Most likely because they made a significant sum of money on DOS/DOS2 sales; it makes sense that they'd rather cater to fans who enjoy barrelmancy, superhero jumps, and surface-spam-boogaloo.
That's the point I'm making. I keep seeing people claiming the Baldur's Gate tag is just a cynical marketing ploy at the same time as saying DnD and BG players are not the target market. It's a literal non-sequitur.
I can't tell you that there's no logic to it. They want to attract a NEW audience to the old franchise. That's why game has cut scenes and many features are simplified. To make it easier for people who are not familiar with BG and DnD to understand. If they wanted to please old BG fans, they wouldn't even think about the cutscenes, obviously. Many new players have not even heard about such a game as BG, they literally learned about its existence thanks to BG3. Imagine, it's been 20+ years. People who are now 20-25 years old may never have heard of this game, because it is very old. Even if they heard about it, they probably weren't playing. This has its own logic. You were attracted by the name, and others were attracted by everything else.
In theory, Larian can revive franchise, but, of course, not for you, but for a new generation of players.
Well, the problem is that they made conflicting statements about their vision of the game prior to EA. They talked about how they all loved and played the original games, and were huge fans of DnD, and then released BG3 into EA, which is basically a DOS skeleton with some DnD trappings, and then in the Panel from Hell, they basically said they didn't understand 5E rules, and didn't even bother trying to implement most of them.
In it's current state, I doubt they are going to really satisfy any group, it plays like a DOS game hampered by having characters that are built around 5E, and then had their class skills nullified by DOS game features.
And? Did they lie? They can love original BG and DnD, but still see them in their own way. Larian never said that they would comply rules 100%, Swen said this in his interview, they would do everything their own way. It wasn't a surprise.
Judging by the reviews in steam, BG3 is already liked by a huge group of players, but yes, these are more new players than fans of old games. By the way, these players didn't even play DOS. I've noticed that more often they come from other RPGs, like The Witcher or Dragon Age, it's definitely influence of cutscenes, сompanions and romance, not gameplay. Larian, of course, tried to attract attention of the old players too, but they never said that this is their main audience, right?
