Larian is the new CDProjectktRed. And by that I mean they are projected to be a perfect, infallible, manifestation of developer perfection that gamers will worship and praise blindly until Larian proves themselves to be mere mortals by making a mistake.
I‘m starting to get the impression people build them up precisely to watch them fall and kick them down. It‘s in our DNA, I‘m afraid. I mean the praise they get for the most mundane claims (and often they are just that) is ridiculous to the point they‘re becoming the developer version of the life of Brian. And deep down we‘re already anticipating to watch them bleed out at a cross.
In what bizzaro world did the witcher series fail to live up to expectations? The first one was a masterclass of atmosphere and had zero expectations, the second were just fine and the third one still is the gold standard for quest design in open world games.
Buggy like most ambitious open world games, but still perfectly playable. It certainly lived up to expectations, it was one of the most praised games of its time, more than what I've seen about BG3. Granted I don't follow the industry as closely as I did back then.
Just because you didn't like 1 and 2 doesn't mean they didn't live up to expectations. CDPR was nobody before witcher 1 and a small studio before 2, so I really don't get how they didn't live up to expectations for those two games.