Played over 30 hours (lot of free time this week!) and absolutely love the game so far but I do have a few gripes. This may seem pretty negative, but mostly focusing on things that didn't quite work for me in this post. But I feel like this is shaping up to be a fantastic game worthy of the Baldur's Gate name.

A bit about where I'm coming from, I've played a fair few games in this genre and DM D&D. I'm fairly new to running 5E, only started a few months ago with Curse of Strahd, but have a couple of decades running games in lots of different system (including 3E/3.5E). BG/BG2 are games I have both very fond memories of and have played more recently. They were a big part of what initially got me into D&D. I haven't played either DOS games for much time. I started a Wizard and a Warlock but much prefered the latter and ended up playing a Warlock and went the party face route (often makes sense for main characters), so full Charisma and Persuade.

Combat
Liked:
+Faithfulness to the system, I'm amazed and impressed how close it actually sticks to 5E in a lot of mechanics, even some I though would be difficult to adapt.

+Turn based combat is absolutely fantastic feeling very tactical

Disliked
-Too much focus on environmental effects, and AoE. Everything seemed to have AoE either from abilities, carrying flasks or special arrows, which seems a bit much for level 2 Goblins. Often a bad iniative role has your party peppered with AoE before you can even act to split them up. And the persistent ground effects are too strong, an attack misses, splash area lands, your characters still take significant damage and lose concentration.

-High ground advantage/disadvantage is a bit too dominant. Both for range and control of flow of battle. If you can't get the positional advantage the difficulty of some encounters are overwhelming, having position gives you a huge advantage. On paper this is fine, but often it means your party state in the initial engage is a massive factor. Githyanki fight on the bridge stands out as an example, but split your party to take high ground before starting sort of seems required to win.

I like to emphasise environment being important to combat into pen and paper games but I think this takes it a bit far, especially with the AoE as well. It's kind of like there's two systems competing, the core 5E one and a positional heavy one. While it leads to some interesting encounters it does feel like the one that's not really 5E is the more important one. In the Githyanki encounter, just trying to fight them is death, using the verticality to your advantage matters more. That is partly because IMO it's an over-tuned encounter, but it demonstrates the extent to which you can beat raw disadvantage or how heavily disadvantaged you are without starting position. And that feels like it is getting in the way of the 5E mechanics to me.

-Many encounters are a bit too busy. Just too many enemies. Sometimes this is compounded by some massive agro across maps. Inside the goblin camp for example. You finish one group of enemies and then realise the entire zone is now marching on your position even if you prevented them from using the drums.


Conversations
Liked:
+Cinematic presentation. Liked isn't strong enough a word here, I absolutely loved this aspect. There's definitely a few rough edges to work out but this really adds a lot

+Spells which massively shift this being (mostly) implemented. Talking to animals and dead people is crazy, can't think of another video game that game close to this level of implementing it. It's a bit of a pity that Charm spells don't seem to be available in conversations.

Disliked:
-Ability checks, there's just too many and it feels like you are just punished for failing them, rather than rewarded for passing. Sometimes this massively OTT, well into "well that escalated quickly" territory, right down to the dozen of combatants piling in out of no where in some cases. You are usually better off avoiding checks as most seem to be traps. Some conversations to get good outcomes require multiple checks, and in fairness these do tend to be lower but still it's more frustrating than thrilling. Overall many of the DCs are too high for they achieve, DC10 is a rarity, DC15 seems like the norm out the gate. So a character starting with perfect ability and proficiency will have about +5 innately and will fail about 50% the time. In P&P fails in conversations don't feel so bad with a good GM/DM because they can lead interesting places. In this they just feel bad, especially when that's what your character is meant to be good at.

-Some dialogues are either really hard to figure out what you are meant to do, or have no route to get to some where the player could reasonably want to. For example when dealing with the leaders in the goblin camp you can lure Gut to secluded spot to kill her without picking a fight with the camp. The other two there doesn't seem to be any options that make sense if your intent is kill them other than the route of attacking them, or failed checks with the same result. I know there's a lot of content with those characters if you side with them, and that is impressive but it does feel like you should be able to do something more subtle than pulling a (goodly) murder hobo on the entire camp if you side with the grove.


Couple of other minor things:
-I really missed not being able to switch eldritch incantations on level up. I really wanted to switch to switch to permanent Dolittle and was disappointed when I couldn't. But IMO it's a pretty major nerf to Warlock at higher levels if you can't switch them. At low levels available it's not such a big deal because Warlock's power is so front loaded, in later levels they need all the versatility they can get as their spell slots fall further and further behind the traditional casters. Without that a lot of invocations are pointless (almost all once per day spells, even the at will/permanent spells) as they will obsolete fairly quickly as you get the same effects readily available without trading off such a valuable resource.

-Along similar lines one short rest per long rest seems reasonable but it really hurts some classes, again Warlock being the big loser when put along side Wizard's Arcane Recovery. Even from a simulation perspective at least two makes more sense. My preference would be three.

-Guidance doesn't seem to apply to ability checks without a skill proficiency.

-I would massively prefer starting feat variant of humans. They are maybe a little better than other races, but probably less than the +1 to all attributes version is behind every other race. And at least they aren't boring if that's what people will insist on picking.

-Githzerai please! I know it's too much to ask if it hasn't been in the works from the start as an option, but just expressing how awesome it would be.


Mostly I've written about the negatives but really enjoyed my time with early access. I rarely get to play D&D so I really appreciated how much it captures the experience!