In who’s opinion is this not like a d&d game ? This is a d&d game pure and simple.
D&d spells, setting, characters,magic items, rules, races, combat..etc
D&D games do not stop being D&D because someone adapts for a video game medium.
D&D games do not stop being D&D because there are some slight rule changes...( yeah yeah the surfaces thing I don’t disagree with that & many other comments people have) ... but declaring it’s not D&D is just utter garbage.
Yes, it's certainly a D&D game, but because of a few design choices it doesn't have some of that same D&D
feel so much as it does a Divinity feel. And I don't think anybody is actually saying it's not a D&D game so much as they are saying it doesn't really feel like a D&D game because of some of the decisions that Larian has made to change things around so much. All they really need to do, in my opinion, is to change the cantrips to stop making surface effects and rebalance them a bit, balance the enemies better (they seriously made too many enemies that get 3 attacks in 1 turn), remove some of the grenades/special arrows/barrels from the game (not all of them, just tone it down a little bit Michael Bay), and stop making everything a bonus action.
The main problem here is that the game seems to be balanced around the Divinity style play more so than a D&D 5e style of play, such as some of the puzzles involving ground effects and poison clouds and such. They have these massive areas full of poison clouds or other effects you have to get around, and the answer most people seem to find is the one that was used in Divinity: set the poison on fire and then put out the fire with water, running past before the poison comes back. Problem is, this is a rather hard feat to pull off if you don't know any spells like Create Water or if you're out of spell slots. In Divinity you had a cooldown timer on abilities instead of spell slots, but D&D has a limited resource spell slot instead, so balancing it around cooldown timers as it seems to have been just doesn't work.
The game is good, I rather enjoy it, but it needs some tweaking and some things they simply should have left alone. It seems that rather than mess around with a few things to fit them into the game better, they messed around with
everything and made it feel like a weird mashed together Divinity D&D homebrew that just doesn't work as well. It's still EA, and very early in EA at that, so I'm sure they'll take the feedback into account and make changes as needed. Considering the amount of people asking that cantrips be tweaked a bit more and have ground effects removed from them, I hope they'll listen and improve upon it. I like some of the ideas they have, they just implemented them a bit wrong is all, if they can tweak it a little bit more to help balance everything out then fantastic!
Side note though, who hopes they make a GM mode similar to what they tried to do with DOS2 (but more streamlined hopefully) for BG3? I always thought that was a killer idea for DOS2, but having it in a literal D&D game would make running a D&D campaign pretty interesting.
