OP, it would be helpful if you tightened up some of those thoughts. Things like "Let me take this time to take a tangent" - just make the tangent, you dont have to tell people it is one. The style makes it difficult for people to find your reasoning and respond. This isn't an attack, a lot of what I said was kind of tongue in cheek so don't read this as someone going after you.
General1. "I have 25 hours in the game therefore I think I have a firm understanding. "
You could have replaced 25 hours with 30 minutes and it would have been true. At any point you could have deemed yourself to have a solid understanding. Did you finish it? Did you hit max level? I am not sure what perspective you are coming from. Stats are fine here, it isn't a pissing contest, it helps everyone to know what has happened in your experience.
I am over 70 hours into my first playthrough, have been max level for quite some time, and have not finished it yet. I have submitted dozens of bugs and suggestions both on these forums and on the steam forums and I do not think I have a firm understanding. There are a lot of skills and interactions I can't check until I replay the game several times due to class and race combinations. I can't judge all combat based on my 1 PC and the 1 party formation with the pretty much 1 spell build I gave my casters. You might put something more concrete in there on what you have parsed - hours are kind of arbitrary. I have restarted to pass every dialog tree (though ultimately chose one on each gate so there is still stuff I haven't seen), removed all fog of war from every map and, to my knowledge, found every secret area, button, wall, teleporter, etc...as evidenced by no wall or spot is left that a dice didn't appear and start rolling for a check.
I have completed all quests barring finishing it, turning in mushrooms to mind flayer, and the pregnant girls quest because I dont want to raise her dead husband - I will play with that later to see if there is another option. There is a lot in the game to unpack and try. I have over 800 hours in DOS2 and I am still finding new stuff in it, their games have a lot of depth. I want to try to go to the under dark early on next playthrough, sneak to the anti-magic tree early in the game, put the flowers in a pack (it blocks their effect) and then go back up and fight caster battles and throw flowers at the them and deactivate the magic. Who knows, if they catch on fire while on water is it anti-magic fog? I don't know, I don't have a firm grasp on what they do with that kind of stuff yet.
Selune's chest in the Owlbear cave could have been opened with the antimagic field, I carried the chest to the underdark because I wanted to try to get the Gem of Shaar that the statue is holding up that powers the defenses of the fort. I was really hoping I could throw the chest out in the pathway and shaars power would activate the defenses and open it or if I could get the gem and place them next to each other and shaars power would deactivate the chest. I never did get the gem out of the hand, it has 1hp so I cant knock it out, couldn't get mage hand to appear next to it, so I just shot the chest open, ultimately. Really with the Seulne / Shaar artifact proximity combo would have done something. Shortly thereafter I found the blossoms...almost made it. I have so. much. to. try. still.
2. Companions - "People are judging them too harshly. Perhaps they don't remember DOS2. This is a fandom meme. All fandom memes are untrue."
People judging them too harshly is your own harsh judgment that I harshly judge you on. I do remember DOS2, 800+ hours in it. Also this is based on your opinion that it is a fandom meme (whatever the definition or criteria for that is), and 2 - your claim that fandom memes are untrue. Thats pretty much where your logic stopped and turned into an opinion piece that didn't seem to be based on much. Some theorizing on companion numbers in the future happened. There are multiple threads on this and the point comes back, over and over, about what is justifiable versus what is the most fun. They are in depth conversations and you should participate in them if you have something to add.
3. Shadowheart
She is my least liked character for the reasons you outlined. Voice on her has the edgey edge, not just an edge. When she is nice shes palatable but, like Astarion if you pick the wrong thing (who literally went from "I trust you, thank you" in one sentence to him crouched down, snarling, saying that he is going to "kill you in your sleep if you ever dare even think to breathe such a thing again" in reaction to a very mild statement) is manic in her swings line to line. The overall levels of disgust, disdain, annoyance, distrust, and impatience shown with you sentence too sentence is like talking to a crazy person. They are too big and bury the glimmers of genuine companionship they exhibit.
D&D1. "Just about every complaint/issue that it looks like BG3 is running into comes from the fact the system is a heartless algorithm being run by a computer with pre-determined outcomes"
As a DM, I am offended at being described like this. You aren't supposed to know that you are all hurtling to an ultimate point in the story regardless of your actions - those just make the journey better or worse along the way. Matt Colville has the best take on dice "fudging" that I have heard - DMs don't fudge dice to fix your mistakes, they do it to fix their own. If a DM makes something too hard or just got 5 natural 20s in a row, they will most likely change it because this was a decision the players could do nothing about that is going to adversely affect them. The DM can only account for so much, we are only
computers human. If a player attacks a guard post in a city - no fudging. That was your mistake, and I am not going to fix it for you.
I know loosey goosey games are out there, but my game's rules are pretty much by the book. The rules rarely leave a case uncovered and allow for pretty much everything ive come across. You have to be
allowed to do something not allowed by the rules to piece rules together to figure it out - which I have always been able to do. This game isn't letting you try to polymorph a Tarrasque into a chicken and fly up 1000 feet and drop it on BG and see if it wipes out the city. You're shooting a goblin in the face. I don't think a DMs magnanimity or rule bending is required for this format as they limit the very options which would necessitate that by virtue of it being played in a bounded space as opposed to your imagination.
2. People need to get over the name, it ain't changing. I don't know if people are actually serious when they say this, but if they are all I can think of is a lack of awareness on how businesses work. This is done in partnership with the owners of Baldur's Gate. The name change would come from them, and this is too tied into what they are doing with the edition and the drumming up of excitement for D&D.
3. "Savescumming"
Its an option. Any feeling of needing to use it is yours. I have also put hundreds of hours into the games you mentioned and reloaded in them a lot. I like testing things out and then going 'huh, neat' and going back to what I actually wanted to do. Ive done 5+ playthroughs with save carryovers from the priors as well on PoEs and whatnot. Its a feature, utilize it if you want. If you don't like having a character that can fail that kind of thing...well...make a better one or roll better bruh. A point could be made that at that level, the proficiency level bonus is so low at that level and combined with the fact that rogues don't have expertise at that level (yet), that its too early to introduce critical path segments for a character with that high of a DC.
However, I will say that you go from saying that "I've played through Wasteland 3 and Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire recently and did it without reloading". And then go to "players generally want to experience all the content they can in a single playthrough.". Those are incompatible statements and the issues you raise with one, negates the validity of the other. You want to do it all, even though you cant possibly do it, in one playthrough, but without save scumming - as you have somehow managed to do in the past in other games where experiencing it all would also be impossible by not savescumming. It feels like the argument that spreads through the post regarding potential, rolls, saves, and options is just too muddy to understand what mechanic you don't like and what you hope to accomplish as a player via the mechanics.
Not getting everything in 1 playthrough. Thats most big games. That is also D&D, except in D&D there is no other playthrough. You just never get it. The number of times I say to my players, "Actually, make an intelligence check" and the player says "10" and my response is "Ok, so what are you guys doing next?" is a large number and they all grimace wondering what they just missed out on. I have written hundreds of hours of gameplay they never got to, items they never got and never will, and places to go that they probably never will - at least not in that campaign, with those characters. They have, of course, used those failed saves to make really incorrect decisions which ended up in flying castles and storm giants giving them rocs to fight on in the clouds - because they failed and made decisions based on the info hey had. But they never actually did find the right thing.
In BG3 I expect to fail an insight check and go off of the face presented to me - this guy looks shady, lets kill him in his house and steal his stuff. Oops, he ran an orphanage and just has a hateable face. I made that decision though, I could have read his journal before killing him. Is it save scumming to go back and redo that? I didn't think of the choice until later of sneaking around reading personal things, or talking to his servants in a disguise self to see if they said something about their master, or eavesdrop on their random conversations. I had tools, I didn't use them. In this playthrough, Id like the head of the orphanage alive. Ill kill him next time. I cant experience both in a single playthrough without going back pretty far at some point and walking the other path.
So, I am not really sure what your problems are. The fact is that there is the ability to save often in the game. Thats it. That is not a terrible thing, it is a thing. Its a hammer on a table. You making a house or bashing someones head in doesn't make the hammer a bad thing to have around because it can be used. So is it the story? The fact it has options and you can only take 1 path at a time? Again, I am not seeing the problem you are solving here. Just a disgruntlement that the game can be used in ways you have chosen not in other games.
4. Perception checks et al
This is something that really bothers me too. Perception checks that reveal doors reveal the doors and they shimmer. If you perceive footholds on a cliff that weren't there before then make them appear. Tracks appear and if you mouse over them it says "Humanoid tracks" on a low one "goblin tracks" on a medium one and "12 goblins, heading east, 1 hour old" on a great one. Insight checks need to be more readily available and, in general, there is very little player feedback and awareness alteration that happens. They need to connect skills to things people can look at, read, and interact with for sure.
5. Nettie
This was a good example of broad thinking. If you do every quest you see right now, you are limiting options. They TOLD you the other dude was the healer and shes some apprentice. You had the option of the real deal or the apprentice. You got the apprentice experience when you chose the apprentice and it was comical in how bad she is compared to the master of the circle. Thats a straight D&D choice. As a DM id be tickled pink if my party had said "Yeah, lets have the apprentice try to heal us". I love their idea on what she did, its a hilarious DM punishment. It taught me to not finish quests immediately or choose what seems like a final option until ive run around a bit and done related acitivities.
6. The Face
I am loving that there is 1 person you use to talk to people. In multiplayer, I get to be lazy or dictate the pace. Either way, it doesnt leave a lot of "no, you talk to him this time". You know who should (except backgrounds might make you think wait, im a pirate, i have no charisma but maybe us both being one will help *save*) Every party has one. What would be good is to weave other people's skills in. This is complex for them, but I think it would be amazing. Your face is talking, and she mentions that the goblin attack wasnt going to be the last. The NPC says "I think it was". A ranger with survival skill could say "The tracks I saw were of a force double that size. I don't know if you could withstand another such attack, much less the one of what I saw." Persuasion check, from the face, with advantage because of the specific knowledge of one of the players who had perceived tracks earlier (and if they hadnt was just a random goblin factoid that maybe didn't lower the DC as much). The roleplaying does kind of suck in that regard without a sorc, paladin, bard, or warlock as persuasion/deception turns to intimidation after that which isn't really fun going around being a jerk to everyone just as a player selecting options. It isn't how I want to conduct through the game. It isn't how I want to conduct my or my character's actions. I think you have a very valid point on RP limitations, especially early game without the stats to help.
7. Modifiers are boring
Modifiers are modifiers, there isn't really anything thats going to be emotional about them. What I am reading is you saying the way the game uses your skills is boring because it doesn't give the option to use use character's background or actions to affect the story often enough and when it does, it isn't particularly exotic or based on some "oh wow, they kept track of that?" moment. This might tie back to a more complex background creation process that allows you to set certain pieces of information as blocks for yourself. Yes, you can min/max second playthrough if you wanted, but you cant change the game NPCs, just your own. Knowledge of gods, races, say that you escaped from a slave pit, etc...a slave pit escape back story might let you know when you get to the part of the castle that slaves get fed from, you know there is a slave pot and only the slaves ate it. Time to put in a potion of fire breathing or giant strength to the pot and watch a slave jail break. They give you ideas or allow conversation options on something like that. Otherwise, it IS hard to just say "change the modifiers". A lot of what you mentioned was a reputation system - which should lower the DC, I agree.
I think you had a great write up!
My penny of thoughts on them
