One of the things that still stands out in my mind for the BG saga and all the old Infinity games, was just the steady clip at which its expansions and sequel were released.
For the time, and even by todays standards, they cranked those games out in what felt like a new entry like every six months for couple years running.
I recall picking up Baldur's Gate at Fry's at Christmas time, thinking it might be cool cause it was sitting right next to Fallout on the shelf. The Tales of the Sword coast expansion was out what, like a couple months later. For sure by the summer of 99, cause I remember playing it right after graduating, and by the time Durlags was dunzo they hit us with Planescape almost immediately. I remember it was plugged by a trailer showing Sigil on the ToSC cd, because that was the load disc for the main BG game and always in the drive lol. There was a little lull for BG2 to come out, like long enough to get mailed a t-shirt, but in the lead up they dropped Icewind Dale which was basically BG1.5, since the engine and gameplay was the same. It was basically the same as creating a 6 person party in BG:ToSC using the multiplayer lan but as a single player to create a custom party. Plus it had the killer art for the portraits, which was all cross compatible. So by the time you were done with that Shadows of Amn was on.
What all that did was to create sense of continuity, or an expectation of continuity/compatibility for a serialized D&D game on par with the gold boxes of the late 80s. Like where the same basic engine and systems would be used to do more than a single campaign. Which was cool cause it hadn't been that way in a while. And of course TSR had just imploded so that didn't bode well too well, but then those infinity games made D&D a hit again on the sneak attack. Just long enough in the stopgap for the Wizards to take over and crank out a new edition and new crpg game engine with NWN. I feel like that's what's missing a bit right now, that sense that there's for sure more stuff coming down the pike. I'd guess the Wizards were hoping that a D&D entry using the divinity engine could work in a similar way? Like to do a serialized thing piggybacking on Larian's obvious success with DOS by grafting it onto that, the same way they used Interplay's success with Fallout. My main hope is that this isn't just a one off. Basically so the convo can go how does "Infinity compare to Divinity?" rather than 'how to does BG3 hold up to BG2?" If that makes any sense
