I'll do a proper review myself once I fully finish the game, but your post hit many of my grievance points well enough.
Ultimately, I enjoy the game. And while the flaws become more apparent the longer I play - and especially so when I feel both interest in Act 3, but also like I'm forcing myself through it at times - I would still cite it as being probably in my top 5 cRPGs for now, and just like DOS2, I can enjoy it despite the flaws.
But that said, I've always had a complicated outlook on Larian as a studio, and their games as a result. I do feel they vastly improved BG3 since EA, at least - heck, EA turned me off of it entirely, as I only enjoyed it when playing with a friend, but had so many issues with the way it wrote itself and how... not Baldur's Gate it felt. I do at least feel like it can carry the Baldur's Gate name now, even if not perfectly - but as much as I love BG1 and 2, they weren't perfect or entirely well-written start to finish, either.
But, despite being able to enjoy it, and feeling it better carries the franchise' legacy name now, I still ultimately feel the same complex sense of dissatisfaction with it as I do with all Larian games. And I'm going to swear up and down until the cows come home, that Owlcat would have been a much better company to give the D&D license and Baldur's Gate franchise to.
Hopefully I can finish soon, and maybe try to brain a proper review after.
The summary of mine would be 'It's great, until it isn't.' In many, many ways it feels like that meme with the horse drawing. Act 1 is the flash and sparkle that sets up a game that ultimately doesn't exist. Act 2 the flaws start becoming readily apparent, but there is still enough there to enjoy yourself even if all the 'extras' are noticeably trimmed and then Act 3 is a mess that doesn't seem to know what it's doing, why it's doing it or how to end on top of the technical issues coming to a head. It's fun despite the warts, but man...
There are a lot of warts.
I agree for certain, and especially as time goes on, it slowly falls down and down the list of enjoyable cRPGs for me. No longer in the Top 5, and feels mostly held up by its gameplay at this point - which, despite Larian's distaste for 5e to the point they took all consequences away from using the tadpole powers, is still incredibly fun and well-done.
The story is a mess, though. Both in terms of the timeline of events, how glaring some of the rewrites are, how poorly treated some characters are, how messy others are...
I basically can't care about Shart's story anymore, because of treatment of a certain old BG character in her storyline. I don't WANT to do her story anymore, to the point I don't take her with me anymore (or get her killed so I can at least take the prism off her).
Wyll? I took him with me to
meet his father, and he literally just stood there in silence the entire time, then when I directly spoke to him after because he had a little exclamation mark, he acted as if I was coming and telling him about the experience, rather than... having been standing right beside me the entire time.
Which really feels like it's a bug, but Act 3 is such a bloody mess that I genuinely can't tell if it's a bug, or he just got shafted that hard by his close-to-deadline rewrite. Either way, it just soured me entirely, to the point I no longer pick him up.
Karlach's endings are so mishandled I can't bear to take her with me anymore.
Halsin? We have a nearly 70 page thread about what's wrong with Halsin.
Lae'zel and Astarion feel like the only two companions who are mostly well-written or at least don't have a ton of "warts", as you call them, in their storylines.
Gale is just kind of there.
Jaheira is mostly fine, no comment on Minsc since I haven't seen him yet.
BG3 is, effectively, a spectacle best enjoyed by mindlessly going along with it. If you look too hard, it all begins to fall apart.
I've basically only got three playthroughs left planned, then I don't know if I'll be picking the game up ever again - unless a Definitive Edition release magically fixes the copious amount of problems it has, from storyline to lore to bugs to endings, etc. And only one of those playthroughs will involve taking any companions besides Astarion, really. One of them will be a pure hireling "solo" run for an evil Durge, because I just cannot care any more about these characters - not because I dislike them, but because almost all of them are so mishandled or shafted that it becomes too disappointing and frustrating to go through 90+ hours for their stories.
It's not a terrible game, but it just... isn't a good one for me, I suppose.
