It has been said many times since the game was announced that a different name should have been chosen, but until all the story links are seen in the released game, that will be difficult to judge. Certainly the name is a marketing/branding tactic to generate interest, and you wouldn't expect Larian to be anything but positive about what they are developing, but that does not mean they are lying.
But this is the name the game has. The name is part of the product. It defines the genre, sells the reputation of the previous games in the franchise, and sets high expectations for the product that customers will receive. No developer is entitled to traffic in other people's reputations without consequences. I don't think anyone expected another 2D-based late 90s game for "3." I did not, and I was actually hoping that they would update the engine and the interface to be more modern. There are plenty of ways this could have been a great, but different, "3." I did not expect it to look the same as the other two. But, the many types of fans who got excited about this game did expect an open-world, customizable RPG with mechanics faithfully adopted from the D&D system. There are some basic qualities to D&D games that Larian knows people are going to assume are in it. There is a reason why Swen worked so hard to earn WotC's blessing to use the intellectual property. Swen knows the enormous value of the brand on the product he is going to sell. Larian could have made DOS3, but they chose not to do that. They chose to develop a game under a different franchise specifically because of the value of its reputation. It doesn't matter what Larian has added to their expectations with press releases or magazine interviews. Calling your product "Baldur's Gate 3," and being licensed by WotC, gives every customer the
reasonable expectation that the game will include the class and combat mechanics of some edition of D&D, character customization, an open-world quest system, and importantly, the class and item balancing from 50 years of iteration of that game system.
The reasonable expectations of fans, at all levels of familiarity with this product's development (remember, this game has not been released yet), are not being met, and not due to a lack of time. This is being done on purpose. The production quality of this game is very high, but the developer is clearly more interested in writing stories and creating dramatic moments than in producing deep gameplay. This is less of a game than it is an epic machinima soap opera. I couldn't be less interested in that, and a lot of people who are fans of "Baldur's Gate," "D&D," or just PC games also could not be less interested in that. The primary appeal of the D&D roleplaying system is the ability for players to utilize a deep, balanced, customizable character system to create their own unique player characters, and specifically
not to replay tired archetypes and
not to re-enact someone else's story. D&D is about gameplay, not drama. Gameplay is what matters in creating videogames, and the distraction of drama and cinematics is a trap that will sink the reputation of "Baldur's Gate" too. Larian is following in the footsteps of Squaresoft in making a pre-written, railroad, cinematic-heavy game which focuses on drama and visual effects, which inevitably all come at the expense of the parts of the game that actually matter. I'm very disappointed every time I read the updates from this game, and see the huge amount of man hours that are being put into the parts of the game that don't really matter, while basic components have still not been included years into the development process.
