Even the most brilliantly designed combat encounter is undermined by metagaming once you've seen it the first time. I was surprised at how little changed in my second playthrough. Every combat interaction so far is scripted. The enemies are always the same, and they always appear in the same location and in the exact same position. To me this diminishes interest far more than it enhances it.
This is very true. I think it would be interesting to at least prepare a roster of characters that would be randomly selected for a given encounter. You know that there's an enemy party in a ruin you're exploring, but suddenly the mage is replaced with a barbarian and you have to adjust your strategy accordingly. Perhaps it would even be possible to have 3 or 4 encounters per dungeon area, so that with each playthrough you have to be on the lookout for new challenges. You expect an enemy party in a deserted library, but what you find is an owlbear etc.
Why shouldn't they be able to design interesting random encounters?
There could be NPCs with special quests or barter options.
I think
Skyrim handled that pretty well, spawning NPC encounters on the road in random places around the map, though it quickly became predictable. Much less predictable than static, scripted encounters though.
"You have been waylaid by enemies" was a defining feature of the original games.
I concur, yet I think it's sadly high time to stop referring to the
Baldur's Gate games when looking for inspiration to improve upon this new game and just treat it as a new D&D game set in Forgotten Realms.
