It is a Baldur's Gate game. If Larian wants to make their very own game exactly how they want it to be then they should not pick a name that is this strongly tied to a particular kind of game. If Larian wants to use that particular name then they should also accept the restrictions that come with that name.
Yeah ... but what exactly that mean anyway?
It means that one can make changes but those changes have to respect what the core of the franchise was.
In the case of Fallout, sure, mechanically it was isometric, but it was also a game about a wacky post-apoc world, wacky people, wacky mutations, and a fair bit of grimdark humor. Did Fallout 3 get all of that right? No, not even close. It wasn't a bad game, in my opinion, but it was a bit lacking in the Fallout factor. What I felt it did pretty well, however, was depicting the world in pretty much the right colors. It had exploration, it had big empty areas, it had laughs, and it had a few dark bits too. It didn't get the dialogue right, though. And it didn't really do the job with companions either, did it? But it felt to me like they at least made a decent effort at a 3D first-person RPG set in the world of Fallout.
New Vegas did the dialogue a lot better, but the game world was too cramped. There was too much stuff in too little space and you practically couldn't toss a rock anywhere without hitting something moderately significant, despite supposedly being out in the Mojave.
Contrast with a game that takes the king of single-player D&D party-based experiences and then violates everything that is holy in D&D by focusing on living through the story of pregen characters, turns the game world into one very long cartoon networks moment, doesn't try to go for any kind of immersion, doesn't even try to get the ruleset right, and isn't actually designed for SP at all. In fact it's really primarily designed for DOS players to play wacky DOS multiplayer in Forgotten Realms and zero fucks are given about what the predecessors were about. Is that really a remotely serious attempt at a modern sequel? Or is it simply a hijacking of a respected name in order to push a DOS game without actually naming it DOS?
Mind you, I am intentionally overdoing the language a little bit to stress a point. There's no need to point out the hyperbole. I am aware.
I understand that you are evoking hyperbole, but still...
BG3 is already much closer to 5e edition RAW than the original saga ever was to 2nd edition. Cinematic scenes were also a thing in the original series, except for they looked abstracted. And a lot of fans love the cinematic scenes, so I am kinda certain that they will be a net positive for the game. The pregen character thing is I admit a Larian thing, but these guys were chosen by WoC to carry out this legacy project and they have already been shown to be willing to let go some of their classic style elements (though origin pcs are obv here to stay which might be a cool thing, as they provide an excellent narrative anchor). I do hope Larian comes up with something that makes Custom heroes just as invested in the story. Also BG3 is much more a singleplayer experience than their previous games...
The old BG1 was a shot in the dark, made by a fairly small team on a harsh budget and working with limited hardware capability. I can forgive them for cutting a bunch of corners in trying to come up with a game that actually felt a little bit like that D&D party experience. And it did feel D&D, even if some rules got bent in the process. It was not a full D&D simulator but contrast with what else existed at the time and it was a pretty solid effort.
BG3 is a rather different situation. Big team, big budget, incredibly strong hardware to work with, and they are not starting from scratch. Games have been made in 5E, and they also have the original games for inspiration. They made the choice to use the DOS engine in what seems to me like a fairly pure form, but that was not obligatory. They've made the choice to make the setting cartoonish, to have an intense focus on surface effects, and to make combat extremely long and drawn out whenever there's more than your party and a couple of hostile actors involved... That's all because Larian wants it that way, not something they had to do.
And they appear to be going for a discover-the-past-of-your-toon adventure and pretending that this is in tune with D&D rather than focusing on having players create their own character who goes on a D&D 5E adventure. That's a Larian choice, not something they had to do. They've chosen to massively compress the map instead of using activation points to load other maps, like the original games would have done. That's a Larian choice. This leads to homebrew upon homebrew, and again this is Larian's choice. They've chosen to have no sense of time in their game, to have everything essentially exist in a time-free zone and occasionally start little combat pockets with time. That's a Larian choice. Shared inventory, Larian choice.
And how many of these choices were made to create a great singleplayer D&D party-based experience? How many of those choices indicate a good faith attempt to extend the Bhaalspawn saga into the 5E ruleset using all the technology and game design ability of the twenties? Rather few, I suspect.
If Larian just wanted to set a game in Forgotten Realms then they could have done that without problems and received probably nothing but praise for the effort, but they made the choice that it wasn't just a game set in FR, it was in fact a sequel to the Baldur's Gate series. Not just a sidestep, not just something that would offer homage to that particular saga, but an outright sequel. I can also slap together some fanfic set in Tolkien's universe, but if I have the stones to call it a Lord of the Rings sequel then it better actually be worthy of that name, wouldn't you say?
What does BG3 do that makes it worthy of calling itself "Baldur's Gate" that isn't also done by a bunch of other games? It is a provocative question to ask, of course, but I don't think it is entirely unfair to do so.
