Generally I am enjoying the game but I'll try to focus primarily on productive feedback and not too much on what's already going well.
Criticisms (Major):
To me, these things make the game feel like it's not BG3, and is instead DOS3. DOS2 was a good game and I enjoyed it, but these have been a letdown.
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1.) Combat is exactly like DOS2, just tweaked. You could follow the examples set by Neverwinter Nights (1, not 2) or Baldur's Gate 2 to see how it should be done. This has been an issue since at least Divinity Original Sin 1.
I've written more on this here:
http://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=680638#Post6806382.) Art & Assets: The mood felt close to Baldur's Gate during the mindflayer ship tutorial, then fell off a cliff when I reached a tropical island (I know, Larian trope). Overall I think the initial plot point of tadpoles in your eye is sufficiently grim and sets up the story well. But after you eventually crash the ship it feels like you're back in Fort Joy. Can you crash the ship into the marketplace in Athkala instead I know this isn't going to happen, but it would be a cool reference and would feel more at home, and maybe tie in with the opening cutscene better.
Asset reuse is awful as well. Since they are both fantasy games, normally this would make sense and I wouldn't really care, but the DOS icons are all more comically drawn and I guess I expected something more realistic. As an example, the new light healing potion icon I think look ok, while the poison and water arrow icons I think look silly. Silly was ok in Divinity, it doesn't fit when everything in BG3 is silly.
Criticisms (Minor):
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1.) Dialogue Skipping: This is probably a minor fix and might be a bug, but pressing spacebar to skip through dialogues works fine generally, but it will autoselect option #1 for you instead of stopping anytime there is a decision that needs to be made. I would expect that you could skip through all the dialogue until you get to a dialogue choice, and I find myself accidentally picking the wrong dialogue option when I repeat a section and want to skip through dialogue I just heard.
2.) Camera zoom: The addition of multiple layers of elevation requires more ability to zoom out IMO.
3.) Faces: Male faces generally look fine, but very samey across NPCs. It feels like all the men are variants of 2-3 people and they just have horns and different hairstyles. Female faces are all pretty homely and could use work (having to choose your ideal woman in the beginning and being forced to choose between ugly ones only is unfortunate). Black Desert Online has a very in depth character creator that I think a lot of games fall behind on these days. I understand that with facial animations this could be difficult to allow too much control, but I would like to see more options. Overall it's no as bad as Bioware, but not great.
4.) Silly Combat effects: I think jumping, pushing, dashing, etc. are generally stupid additions, and I wish the environmental effects were generally gotten rid of or toned down as well.
Pushing people off a box from behind while in stealth is cool. Pushing a guy with a sword that's facing you in combat is stupid IMO.
This is another area that adds to the clowny atmosphere of the game. I appreciate that in DOS games, I don't appreciate it in Baldur's Gate games.
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Positives:
1.) Narrator is good.
2.) Combat variety is good.
There are so many ways to approach each fight that I don't recognize half of them until later. A lot of the traps are also hidden in plain sight and trick the player behind the keyboard, instead of relying on red overlays and skillchecks.
3.) Camera angles & Controls
This one surprised me, but overall I'm enjoying it with little issue. I'm not using the tactical camera at all though. So far it feels like playing NWN as far as camera angles and controls go, and that's a good thing. (NWN2 was horrible, please don't think I want that control scheme).
4.) Simplification of D&D: This is probably controversial, but I like how you have simplified things. I personally like getting into detail on different builds and min-maxing heroes, but it's tedious and I know most players probably don't. A good example would be selecting skills & ability points on character creation. You're presented a nice, tidy list and you can expand each one to see all of the things it effects if you really want to, but if not you can just check some boxes off and move on.
5.) Spell Variety: I haven't gotten high level spells yet, but so far spell variety is pretty good. I never cared that I had 4 types of elemental version for each nuke spell (fire, acid, frost, lightning or whatever), and instead have always cared that there's a good mix between nukes, protection spells, movement (blink, teleport enemies, etc.), timestops, summons, etc. This is one area where Larian's creativity seems to be doing well.
