CRPGs with people for ages. Again, Larian (and for that matter Obsidian) had teams that gradually worked on larger project over many years.
3) Good writers.
This is incredibly challenging, and there's absolutely no easy way to do it. You can't just hire people "off the shelf". People who have written good games are not necessarily all-round good writers nor team players (I'm not going to name names but there's a certain videogame writer who is basically unemployable except as an "additional writing" contractor, despite a stellar early career, because he's 100% not a team player, he's a diva). There's a real "too many chefs" syndrome here. I know keep going back to Larian, but they must have used exquisite judgement and experience because the two people they hired to LEAD BG3's writing, who lead it incredibly successfully, had ZERO experience writing videogames, and indeed one of them had nearly-zero experience writing fiction (but her massive influence on the story of BG3 is clear - she basically studied identity and trauma from an artistic and philosophical perspective - and what are two of the main themes of BG3? Identity and trauma and how they interact!). I don't believe for a second someone just coming in and hiring a team is going to manage something like that, unless it's by sheer luck! Plus you need strong leadership and vision with the writing to keep everyone on the same page.
4) Time and money!
This is a big one! Time is money, money is time with videogame development. To develop a "serious" AAA CRPG, you're going to need 200-400 people. You're going to need them for at least 4 years. A rule of thumb is that an employee in a company like this costs you $100k US/year, on average (thats costs the company which is not the same as their salary). So let's say 200 employees for 4 years.
That's $80m, which, yeah is towards the bottom end of AAA spending these days.
Does WotC have the balls to invest $80m in a game? Maybe, but I'm skeptical that they will. And that's pretty much the minimum. More realistic would be 300 people for 5 years. $150m - which is more like what BG3 seems to have cost - and BG3 actually had cheaper employees than $100k per person because they used people in the EU, not the US.
I think it's much more likely we'll see WotC blow some tens of millions on attempting to form AAA videogame teams, and as soon as one of them flops, Hasbro/WotC will just try and sell off the videogames division entirely. Or just fire them.
