Lot of characters die in early levels. (Table top)
Gives combat more weight when a well placed arrow can ruin you day.
I feel the opposite. I feel they captured the tabletop feel quite successfully
Except for those barrels
Personally I think combat should be a bit less deadly in a video game because dying in a video game means going back and redoing stuff you may have just done until you get it right, which isn't really fun. The game shouldn't by default be a cakewalk, but I think at this point the game is expecting more expertise off the bat than is reasonable for an average player. This definitely feels like playing hard mode as opposed to normal, for me at least. A baffling number of players are finding it easy and the more I dig into it the more it seems to be that they've just mastered the game and figured out how to take advantage of the systems far faster than me.