Originally Posted by korotama
perplexing statements on Vincke's part to the effect of "I can't meet fan expectations they're too high" even though his company had asked WoTC to make BG3 at one point.

Seems far from perplexing (reasonable in fact) to want to make a BG3 game but feel that certain expectations will be too high. I would go so far as to change his statement to say "no one can meet certain fan's expectations; they're too high." But that doesn't preclude wanting to make a follow up, nor that is cannot be a great game.

Originally Posted by korotama
I mean no offense but I don't consider DOS:2 to be as successful as BG was decades ago when the industry was much smaller so my prediction is that BG3 will be good on its merits but isn't likely to "revitalize" the CRPG genre like the former did

Relatively speaking, that is certainly possible, but I would say it speaks more to the times then the games themselves.

Originally Posted by korotama
I don't know how much they're going to spend on marketing but no amount of money can bring back lost confidence and yeah saying things like "features that were a given in Baldur's Gate aren't coming back because they cost too much" can be (mis)construed as an admission that they're not willing to invest a whole lot of funds in the game, which leads me to think there isn't much passion in the development process. I'm not feeling it to be honest.

I construe it as not as an unwillingness to invest, but a simple and practical business decision based on what they have and where they have come from. Certain things might seem easy and cheap to implement, but we cannot really know. If they can spend X amount of $ to get feature A in the game, or use X amount of $ to get features B,C and D in the game, it seems reasonable to me (provided a rough equality between features A-D). Everyone has a budget to work with. As for passion, Larian seems to me to be as passionate about their work as any developer I can recall.

Originally Posted by korotama
Also, certain people working on BG3 have said disparaging things about its predecessors to my surprise as that gives me reason to believe they're more focused on fixing things that weren't all that broken to begin with in lieu of working on the setting, the characters, story etc.

Which things?