You didnt answer the question.
What exactly *is* Baldur's Gate series? :P
The problem, Ragnarok, is that the question you are asking is one where you do not appear to accept any answer in simple terms, and if someone does write the novel presumably required to fully answer your question then I suspect you will nitpick the answer to argue that a comma here or there is out of place, and therefore the whole thing is not an acceptable answer. It's what you did in GM's story topic, isn't it?
What is the Baldur's Gate series? It's a series of games designed primarily around letting singleplayer computer gamers have that experience of party-based adventuring in the Forgotten Realms. There are a lot of flaws in how they tried to achieve that but combine a limited budget with limited hardware at the time and suddenly their achievement is more much impressive. What games at that time did a better job?
Now contrast with BG3. What does it feel like the design periorities were? The same as before or rather different from before? Keep in mind just how much more resources Larian has and just how much stronger computers are today, as well as how much better we are at general usability. And keep in mind that Larian had something to target and didn't start off in a complete void.
No, I'm not at all keen to reduce the originals to a checklist of technicalities that we can then spend a ridiculous amount of bandwidth discussing back and forth about. That misses the point entirely. There is an artistic element to games and art is largely based on feeling rather than hyper-rational thinking. So rather than throwing a giant book at you, so you can throw said book back at me, the simple question for me is how does the game feel? Does it feel like a sequel? And once we've searched deep within our bones for the answer to that, we can then try and figure out why the answer is what it is.
To me, no, I'm not getting any feeling of BG2 when playing this game. I'm discouraged from creating my own character. The story isn't about my character anyway. My character is at best just a lucky passenger. The world is fisherprice plastic and ridiculously compressed. The sun always shines. Time stands completely still. Once you scratch the surface, the world feels extremely dead, like nothing whatsoever is happening anywhere and nobody has any purpose in life but to handle one or two interactions with "the party" and then disappear.
Combat in the BGs is done in an arcade way that makes it entertaining enough to do many times but also fast enough that it doesn't dominate completely, and with an option for those who want to really put time into it, but here in BG3 it is freakishly slow without any way to speed it up. In BG2 there were tactics that made you feel smart rather than cheap, in BG3 there's stealth cheese and high ground cheese and the occasional surface effect cheese, but not really a lot of smart tactics.
I could go on but at this point I suspect you get the drift. I'm not a D&D purist and I don't play TT, but I did play the heck out of SoA back in the day. There are good things in BG3, definitely, but it just doesn't feel like it's got all that much to do with BG2. Or BG1, for that matter.
