They said, in their initial interviews, before EA even came out, that they were excited to be making Baldur's Gate 3, that they would be making it using the fifth edition of the dungeons and dragons ruleset, which they were going to be implementing as faithfully as possible. Those were the original advertising comments made. Those comments were weakened and backtracked very hard after EA launched. This is not a shared hallucination - this happened. No, I can't provide quoted interviews - they've disappeared.
It may well be that those initial comments were made indelicately, and were not, exactly, intended to deceive... but they were nevertheless not indicative of their actual intention and so people who came to the game excited and invested in it, based on those comments, got very upset when it became clear that those initial comments were not actually reflective of what they were doing at all.
Baldur's Gate 3 is based on the fifth edition D&D ruleset, which Wizards of the Coast designed to make the game more accessible to new people. Vincke said that made his team's job a little easier than what a still-young BioWare faced in the '90s.
Based on; The interview also goes on to mention trial and error in interpreting TT into video game translation.
Vincke also confirms that Baldur's Gate 3 will emphasize environmental interaction of some sort, though it's unclear what form it will ultimately take. When I ask Vincke if Baldur's Gate 2 will have interactions similar to that of Divinity: Original Sin 2, where you could set up massive combos by, say, arcing lightning across water, he says, "And more."
In reference to earlier statements on the forums. Homebrew / extra system designs were talked about long before EA release.
Q: On the subject of gameplay, is it going to be influenced by Original Sin or are you trying to make something that's closer to the original Baldur's Gate games?
A: We are moving forward, so we don't want to go look backward. We want to innovate within the RPG genre and we have a bunch of ideas. We took the D&D fifth edition ruleset, we ported it to video game format, and we saw the things that didn't work. So we started working on that. And then we also added systems that would replace the game master because there's no human sitting inside of your computer. And that allows you to do things that you would otherwise not be able to do. And so that is pretty much the approach that we've taken. All the core values that were important to us in Original Sin, like the fact that the game reacts to what you did and that the story would change in a logical way are still in, except that we are doing more.
Boldened text implies creative liberties / changes to the ruleset deemed necessary for a video game format. Hence, not 100%. (Though this isn't meant to disqualify criticisms / requests of turning current design to be closer than it currently is, I too want this. I'm just putting cards on the table here.)
Edit/Appendix: Whether or not having tried it in video game format, or comparisons with Solasta is beyond the point, I think most of the critiques among us, me included believes there's a lot of current changes steering away from PHB that would be better if changed back to RAW. Point is what was said, namely clear indication of some homebrew and creative liberty in interpretation of the ruleset. Expectations beyond this is solely on the player individually.
Vincke: Based on the 5th Edition because we ported all the rules to the computer game and looked at what worked and what didn’t work. There are somethings that don’t work for video games. But there is also the aspect if you’re playing tabletop, the game master and imaginations is a large part of it. There are things that are just not described in the rule set that you could do and we obviously have to make it work inside of the video game, that is something that we have to add on top of it.
Similarly, based on.
Now here's the real kicker. It's not vanished. Here's every single interview available on google specifically published before 2020. Dig in!
