It is my opinion that companies should not be so willing to change their engines completely between games. The Baldur's Gate engine worked well for several games and several more expansion packs. Before that, the "Gold Box" games spawned by the truckload, and a construction set at the end lasted several more years (partially due to what would now be called "modding").
Nowadays every game seems to be done by a different set of dudes that have COMPLETELY different ideas of how the game engine should be! Why even bother selling a D&D game license to someone if different people end up doing every game?! Frankly, I am not in the least bit surprised how the last few D&D games came out... every one was by a different gang of people with an entirely different vision.
Changing engines each time is expensive, and risky. Keep the engine the same and churn them out until one does bad. That system worked fine for Final Fantasy... until they fell into the same "change it every time" trap!
I don't think of this is the heart of the problems - IP, legal or game design - behind making a good D&D game, but this is a very valid complaint.
Developing video games is so expensive now. Back in the old days it only cost some tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to make a D&D videogame. You only had to sell around a thousand copies to break even. Today, just getting the engine to work, making sure the design is actually good, and neither the engine or the design get in the way of one another and that it actually looks like modern tech is so expensive.
As a result, every time a new D&D game comes out, the odds are kind of stacked against it because they've already spent so much money just making the thing remotely presentable -- insofar as buggy and poorly designed can be considered presentable -- that sales are hardly going to reward the developers efforts.
I'll be honest and say that Baldur's Gate didn't impress me. But at least they used it in Tales of the Sword Coast, Baldur 2, Throne of Baal, Icewind Dale, Heart of Winter, Trials of the Luremaster, Planescape Torment and Icewind Dale 2 so that the cost of actually building the thing became smaller and smaller leaving room for better and better game design writing.
So I agree, but not insofar as the designers are always different guys with different vision, but because a stable design group that sticks around long enough to learn from its own work -- let alone put out a good game on the first outing -- and gets to use the license for more than one game can be counted on to eventually put out a great D&D games than playing musical chairs with different developer studios.
I mean, imagine if D&D editions changed every two years! No one would like the game AT ALL. (No Essentials jokes, pls)
