As an aside, if you've never played Table Top, how do you know if this game, or any other cRPG DnD game, is even close to the rules, because someone said so? I mean, one of the common arguments when I was last active here was "but exploding barrels", as if Larian invented them in DoS. It's not like there's been a Grease spell in DnD for a very long time or anything... Wait, there has been. It's been flammable too. It's not like it doesn't have practical advantages in Table Top as well, where I have actually played, and actually used it tactically. I once linked to a video of Outside Xtra and Outside Xbox playing 5e, where they had a really fun scenario play out with Grease, and Spike Trap.
Wow. Do...do you know the landmine you just walked into? Whether grease is flammable or not is an
incredibly divisive topic in the 5e community. RAW, it is not specifically said to be flammable.
https://twitter.com/jeremyecrawford/status/739200837809934340?lang=enMaybe they don't have to be, but I wonder:
How clunky would KotoR had been if it had played exactly like BG? FO 1 and 2 did, but Bethesda went a different direction with F0 3 and 4, and Obsidian as well with FO NV.
I can't imagine trying to play Oblivion, or Skyrim in the same manner as BG, since the environments were as much a part of the game as the characters in them.
KotoR is an entirely different game series than BG, so it makes sense that they don't play exactly the same. It's similarly not really relevant to compare Skyrim to BG. Your Fallout comparison is more apt, but to be fair, there
was a huge outcry when FO3 was revealed to be significantly different than FO 1&2. A lot of fans didn't like the way Bethesda was taking the series. Allegedly, BG3 (because of the "3") is a direct sequel to the BG1&2 games, which means that naturally it is going to be compared against them. Had Larian titled the game "Baldur's Gate: Rise of the Absolute" then there would be much less unhappiness at its differences from BG1&2.
My point, however, is in how modern(ish) games would play if we stayed with the same style as BG. There are games today, along with a whole host of others, that wouldn't be the same if they had been released in top down isometric. Instead, the technology advanced, and the games became "inventive and quirky".
Yet, despite the complaints, FO 3 went on to be wildly successful, as have most of the other FO titles since, 76 being a whole other ball of wax. Ironically, we have one chapter of BG 3, and no idea where the game is going after we leave this zone, and yet we have loads of "but it's not connected". How do they know? What is it that they've seen that others of us haven't seen? One thing I do know is that we will find our way to Baldur's Gate, which ties it to one in so far as locations go. However, flipping back to the FO references, are 3, NV and 4 not FO games, since they aren't direct sequels to 1 and 2? They share one thing in common, background lore. One can see that connection simply reading the myriad of books laying around the map here, and what would have been the response if it had been set x years/centuries before the events of BG 1 and 2? Is it a case of "but we have to be Bhaalspawn for it to be a BG game"?
At any rate, this is wildly off topic. There are a lot of cRPG veterans that have the same(ish) philosophy that I have; "Know your world". This means that they'll be overturning every rock that they can, and clearing the Fog of War from all zones on the map. They're going to read every tooltip they see, and spell and skill descriptions. Some folks may be a bit surprised to find out how many strategies can be gleaned from just doing that, with no need for a drawn out tutorial section. Especially if something winds up changed down the road, and thus requires the tutorial to also be changed. A tutorial should give you the basics, and leave advanced strategies for the players to discover.
