About the comparison to Dao - bg3 would be lucky to be like Dao.
Personally I feel much more bg1 vibes than bg2 so far. which makes sense. Bg2 at least for the first few hours (I would say that much more) is set in a big civilised city. So far bg3 is set up like the first game, lots of wilderness, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It also much more similar to bg1 in its quest structure. A lot of strange encounters on the road.
Now I'm not worried at all about the gameplay. The combat is already tons of fun, and based of what I know about Larian, I assume they will put most of their efforts into refining and improving it. The biggest potential issue is the story and characters, and more specifically, Larian design philosophy which tends to prefer cool gameplay mechanics over cohesive narrative.
Already the game suffers a lot from the insistence of Larian to implement their origin characters here, and at times it seems like the game is struggling itself to deliver an interesting and suspenseful story. Aside from that, Larian's obsession with exploration and experimentation in their games already makes some parts of the story disjointed and unclear, and some of the story bits we do have are quite weak. All of these problems might not be such a huge issue for people who likes to play games this way, people who want to push the game's boundaries as much as they can, but I prefer a more restrictive experience with a more flashed out story.
