It's a direct sequel, so it has to be better than the first game to succeed. While there were good improvements to the mechanics and the graphics, those aren't the types of changes that will increase sales significantly. If you look at BG2, you get to keep the levels you earned in BG, and the character interactions were more interesting. With PoE2, you got stripped off all you'd accomplished, and the character interactions were about the same. Plus it seems harder to become engaged in the main plot of PoE2; you're basically chasing down a deity for some other deities, with no real motivation to do so. I think the game would actually have worked better if you stripped out the deity plot until the very end, and let you just explore and deal with the factions.