I'm not critizing the game for its time. Back then it was a standout game. But as time passed people build on its successes and flaws and improved the games. By today's standards it would be just a niche game, nowhere near the top. Honestly even PoE writting is not worse than BG, its just people remembering it more fondly. Edwin and Minsc were entertaining characters, but look just up what people write about Jaheira or others. And while the story was very dark, the characters were more on the comdey side of things - again the main protagonist in BG1 had some of the worst dialog options I've seen, purely making fun of whatever archetype you were playing. Back then we all enjoyed it. These days we expect top notch story telling and immersion, the demands from player side are much, much higher - and rightfully so. We've learned from previous games, books, movies, series,... and we creators also want to apply this knowledge to achieve something that will move the needle to the next level. You see the same evolution in movies and seires - compare a 'good' action sequence in a movie from the 80/90s with what is critically acclaimed now.

Even the system BG was based on - D&D 2e - didn't survive the test of time and was changed before BG2 was out. Why? Because it needed improvement. It was not a system made for video games and it made the whole combat chunky and people not coming from D&D couldn't relate to the spell system at all. I don't know anybody outside of D&D-fans who thinks that its magic system has any merit or logic that was easy to grasp. 5e is the evolution of these mechanics and you see that it has higher appeal and bigger reach than 3.5e ever had. 5e addresses issues with the extremely limited amount of spells for casters that made a mage utterly useless and just an arrow magnets in BG1 (also being potential 1-shot-kills). It also adds abilities with limited usages for melee and ranged low level classes to not be so monotone to use. Still shoehorning it into a video game and making it a RTwP is once again forcing a cube through a circle-shaped opening. How would bonus actions even work in a real time with pause? Why are we even bothering with using D&D 5e at all if we want a real-time game? Why not develop a system that is made for real time like Dragon Age Origins did? Just becuase of the story background? So we sacrifice gameplay to keep names?


Larian said they would make a new BG3 based on D&D5e with turn-based combat. So they took the original games rule-system at its current incarnation (same that was done for BG2 switching to 3.5 and later BG1 EE with adapting it to 3.5, Icewind Dale 2 using 4e,...), which seems also to be a license requirement, and put it into the BG setting a 100 years later. Regarding the story we can't judge if it will fit BG1 & 2 because we don't know enough yet.

A lot of the stuff that gets thrown here around being it a successor seems to me purely subjective.

I don't know how the game will feel in the end. For me personally, BG as Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights are primarly D&D games. Not just backgroundwise, but also based on their rules and the oddities that result from that. If the game doesn't try to get the best D&D feeling of that timeperiod in there, they are not successors. RtWP was an adpation that might have made sense with the 2e and 3.5e rules, even 4e - though none of those games felt to me like a Pen&Paper experience. They just felt like video games very clunky combat systems with very annoying mechanics that were neither fluid nor particulary deep beyond spells (I don't consider 'stressful' to be a thing in RTwP - you can pause and give orders, what's more difficult about that than real turn-base? you can even move simultaniously to avoid being reached - i never could run in circles around my party in a turn based game to avoid be reached by the ai chasing a mage for example, while that is an exploit you could do in BG). All those games were to me inferior to DAO when it came to fighting. Also PoE2 with turnbase was far more engaging to me. Would I want the Total War series to turn turn-based in battle? Nope. Would I want X-Com to switch to real time? Nope. The difference being that some games excel in character micro management and thus work better in turn-based systems, while others are just mainly macromanaget and can remain fluid in RtWP.


Sorry for the long-winded answer here.