As I said before, the original BG saga's fundamental design philosophy was to recreate DnD within the framework of a video game. BG3 has the same spirit. That makes it a Baldurs Gate game above all else for me.
Is Solasta a Baldur's Gate game, then? How about the Icewind Dale games, are they Baldur's Gate too? Planescape Tormet?
Obviously these are ridiculous questions to ask, but the point I'm hoping to make is that it takes a little bit more than just being a D&D game with a fancy title to actually capture that feeling of Baldur's Gate.
And of course we can analyse the actual gameplay in details to try and understand in detail what Baldur's Gate was back then and how Larian have interpreted it. But I'm not sure we've quite got the toolkit to do it correctly. Personally, I do work with software development, but I'm not a game developer. We could probably iteratively grind our way through it an eventually get a proper analysis put together. The wildly different backgrounds and skillsets and worldviews of people on the forum would be an advantage, but it would require a level of trust and goodwill that frankly doesn't appear to exist at the moment.
