Pathfinder Kingmaker sold over a million copies and led to the development of a (now imminent) sequel that promises to be "bigger an better" in everything, despise being conceived as a low budget crowdfunded "BG2 spiritual successor" from an unknown Russian developer. If anything it's the embodiment of a surprise success story. Solasta has probably a fraction of the Kingmaker's budget.
BG1 and BG2 themselves were ANYTHING BUT an attempt to appeal to "niche audiences" for their time. In fact they were both massive success stories and are often pointed as arguably THE games that introduced high budget and production value in a "genre for nerds" and made it shiny. Well, outside of the Ultima series, which had the "minor" inconvenient of being basically dead by then, coming from some of its worst chapters and having a history of hefty hardware requirements that made it just for enthusiasts.
If we put aside having a FAR bigger budget, which automatically puts it on a league of its own, there's nothing BG3 is doing over Kingmaker or Wrath fo the Righeous that can be argued to be more or less suited for a "mainstream appeal" from a design standpoint. And most of the recurring talking points on this forum about the issues BG3 should address have hardly anything to do with its appeal (or lack of it) for a "causal audience". In fact they tend to be the sort of minute details, so to speak, that a causal audience will hardly even hear about or even notice, until pointed to them. Does anyone SERIOUSLY think that if Larian introduced a control scheme that doesn't kill small lab animals at every use or addressed some of the "quirky" oddities in their implementation of D&D rules, the casual audience would be disappointed and leave? Like, REALLY? Can anyone argue it with a straight face and making a coherent point?
Trying to leverage the lame "ad populum" appeal with "But if they change things they lose the big market" strikes me as fairly disingenuous, at best.
Party control in Baldur's Gate 3 is a complete mess that begs to be addressed. SAY NO TO THE TOILET CHAIN
