Why would I compare it to the first Kingmaker game?? Wrath of the Righteous is also in Beta, and BG3 is Larians 3RD RPG GAME using basically the same system. I just thought that is really cool having 6 party members, tons of playable NPCs and all these different variation of classes available. Something that BG3 should of a least have. Its like EVERY SINGLE CRPGS out there feels MORE LIKE BALDURS GATE than BALDURS GATE 3. Its so incredibly ironic, I just dont understand why people dont get it. Especially Larian.
I pre-ordered Pathfinder: Kingmaker, followed parts of the early access and made the largest wiki basically single-handed expecting the game let me get my BG-groove on. Then came the huge let down. Even when you looked past all the game-breaking bugs and borked mechanics that took Owlcat about a year to iron out, the story and writing was average at best, the characters flat tropes. I was reminded that for me, game evolution had not been frozen in time over two decades, and that I had changed too. I suspect a large majority of those who still hold BG2 on a pedestal like the pinnacle of RPGs, want to feel blown out of the water like they once were as naive, impressionable, youth. A much, much harder goal when jaded by time and by so much on offer.
To say every single CRPG feels more like the original BG-series (Baldur's Gate is more than that even before the inclusion of BG3), is a view that lacks even a semblance of nuance. At the best of times, only somewhat true if you completely disregard story, narration, characters and interaction (which was the true essence of BG-series in my mind), to focus on purely mechanical issues. 6 vs 4, and RTwP vs TB is flogging the proverbial dead horse. These things were simply mechanics of the original series, not the essence of it as you seem to think. Larian, for their stubborn belief that Larian cheese is "the one way", at least understands this clearly.
The reason Bioware went with RTwP over TB, which would've been the more faithful AD&D implementation, is believed to largely be the PACING. Rolling a lot of dice and moving individual characters with pause is quite time-consuming. Especially when you throw in lots of trash encounters with enemies designed to "cheat the system" (ie. Kobold Commandos that were counted as 1/2 HD mobs in terms of XP, but were significantly more dangerous) like Bioware did. In BG3 everything is painstakingly handcrafted. This only becomes more true with a larger party. So if you want, in your own words, something that feels MORE like Baldur's Gate, then you also want something that feels LESS like D&D in a very significant way (another issue I believe you harp on). Or you have to disregard a common criticism of combat already being too slow-paced with a smaller party.
Maybe Larian isn't the blind fools you take them for, but that it's you who refuse to see that Larian has to make compromises in a game based on tabletop mechanics yet reflect contemporary computer game design. Mind you, I'm guilty of thinking this too when it comes to much of the Larian cheese, but at least I like to think my criticisms are well-reasoned.
