I agree with OP. Honestly, if we wanted BG3 to be a Baldur's Gate game worthy of the name, that ship has sailed the moment Wizards decided to give the rights to Larian, a game company that is very clearly afraid to even PEEK out of their comfort zone. Now the best we can hope for is a good Larian RPG, but the fact they went for the name just as a cashgrab without respect for either the Infinity Engine games or D&D in general will keep stinging me quite a bit, even if BG3 turns out to be a good game. Getting strong Fallout 3/4 vibes here... Maybe we can hope for something like New Vegas, made by someone else, who actually likes/respects the originals?
If I were an optimist, I'd say there is still some hope for BG3 becoming closer to 5e D&D (but to me, that's not nearly as important), but no hope at all that they will even attempt to change BG3 to feel (at least a bit more) like an actual Baldur's Gate game. Many of Larian's game (and world) design decisions go literally exactly the opposite way.
This has probably been posted a few times before, but:
The 20+yo games manage to give me a 9999x more faithful impression of an actual living and breathing world that keeps existing even when the player character is not there, with characters whose existence, motivations and interests are not defined only by their relation to the player. This is my main problem with BG3: Static, theme-parky locations where everything is mashed close together (for convenience?) and time simply doesn't exist; player-centric characters (and player-sexual companions, but whatever...) written/scripted in such a way that it's clear when their sole purpose is to provide the player with dialogue(s) and/or quest(s) and/or a cutscene or two; locations where almost every inch has to have some kind of purpose _to the player_...
I want (way more) bedrooms/bathrooms/toilets/latrines/useless store rooms - though, funnily enough, we sure DO get lots of useless/empty containers, almost on the other extreme end of the spectrum. I want to believe locations where people live were actually designed for people to live in and I want the game to give me the impression that people there actually do _live_. Yes, if you design a game world in such a manner, there will inevitably be some lost convenience and "wasted time" - but if the world you create is living and believable, then it's actually not a waste of time at all. 20+yo (Infinity Engine games, Fallout 1 & 2...) games were able to pull that off pretty well, I wonder what would happen if someone actually embraced this kind of world design with today's technologies. For a game that calls itself Baldur's Gate 3, a believable living world should have been an obligatory MUST HAVE in the pre-development/planning phases, instead we get a theme park "world" design that gets called out even by people that don't care about the originals, that's just sad...
Everything else (shitty controls, questionable combat, occasional cringy writing - the originals weren't completely without fault in this regard either) I can get over, but not this weird feeling that the whole BG3 world is in a snow globe.
