@ Sordak,
I pretty much disagree with everything you said. Things like the dark atmosphere...the intro cimematic for BG 1 is an unknown individual getting his throat crushed by an as-yet-unnamed overpowering villain, and being thrown to his death on the cobblestones below. As for the art style etc, what I've seen so far of Larian's efforts reminds me of nothing so much as having the sun shined directly into my eyeballs for a prolonged period.
But really my objections are more of a sum of the individual issues, none of which taken on its own is sufficient to make the point. As someone said above, a lot of us want to see some meaningful resemblance to the originals so we can identify that connection, other than simply the setting itself. Plus I can't stand it when people say the setting IS what makes it BG. You could make a LotR game in the setting of Middle Earth but if you did it in the style of Pokemon it would be justly seen as ridiculous. On the technical front I don't care that it's not Infinity engine-esque because that would be irrelevant if the essence was correct. If you got that right even a first-person rpg would fit just fine.
There are five of us in my circle who are into BG. Four of us absolutely hate what we've seen so far and one of us thinks "it's not BG but it'll probably be a good co-op game." 0.5 out of 5 is not a good success rate for old fans. Each fantasy creation has its own particular flavour, whether it's Divinity, GoT, LotR, BG, Witcher...they all taste different, and for whatever reason or combination of reasons Larian's effort tastes wrong for this creation.
