Baldurs Gate 3 does nothing for me, just not my kind of game. I never find crpgs fun to play.
So I’m betting on Starfield.
Same. BG is the type of game I'd love to get into, and is super tempting with all the hype, but I'm just not wired to soak it in the way it's meant to be played. Playing through BG1 was a chore for me. Love the choices, lore and atmosphere though.
What part of BG1 was a chore? The combat?
It was moreso the UI and the rule set/stats. Something that should be simple, like trying to transfer an item from one character to another, understanding weapon and armor stats, zooming in/out on a greater scale and snapping back to a psuedo-default view even when the setting was on manual, the AI settings for your followers (It was like herding cats on fire half the time), having to look up what effect icons are on your characters and why they aren't doing certain commands, and the toggle between trap detecting/disarming. And to just heal with magic, you have only a set amount. By the time a battle is over, you rest, then half the time you get ambushed in the middle of the night, causing you to do it all over again, if you survive. That got pretty annoying.
Other than that, all the freedom of choice, party members, atmosphere, music, dialogue and banter... I loved all that. Granted, my family and I were all into table top D&D at the time I played it, so there was hype for it. Being able to make my TT character roll right into BG1 was pretty cool. Thos 2nd Edition rules though... yuck.
Yeah, that's totally fair. The UI is super fucking dated. But these are 20+ year old games and they're more complex than "run" + "jump" platformers or PnC adventure games of the 90s so they don't hold up as well in that. The simpler the UI, the easier it is to hold up decades later. Meanwhile the Infinity Engine games have dozens of mechanics and things going on so yeah.
Like playing BG2 this past week or two, the AI pathfinding is the worst I've ever seen. People hilariously go the wrong ways and get murdered or get stuck against walls. I have to constantly babysit movement because the pathfinding fucking sucks. And yeah, inventory management is a huge pain in the ass and every few mins I'm hitting the inventory screen and moving blue items to my high lore character to identify them and then moving them to the character who can use them or sell them, moving all the gems I pick up to the gem bag, potions to the potion bag, etc...
I mean you get used to it and put up with it to enjoy the other stuff. Plus these games have a fuckload of mods and cheats to smooth some of that stuff out like "just save edit or mod and give everyone infinite bags of holding to carrying everything if you want"
Rest mechanics and ambushes are kinda offset by 1) picking areas that enemies shouldn't spawn, like a boss room, or an empty castle vs an open field, but you can also get around them by hitting quicksave and resting and if you don't get a full rest hitting quickload and trying again
Weapon/armor stats/mechanics are just getting used to AC/THAC0. I've never played any D&D that isn't 2E rules, so no idea there. I'm guessing BG3 isn't using 2E
Traps are annoying and having to manually switch on detect traps after every battle is annoying, but it is what it is. If you turn the AI on the trap detecting characters will automatically do that, but if you turn the AI on they'll blow all their buffs when you're not even in a fight and aggro everything so it's honestly better to leave AI off and just switch detect traps on after every battle and every trap disarm. Also quicksave or using mods to instantly detect traps helps.
But at the end of the day, everything you just said about why you didn't like BG1...shouldn't apply to BG3 at all? Because everything you said is more that it's a 20+ year old game and dated in its UI which BG3 should not be. So I wouldn't be put off of BG3 because of that stuff.
Edit: Seems most of you all don't like the generic high fantasy stuff... I do. Not a big fan when they try and create super fantastical beings and other worldly alien type shit.. then it's just reaching and has a lore that is less believeable as a specific age of an old world... But again, that's just me. Personally, the mindflayers of D&D are some of the stupidest looking characters ever created... But apparently they're popular... So much so, Demon's Souls even had them, and they appear to be the main antagonists of BG3. 
I think Mindflayers are fine in the small doses of them in BG1/2 so far. I like the concept that they're like dimensional outcast aliens from a fallen society trying to hide and find refuge on other planets. I also like Beholders and all that weird stuff, but I also enjoying fighting big dragons. I think the only lore stuff I don't care for in D&D from BG1/2 is the Drow/Dark Elves because I find elves and dwarves and Gnomes and halflings pretty boring. I've never been a LoTR kind of person and even there I mostly like the Balrog demons and ghost riders than the dwarves/elves/orcs stuff.
