[quote=Sordak
I mean for crying out loud, so many of you somehow look at the ye olde england bright green garden landscapes of BG1 and somehow see "gritty dark" fantasy. Because thats how your brain imagined it.
You cannot win against imagination.
[/quote]
Those things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, though. You can have just as much darkness and grit, or just as much of a lack, in the DOS style's brighter areas or in BG's, but the resulting impression of the style from each combination is bound to differ.
I know what you're saying, of course people have varying expectations and they're not all going to be satisfied, but this isn't justification for simply throwing out everything and doing whatever you want with no regard to any of the pre-existing hallmarks. The check boxes do exist, some are simply more easily defined than others.
There is an objective list of criteria (including things like RTwP as you say, UI, number of party members, resemblance across the board to DOS) mixed in with more subjective aspects like the atmosphere and lighting and how they affect the game. The difficulty being that people prioritise that list according to their own views, and also the fact that pretty much none of these boxes have been checked at all makes people far more critical across the board and with reference to aspects that are harder to quantify and define.
But however you look at it there's a certain degree of fidelity that people expect when you seek to continue a series and it just doesn't seem to be there in any aspect of it.
