I'm honestly neutral about the first.
I'm neither a fan or a hater of systems that use action points rather than dedicated actions to manage turns. As long as the system in its totality holds together both can work perfectly well.
I agree about the second point.
This is the way to handle "origins" in a way that keeps them interesting AND flexible enough (as some sort of extended background for your custom character), without making you feel that you're missing out on a companion to do so.
Absolutely not a fan of the other two, on the other hand.-
Withers and the mirror are the classical example of "convenience that kills any immersion". When you have it you use and abuse it, but then you realize that the game lost something in the process, as virtually no decision feels like a long term commitment anymore.
The stats and class of your companions don't matter, yours even less and you can even re-edit your look constantly. After a while it feels like nothing has any weight.
I'm not even going to argue against their inclusion because i know how popular they are and how much people would whine about their removal, but I'm still free to comment that I don't like them.
At most I could argue that I'd love to see their use severely limited in any future version of "Honor mode".
For instance: say goodbye to respec to "8 STR" later only because you are going to use the STR 23 gloves. If you want to do that trick, you'll have to suck up going through the whole game with STR set at 8.
The camp is bad in the sense I'd prefer an Owlcat-like system where your potential camping spots are contextual to the world OR you can simply camp anywhere there's enough space for it at your own risk.
The instanced pocket dimension is aggressively meh, as far as I concerned. I could kinda of dig if they managed to make it contextually meaningful maybe (i.e. In a sci-fi setting your base could be the starship you move around with).
"Non combat experience" is a sloppy solution that doesn't solve really anything (i.e. you can still abuse the system getting the exp reward for the non-combat solution and THEN triggering the combat anyway for the extra exp.
A far better system would be a "goal driven" one. "You get the exp ONCE to solve a certain encounter in whatever manner, but then if you go murderhobo you don't get any extra reward for it".
___________
And now, in an attempt to add to the topic rather than just criticizing it:
- One thing that I'd love to see return in one form or another is a REACTION SYSTEM. For all the silly concerns people had before they added it to this game that it would "slow the combat down", having the option of the occasional input even during the enemy turn never stopped being thrilling.
Incidentally I'm almost confident that's not going to happen, because most fraud modern videogame designers think they know better and that anything with a "tabletop vibe" is intrinsically obsolete and "unfit for videogame format".
- Another feature of BG3 I hope to see return in future Larian games is STATIC HANDPLACED LOOT. Words can hardly explain how much I loathed the randomized itemization of the previous DOS 1 and 2 and how much I dislike "random loot" in general.
