I respectfully disagree. D&D holds a mystique for many that no other IP can fill. I have played so many CRPGs, even DoS2 and just could not stop thinking "man I wish this was D&D."
This is something most younger gamers do not understand. Back in the EARY days of computer gaming three primary genre drove game development. Simulations, Streatgey Gaming and RPGs. In the RPG Genre DnD was not just a driving force, it was THE driving force. The impact of using the DnD IP cannot be overstated as it drove in newer players due to the recent DnD boom and pulled back old school gamers remembering fondly those days when computers let us step away from dice and charts.
If you pulled DnD from this game, took the story out of the realms and tweaked it around another game world. It would be considered a good game, no doubt but the sales numbers would have been around a 3rd of what they have been if they where lucky. This is not to dimmish the work Larian has done, this is just to say the DnD inclusion is a key component to the success.
This doesn't really jive with my memories of the 80's and 90's. The gold box games were solid, as was Eye of the Beholder, but I wouldn't say that those games drove the industry. If you had asked me in the early 90's what the most important RPG was I would have without any reservation at all said Ultima. Now there is room for argument there (and my opinion has changed A LOT in the past 30 years) but it was definitely a highly influential series, and also definitely not D&D.
I do think its fair to say that the AD&D was well represented at the time. But it shared shelf space with: the Ultima games, Wizardry , Might and Magic, Betrayal at Krondor, and that's just what comes to mind off of the top of my head. I think you could argue that D&D was part of the influence behind each of those games too, but certainly not all of it. They were each pretty much their own thing (except Betrayal at Krondor, which was based on a book series). Dungeons and Dragons are absolutely an important part of the history of cRPG's, but they are not all of it, or even a majority of it.
