I have an entirely different perspective. I don't care what rule set it is, or how closely tied to it the game stays. I didn't buy BG because it was DnD. I didn't buy BG 2 because it was DnD either. Upon thinking about it, I initially didn't buy BG anyway. At the time I was playing DOOM and Mortal Kombat. My girlfriend brought BG home one day, and after playing it a bit, I barely looked back at either. Although I did, I must admit, play a lot of MK up to the third installment.
But I played BG games, and IWD games because I liked the stories. DnD had nothing to do with my enjoyment of the titles, at least beyond superficially. Then came Neverwinter Nights. I played that game for 5 years, but it had next to nothing to do with DnD, other than it happened to be the setting, loosely. I say "loosely" because I didn't play the campaigns for 5 years, I played the online modules that people were producing. I played on RP servers, I played on high magic worlds, and in the last year or so of that 5 years, I spent time making my own low magic world, created to tell a story that I wanted to tell in the toolset. While I'm not looking for the NWN experience here, I'm not sure we'll get a toolset, considering the MP aspect, that would be great, I am looking to be engaged by whatever the story is going to be, once it's fully fleshed out.
When I read "not BG", I'm not "like yeah". Instead I see "not the Warden" in Dragon Age, and "Mass Effect is Shepard's story". Bhaalspawn is, after all, the only thing that ties BG to BG 2 in so far as story is concerned. It's a rather important bit there, but that story has been written. I didn't see BG 3 and think that they were going to just remaster the previous two games, or try to retcon the old stories out for a new one. There's a lot more to the FR than just that one storyline. So, I'm waiting to see what they do. This was a pre-alpha test of basic stuff, not a finished product. I didn't get my dice out, and get new books, to go sit at someone's house to start a 5e campaign. I saw BG 3, and nostalgia kicked in for games that meant a lot to me when they were new, and got some hype going. I've been in on the ground floor of modules, especially in NWN, where I wrote story lines, drew up some maps, and even wrote some scripts for existing modules, before going on to create my own. So I didn't come in expecting a polished experience. I still don't expect to have the entirety of the story laid out in the Prologue and Act 1 so that I can say "not a BG game". Even with all of that assumed, I'm not sure I could do that w/out also going "not the Bhaalspawn"...
