Feels like people forgot temple of elemental evil... This was turn based and D&D and so much worse than BG especially because of the fighting system
Yeah. There is no trend in gaming indicating that TB is preferred to RTwP. There has only been big TB hit, and that's DOS2. 1 game isn't a trend.
There are been more recent TB games that tanked than there are ones that did great. Torment: Numenera and Wasteland Remastered were both flops and both had TB. And the TB combat was one of the things that were criticized about Torment: Numenera - because Planescape: Torment had RTwP and people didn't like the title switching to TB.
There are more owners of Pillars of Eternity, which is RTwP, on Steam than Wasteland 2, which is TB.
Pillars of Eternity 2 had TB added to it, but it didn't improve its sales or raise its Steam user score by even a single percentage point in the months that followed the TB patch.
And Pathfinder: Kingmaker is more popular right now than any TB game other than DOS2.
And while DOS2's sales have been great, they still haven't topped Dragon Age: Origins': DA:O sold 3.2 million copies in just over 3 months. DOS2 sold 1 million copies in 2.5 months.
So, there is no trend anywhere that TB is more favoured than RTwP. But some fans of DOS2 have let their appreciation of the game blind them to the point they've crafted a mythology about TB games and their popularity.
Here's Larian's "BG3" senior designer and main combat designer, Edouard Imbert on RTwP vs TB:
Q: How do you reconcile the nostalgia of Baldur's Gate fans with the need to modernise the formula?
A: First of all, you have the basic question: do we do real time with a pause or do we go round by round? I'm a critic of real time with pause because I remember my Baldur's Gate games and I look at what they did recently with Pillars of Eternity: it's a mess, pause, you give three orders, you stop the pause, it's a mess. I don't like that at all. I'm convinced it's something that's playing against us, that's preventing us from attracting new players. What I like about the turn-by-turn is that the "it's yours, it's mine, it's yours" side of it, everyone understands that.
What I want to do, apart from the mechanics, is to have references to the old Baldur's Gate, so that "it rhymes" as Georges Lucas said. Nevertheless, you still have to realize that it has aged. The tone has aged, the mechanics have aged. We have to modernize, we have to simplify. Anyway, we follow the rules of the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons, which is still much more accessible I think. So, how do you modernize with that in mind? I think we can make references to the scenario, we can go through known places, maybe find characters, but I think that this will happen mostly at the level of the universe and the scenario as well as at the level of the tone more than in the mechanics, which, for their part, need to be modernized.
That is somebody who should not ever be allowed to develop a Baldur's Gate game. They are prejudiced against Baldur's Gate from the outset and have no interest in making a Baldur's Gate game. There isn't a problem with RTwP, there's a problem with their perception of and skill with RTwP. They require a very dumbed-down experience that is ultra-simple and clarified in order to be able to follow what is happening. They aren't the average gamer, though.
This further underscores that Larian are not even thinking about making a Baldur's Gate game and couldn't care less about the Baldur's Gate series other than the potential for its name to boost their own Divinity brand's popularity, as Swen said is what he hopes to do:
... so, the chance to do that, and to bring what basically is our RPG identity to Baldur's Gate as a franchise was an opportunity too good to resist. And so, what it will do for us... uh, what we think it will do for us is it's going to show a larger segment of people, because I think Baldur's Gate 3 will reach more people than Divinity will have done... it will show a larger segment of the population what our RPGs feel like and hopefully bring them to play our other games also.
And as Walgrave revealed when he said Larian are sticking to the DOS formula (which disingenuously saying that D&D is a turn-based game while omitting to acknowledge that Baldur's Gate isn't just D&D and is a RTwP series):
The choices that we made are ours. Why did we go for turn-based instead of real-time with pause? Because D&D to us is a turn-based game and we're really good - or we have become really good - with turn-based combat. So that, I think, is one of our strengths, and trying out real-time with pause for now, just because the originals were that? It's a big risk. Because the team would have to think completely differently, our combat would be completely different. And we didn't really feel good about that. Normally we do try out a lot. Normally we try out a lot before we make a decision, but with real-time with pause and turn-based we didn't, we just said "Okay it's just gonna be turn-based."
It's no wonder Walgrave couldn't think of a single aspect of their D&D RPG that justifies calling their "BG3" a successor to the Baldur's Gate series:
So, I think that in spirit it's still the successor of Baldur's Gate 1 and 2. Because there are so many things that people who did play and like Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 will still recognise in the new one. It's still about your party. It's still about big personalities clashing with each other and relationships. It's still a party-based game, you still need to do combat, you will recognise a lot of D&D rules - even if you haven't played D&D in 20 years. You will still recognise all the spells, et cetera. So, to me it's a true sequel, but we are bringing it into the 21st century by saying, "Look, it's glorious 3D."
So, Larian's "BG3" is a sequel because it's a party-based RPG with colourful character and with combat in it - and the combat uses a D&D ruleset. He didn't even dare add that Baldur's Gate has specifically RTwP combat - because, of course, Larian's "BG3" doesn't. Walgrave's claim is the equivalent of saying that any first-person game where you play as a single character and use a variety of weapons to shoot at lots of things is a DOOM series game or a Half-Life series game.
There are loads of games that fit Walgrave's description that aren't called Baldur's Gate series games, and there are thousands that fit the description if not counting the D&D ruleset qualifier. What Walgrave is saying is that there is no similarity between Larian's D&D game and the Baldur's Gate series and so he couldn't think of something that actually justifies calling Larian's "BG3" a Baldur's Gate series game.
Black Isle themselves, the creators of the Baldur's Gate series, wasn't willing to call their game "BG3" despite that their cancelled game had a lot more in common with the BG series: https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/1234228179906134016
So, if they judged it not right that their own follow-up game not be titled Baldur's Gate 3, then it's clear that they would not approve of Larian's game bearing the Baldur's Gate name.
Larian talk like snakes in interviews when trying to rationalize why they're calling their game "BG3". But it's abundantly clear that the only actual reason why they are calling it "BG3" is for a cash-grab, to promote their own DOS formula and brand. And co-opting another series and disregarding its important legacy and its fans for such a self-serving goal is selling-out. If they weren't interesting in making an actual Baldur's Gate game, and it's clear they have never been, then they should have left the title alone.
BTW, in a recent interview Swen said that their studio all loved the BG series (except for everything about it, it seems). But in an older interview from when the license was being announced, I'm pretty sure he said that the people in their studio didn't even know what the Baldur's Gate series was when the idea was raised.
