My point is: I think it makes no sense trying to divide people in BG fans, PoE fans and D:OS fans as completely different groups.
There are so few games in this market that most people who liked one of them also played some of the others.
And I say you are completely and totally wrong about this. This may be true for the people on this forum, who make up a tiny fraction of 1% of the total number of people who've bought and played those games. The people on this forum, and all such forums, are not even close to being representative of the overall fanbases of these games.
For a long time now the broad, general population of gamers have been complaining about RPGs as being unplayable for them. D:OS came along and said to those gamers, here's an RPG that fixes all your complaints but is still and RPG: no deep story, don't have to read a lot, silly dialog and characters, cartoony writing and characters, glitzy shiny graphics, full VO, co-op play, lots of gimmicks like blowing up oil barrels, and most important of all - a very simple, superficial, easy to understand and use set of game rules and mechanics combined with the ease of TB combat. And all of THIS is what brought in hundreds of thousands of new gamers, people who normally DON'T play cRPGs, into the D:OS flock, because D:OS was specifically made to appeal to gamers beyond the traditional, classic, hardcore cRPG fanbase which accounts for only about half a million to one million gamers. This is how D:OS was able to bring in better sales than its contemporaries such as PoE, because games like PoE (and P:Km) continued to cater only to that hardcore cRPG fanbase.
But now Larian is making a D&D game. And the D&D ruleset and mechanics, even in its much simplified 5e form, is much, much, much more complex, deep, sophisticated, and convoluted than anything one will find in a D:OS game. Many of the casual D:OS fans - to be very clear, these are the vast majority of D:OS players who are NOT on this forum - will take one look at BG3 and run away because even 5e D&D mechanics are very far from the simple, silly, gimmicky mechanics of D:OS. And this is why Larian is going out of its way to try and reassure those D:OS fans, not the tiny fraction of hardcore fans who are on this forum but the hundreds of thousands of casual fans out there, that BG3 will be "just like D:OS." They need to do this to hold on to the whole of the D:OS fanbase. But the more they do this, the more they alienate the hardcore D&D/BG/cRPG fanbases. It's a catch-22. Strictly speaking of cRPGs, either you can create a deep, complex, sophisticated, story-focused rather than combat-focused game that sells at best about 500,000 to 1 million, or, you can create a superficial, glitzy, shallow, gimmicky game heavy on blow everything up "cool" combat that will sell several million. But you cannot have both. So contemporary developers of cRPGs have to make a decision on which path they want to take. Larian has clearly opted for the second path, because big sales numbers are what they want/need. A studio like Owlcat has decided on the former - making hardcore games for the hardcore gamer fanbase and accepting that their sales numbers will never get very high. Studios like Obsidian and inXile are in the process right now of figuring out what direction they will take.
This is my personal take on things.
