Once again impressed by the quality of the responses in this forum. Find myself enthusiastically agreeing with nearly everything @Tuco said and mostly agreeing with @Leucrotta.
First with @Leucrotta's comments on 2e Faerun
BG II was written when 2e was transitioning to 3e-what I have heard many (I'm one of them) folk describe as the 'golden era' of the Forgotten Realms as a setting. BG III is set in the Post-Spellplague era, when WoTC treats the lore of its settings as essentially disposable, where retcons and the advancing timeline have rendered the setting recognizable only on a surface level.
I agree, the BG2 era when the setting felt like the setting. At first, I was very happy with the launch of 5e because it was undoing the damage of 4e but my enthusiasm since has dampened. Initially I was trilled with 5e's decision to return to the DIY, 1e spirit - "this is a DIY game, the rules are just guides, change them if you want to" - but since start of the 6e revisions I think that WotC has veered too far in the "do whatever you want" direction. Ideally everyone wants the freedom to do what every they want at their own table but you also want the setting to maintain its integrity. I think 2e was able to steer the ship between a rock and hard place - never straying too far towards the rock of complete freedom or the hard place of feeling like the rules were too restrictive to be fun. I think 6e is steering course towards the rocks and doing so at the expense of setting integrity. The rules all boil down to "do what you want" why do you need a setting at all?
Things like "in Faerun everyone worships a god" make Faerun, Faerun; unfortunately the decision to remove the wall of the faithless undoes that - instead of saying "if you don't like the wall just eliminate it from your table" the devs chose to remove the bit of lore that ensured that everyone had to chose a god. And they did in errata! Eratta! Not that I'm bitter. They the changes to player species also make Faerun seem less like Faerun. Instead saying "if your DM says you can play half gnome go for it, have fun" the devs have removed the rules that only allowed half elves and half orcs as playable races. This changes the setting quite a bit - yes, changes it a fun way - you can be anything at all but "anything goes" changes the feel of the setting. Now the cities of the Forgotten Realms feel more like Sigil than BG2 era Baldur's Gate.
And all of this before Larian gets its hands on the lore - lore that the Larian ceo doesn't appear to know or to value. (although I think he, unlike WotC understands that people like alignment)
So it will be a fun game - it just won't be a sequel to BG2 because the setting that produced BG2 is gone and the developers of this game aren't great lovers of the lore.
- BG3 is FAR more reactive to the player's input that the old BG games could ever dream to be. The amount of dialogue options, "triggers" tied to the race and class of the player, custom reactions to player's behavior (i.e. getting a different dialogue with NPCs according to from what direction you approach them, having someone acknowledge in dialogue if you pickpocketed an important item from them, etc, etc) is at time astonishing.
Again enthusiastic with nearly everything Tuco said. Especially the bit about the amusement park maps, hate them. I but do have minor disagreement with the quoted section. While BG3 is indeed more reactive it's ground trigger based banter system is it inferior to BG2's timer based banter system. In BG3 you can hear nearly all of you companions lines while running over the triggers outside of the blighted village but your party members go strangely quiet in the underdark - in BG2 you never knew when a conversation was going to happen and that gave the interactions an organic feel. (and sometimes provided unintended comic relief -" uh, yeah, I also like the cut of your gib. Let's talk once the dragon stops trying to kill us, okay?)
Also with the flaw with range of option
"murderhobo" and the "submissive pacifist"
is a symptom of a larger problem. In BG2 the conversations had two paths - a) walk the path that daddy Bhaal wants you walk down or b) restrain your rage and disarm the trap your father set for you. In that game choosing the path of peace didn't feel "submissive" it felt like a victory against fate itself. Why in BG3 I would choose the pacifist path? To win points with Shadowheart I guess?
Didn't find myself agreeing with anything that The Red Queen said except this:
BG2 was a huge step forward when it came to richness of companion content and interaction, but it was uneven. Jaheira had way more story, for example, than most other companions. Plus romance options were skewed to heterosexual males of some races. BG3 has the opportunity to have multiple companions with stories as rich as BG2 Jaheira’s, and to have a choice of satisfying romance arcs for any players/characters that want them. So far, I’m finding the BG3 companions mostly engaging, but they’re not as diverse as I’d like (where are the shorter races?), the party dynamic isn’t quite coming off and a lot is going to come down to how they develop in the full game, but I remain hopeful.
The BG3 companions do have more layers than the BG2 companions but there just aren't many of them. One of the reasons BG2 has such high replay value is the number of companions - there are some dialogues that only come up if you have Yoshimo, Viconia and Haer Dalis in your party . . .
