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.
I think the key is to let the player customize the game as they see fit. Give them options, options and more options. If you're aiming for a six-figure sales target you obviously have to gear the core of the game towards casual players. However, exploration should be rewarded as well as mastery of the game's mechanical underpinnings. Although, I can't help but think of the Souls series which has sold several million copies worldwide despite being pretty hardcore. Maybe we're heavily underestimating the D&D/BG/cRPG fanbase and much of the genre's current plight is simply attributable to a decline in quality since BG's heyday compared to its competitors.
