I have a little questionwhat is the average age of players of BG 1 + 2, DOS 1 +2, Pillars of eternity, or Arcanum. I'm in my late forties, I was in my early twenties when BG was released. Being so old I ten to watch to those games in a very nostalgic way, but I also remember that at the end of the 90's a RPG that make a huge impact was released too: Daggerfall. The only game, before Disco Elisyum, in my experience obviously, it was Daggerfall. Wich had a bigger impact on the spreading of RPG videogames than BG.
Nevertheless there is another thing I remember well: in those days weren't common as today, neither were consoles, furthermore being videogamers was saw as being outcasts, and rpg players had a long way before The Bing Bang theory (and the pandemic) made role playing mainstream.
What happens when market grows? Software houses need to adjust to reach the bigger audience possible (indie producers maybe start as that but if they want a serious income and profit they have to evolve and adpat).
Role Playing is an idea that can be developped in different ways: tabletop, in real life role play, video games. Table top requires some basic rules to make it possible manage battles and chats between characters (otherwise the dungeon master would gone mad because everyone attempt to speak or make their battle moment in the same time.
As I said before is part of the charm of table top games, the question that arise is if is it possible to create a videogame that follows D&D tabletop rules in the more faithful way possible. There's a lot of irony in the fact that the rpg games that made a breakthrough in the area (Dragon Age Origins, Daggerfall, Divinity Original Sin) are games that broke a lot of D&D tabletop rules, either in character creation, magic management, battle management.
That been said, the problem is that in the current days videogames are taking two very distinct ways: or being utterly difficult (Elden Ring, as example, for casual players is hell) or really dumbed down (Skyrim and a lot of MMORPGs) or come out full of bugs (Cyber punk 2077), that is on one side the target is a niche of players that love to put their skills on test with compelling challenges, on the other side there are casual players that pay to have a full experience with little work, we can see that in mobile games were there is an abbundance of games in wich the only way to advance is to have a trust fund, so here we have the Bethesda fall down (Skyrim is a shadow of what Daggerfall and Morrowind were), Larian was able to find a middle way withe DOS 1 and 2 giving players the option to play with different difficult levels but again those games didn't follow the rules of magic use and battle tabletop's systems.
More recently Outerworlds (Obsidian) showed that party based games without day/night cicle can still have a big impact, while open worlds start showing they limits.
BG3 is a game that appeals to nostalgia of some games while trying to hit a bigger audience. That means that the full game has to give more than tickiling players' nostalgia (isometric, party group, lack of day night cycle, turn based battles) wich means story has to be really engaging, characters have to have equally interesting background stories.
The early access shows some promises but also it revealed how Larian has become more inclined to fan pressure (I'll have answers to some qestions about the use of flexibility instead of a banal hardening the difficulty of the game in an attempt to appease the hardcore d&d table top players), and if they are going to have the courage to avoid fan pleasing the herosexuality (yes, I'm on the side of the idea that a good game doesn't have to rely in completely submission to fan service), but I still have a lot of doubts (and the fact that they haven't said anything about digital versions while pushing for a very expensive limited collectors edition, that again appeals to a segment of players, doesn't help).
