I'm not a veteran DnD player, and what I primarily look for in game is to be interesting. And I find many DnD rules unnecessarily annoying, mostly in combat.
Some of them significantly reduce possibility of tactical decisions and synergies that for example existed in DoS, Wasteland and similar games - chief among those is "one action per turn" and low choice of useful actions ( even in later stages when some classes get multiple attacks per turn, its just simple attacks ). Even games like Wasteland 3, with less options than DoS and also mostly simple gun attacks, offer more tactical options than pure DnD.
Other DnD rules are unnecessary recidivism of tabletop games, like dice attack rolls with frequent miss chances - DnD rules in general result in more frequent and more annoying misses than other games, and BG3 is no exception here. From some reason BG3 is even more annoying with those misses than some other DnD-like games I played, like Pillars of Ethernity II: Deadfire (tactical mode). And those misses are NOT necessary to keep full DnD effects, as I explained in suggestion I made ( and where it was overwhelmingly opposed by DnD veterans ) .
Clearly on this forum DnD veterans are more vocal. But equally clearly, there are more non-DnD gamers out there and reading comment sections on sites posting BG3 reviews show clear separation between what most DnD player want and what normal gamers want.
I think best option for Larian and BG3 would be to identify key issues where DnD and non-DnD crowd disagree and, where possible without too much resources, to implement both options - maybe with 'true DnD' , 'default' and 'low DnD' modes, similar to how Dreadfire has normal and turn-based modes. But it may be resource intensive, as for example Dreadfire only offered turn-based mode long after game was finished. So I doubt this will happen for BG3 before launch.
Do you really know D&D5e ?
I'm absolutely not a D&D vet, I never played that game but I know the rules pretty much and you can believe me : the game would be far more fun,strategic and deep if the rules were better implemented.
Exactly like you... My biggest issue with this game is combats and I'm far from being a D&D/DoS purist...
Tactical decisions ? Tons of choices ? Synergies between characters ? Cover mechanics ? ... ? All this exist in D&D but not in BG3.
There are many possibilities in D&D right at level 1-4 to increase your %to hit. The action economy of D&D is an important part of tactical decisions/strategy. So are the tons of features, spells, skills, reactions,... But we don't have anything like this in BG3... Combats are boring after the "discoveries hours".
Many players also complaint because we don't have enough things to do during our turns... because we miss too often... because combats are too slow.... I'm 100% for more D&D and less "DoS" but guess what ? I totally agree.
Larian give us a bad solution with those bonus actions but the solution is easy ! Just increase the party size ! More action/turn, more synergies, more decisions, more strategy, more damages, more buffs, less (meaningfull) misses...
In any case, whatever the party size the difficulty is a joke and guess what... That's because of everything that doesn't really belong to D&D or is badly implemented (backstab, highground, jump, disengage, potions, grenades, dipping, shove, food, poison,...)
Combats in BG3 are not D&D combats... It's just a mixture that doesn't work well.
Many players saying "it's not enough D&D" share your feelings about annoying combats... But your solution is a bad solution to me. Everything combats need to be far better exists in D&D.
