If I'm going to be going by mechanics, Icewind Dale? Exact same engine, after all. I didn't come away from PK feeling like, "Yes, the Baldur's Gate game I've been waiting for". In fact, I never finished it, the story just couldn't keep me interested enough to progress. I don't have enough experience with PoE for the same reason. As another frame of reference, I have no idea what's going to happen later, or who's going to be introduced to us later to tie this game to BG. I have the DnD feel. For the dizzying array of "this isn't DnD" posts floating around these forums, there's a lot of complaints about the DnD based mechanics, like dialog rolls etc. All based on what amounts to playing through the Nashkell mines in BG.

Being fair, some of the critiques I'm solidly behind, like the lack of active rolls where they would make sense, Perception/Investigation checks, for example, or hotkeys for chaining/unchaining the party. Others come down to "but the dialog didn't go the way I wanted, and it's not fair not DnD", or "but some players are just going to keep reloading saves to get what they want". I've bad news for that latter crowd there: People have been doing that for as long as save games have been a thing. If you find yourself in a MP game where it's happening, leave the group. For what's happening in SP, it just doesn't matter. It's kind of funny, because BG is where we all learned "Save early, save often, save before and save after". Now it seems like the argument is "but Player Y is going to be able to beat this encounter because they reload saves until they do, and it breaks my immersion".

Sorry, tangent. I haven't played enough of this game to claim "worthy successor", because there isn't enough of this game available right now to make that determination. I can't look at Let's Plays on YouTube to find out how the game ends, just what happens at the end of Act I, and so I'm judging an incomplete project vs a project that I spent thousands of hours in, and that's not a fair comparison, by any metric. So I am not ready to proclaim this "the next big thing", and I'm not ready to throw it under the bus either. I'm taking it for what it is, a chance to get in on the ground floor of the development of a game that's part of a franchise that took up a big chunk of my life, in a good way, as far as I'm concerned. I want it to succeed, but I'm going to be just as critical of it if it doesn't as I am ambivalent about it now. The only difference I see is that I'm willing to give it a chance to at least get out of development first.