Shadows of Amn is my favorite game of all time, I still feel the urge to replay it every so often, so I don't hold it against other games if they don't compare to it. I'll reserve my judgement of the story in BG:3 because of how little there is of it, but I'm a big fan of the direction companion characterization is going. For me a large part of why BG:2 is evergreen is because of the writing, banter and character quests that occur with your party, that said, NPC agency is something I'd really like to see developed more in games like this and I like what I've seen so far from BG:3.
That said there are two things I don't think BG:2 did well:
1. The characters could be great or not, depending on the writer. The level of writing in BG:2 could be very uneven sometimes.
2. There were no mid-tier battles. Combat in Baldur's Gate 2 was either all or nothing. Encounters broke down into two types; either your enemies have one gimmick, if you could counter it the fight becomes trivial, if you couldn't you'd fail; then things go from 3 to 11, with wizard fights, the first round of combat is just a chorus of sequencers putting up protection magic, and the battle devolves into a war of attrition as the mages sling debuffs at each other, and the grunts just mill about. "my weapon does nothing" "heresy!"
to the first point, like I've said, I'm seeing good things. I also think 3 has so far had a nice range of encounter types, so all in all I'm happy with it.
