Larian Studios primarily wants to make their player base happy and don´t care much about the old, hard to please, old-school fans but hope that a few them will also buy their game because of the name.
Old school didn't start in 1998. I'm in the old school group (AD&D 1st and 2nd editions) and I'm all in.
i'm pretty sure it means old base bg fans, not ad&d. and that started in 1998.
In fact, BG was a project to bring D&D to PC gamers who were playing Dune, Starcraft, and Half Life at the time.
BioWare planned for Baldur’s Gate to be a blend of old and new. “It was kind of this examination of the old Gold Box games in terms of their depth and their adherence to the [D&D] rules,” Oster says, referring to a series of D&D RPGs produced by Strategic Simulations, Inc. in the late ’80s and early ’90s. “But then bringing that forward into an almost real-time-strategy-style interface.”
(Trent Oster is one of my idols).
They also make it very clear that BG was never a "pure D&D by the numbers game" which is why I get so frustrated with the "but D&D is TB!" argument, because it is a moot point.
“The ones that have been successful haven’t tried to remake what we did, because when we made it we weren’t trying to make Baldur’s Gate,” Kristjanson says, adding, “You can reduce that too much to, ‘Oh, this should be authentic D&D with the numbers.’ Well, even D&D isn’t authentic D&D. It’s every group has their house rule, and that house rule is because of the way that your particular collection of awesome weirdos wants to play it.”
