Hi guys!
I just saw an introduction by @Michal123 (greetings!) and he mentioned Baldur’s Gate 3 and his influence on DnD.
I also read about some controversy (this is rather Divinty: The Original Sin 3, had nothing to do with earlier Baldur’s Gate games or Forgotten Realms settings) and praise (game award) as well.
But more importantly: I never read, how you, as friendly forum members have experienced this game.
So, if you tried it, how do you like it?
I am enjoying it greatly, still not finished but working through.
What is interesting to me is the breadth of options I will try in battle vs campaigns - using grease bottles then setting them on fire, chucking things at people, shoving people off stuff - the general use of things beyond core character abilities.
The way the tweaked the bonus action is great, strongly approve.
The interpretation of the setting - early on - is a bit grim, the treatment of tieflings, rampant slaughter of goblins, true to canon but that stuff hasn’t been at tables I’ve played at for a while and I don’t miss it. Later on, it is a lot better, I really like the exploration of the implications of cultists of really nasty gods being about your society.
On a macro sense we have had a bunch of new folk rock up saying rhey tried BG3 and now want to try tabletop D&D - and that is awesome!
Regarding the controversy of it’s title and the Original Sin 3 jokes: Most of this critique came before or during EA of BG3 and I suspect it’s mostly from BG 1 & 2 fans, who are frustrated about the drastically different gameplay of BG3. But it’s been 20 years between Bg2 & Bg3 and the gameplay of 1&2 has been by far the only flaw people expressed (the very reason why the remaster of 1&2 has a mode, where you can’t die)
And to the Divinity Original Sin 3 jokes I say, they’re merely in the same genre. Bg3 is a lot more like Dragon Age than DOS2 imo
I am not familiar with Original Sin nor with the other Baldur’s Gate titles, so I only have tabletop 5e and of course BG3 itself as a comparison.
I really enjoy Baldur’s Gate 3 - I think the fact that I am on my 9th run now says it by itself 
There is so much to discover, even now on my 9th run I find things I overlooked in my previous runs and then only find because I randomly stumble across something, read online about them or someone tells me about them. It is amazing how many options we have in this game, how much detail Larian built into it - even all the way down to small things like the interaction of surfaces with elemental damage, the fact that pouring water over Karlach cools her off, the ability to throw literally everything in combat including other PCs and NPCs…
Most combat encounters benefit from great, three-dimensional maps (although in tabletop 5e you need to make sure that melees can reach enemies to do their job rather than having to dash or throw stuff all the time) and have things that definitely would be great to see in tabletop 5e games too, such as targets beyond just killing everyone or other ways that provide a feeling of urgency - like the drums in the goblin camp that can be used to call in reinforcements, if you do not either keep in mind to destroy them or manage to kill off the goblin running for them.
Also, I love that choices matter a lot in this game, that there are many different outcomes depending on what you did so far. One of my favourite moments is when Shadowheart stands in front of the Nightsong and you simply trust her and say nothing. Characters are great too, my favourite in terms of development is Lae’zel. I love how loyal and respectful she becomes if you romance her. Among the males, Gale is my favourite, I think his romance scenes are among the best, particularly when you are a wizard too.
From a technical perspective, the game is quite good too especially considering how huge it is. Yes, there are some bugs around and some of them can be annoying, but in general it runs very stable and butter-smooth with maxed graphics settings on my 1440p ultrawide. I only had like three crashes so far (and a couple more that clearly were mod-related). Soundtrack is great too, but there are issues with the sound mix/volume, as some sound effects are way too loud while music and somtimes voices are too quiet and get drowned out.
Now to some things I do not like about the game:
House rules in combat. Some of them are great like Ranger’s favored terrain changes, weapon actions or bonus action jumps to extend your movement as a martial, but others not so much, they are simply not thought through, like the Ranger’s favored enemy - a ranger would never use Sacred Flame or True Strike.
Also, I am not a fan of many changes to spells (Haste being broken, See Invisibility and Invisibility changes, Darkness mechanics) and to conditions (particularly Frightened, Prone taking your turn away and having no tactical use as you cannot willingly fall prone to impose disadvantage on ranged attacks against you, and some other fringe cases like Goading Attack causing you to lose control of your character rather than working as in 5e).
The lack of a pause function and the fact that the game does not pause when you are in a dialogue. I seriously do not understand why Larian did it this way, it makes no sense - and the fact that the game keeps going even while you are stuck in a cutscene has resulted in more than just one character death for me. For example, I had a TPK once when Gale died and the cutscene with his projection played, because I could not do anything about his necrotic aura killing my party. The traps on the way to the Blood of Lathander have blasted off my character a few times while I was in the dialogue to disarm them and succeeded on the check, and there are many other examples. Even when you can save-scum or revive with Withers, it is quite annoying.
Karlach’s story. I love Karlach as a character. She is so sweet and such a good soldier to have at my side. But compared to other companions she really has issues with her story. There are just two small fetch quests for infernal iron, nothing more. And there could be so much more. The steel watchers drop infernal iron all over the place in Act 3, their boss even drops an enriched infernal iron. There are gnomes who are expert smiths. A steel watcher says that Karlach has an outdated version of their engine and tells her to go to the foundry… and if you consider spells like Regenerate or True Res (Gale has a scroll of that one, after all) or the fact that Gale becomes a literal god at the end if he reforges the Crown the plot hole becomes even bigger.
Difficulty, Honour Mode. Only have played on Tactician and Honour mode so far. Act 1 generally is fine, but towards the end of Act 2, encounters somehow stop scaling, while the party still gets a lot more powerful as they continue to level and, more importantly, pick up much more powerful gear. Ketheric is so much more awesome as a boss than both Orin and Gortash. And yes, I do Gortash usually without disabling the steel watchers first because I want the more difficult fight.
Also, the AI generally feels kinda dumb to me, it is very easy to completely destroy most encounters with CC spells that mess up their movement and vision. It is not just that enemies keep trying to engage with PCs, no matter how many Hungers of Hadar, Walls of Fire, Plant Growths and Black Tentacles are in their way, sometimes they simply stand around and do nothing.
Finally, Honour mode. I love the higher difficulty compared to Tactician (although some legendary actions particularly later in the game are barely noticeable or don’t matter when the AI struggles with CC spells), but I loathe the one-save restriction. I would have loved even higher difficulty, so that I need to try boss encounters a couple of times to find a working strategy rather than playing what basically amounts to Tactician plus a few minor changes with the risk of the run being ended by a bug or misclick.
Compared to what we can expect, from game forges nowadays, I’d consider BG3 a very “finished” game. It needed some tweaking, but to be fair, Larian delivered, fast, very fast, even unexpectedly fast, taking all those patches into account.
Still nobody in marketing would say: "Well, release the game on Date X, we’re letting you play a nearly finished game. " But Larian knows, that they have the community on their side, cause they delivered an amazing game, and an easily modable at that. So they gonna def. fix it, moreover make it better! I just wanna blow the horn for all that modders out there, who enjoy making our experience prime! Its based on DnD, and what do we do as a community? We homebrew, make it to our liking! You should def. try out some mods, if you haven’t already 
To your point 2) never experienced that, sure a round based combat with a pause function would be nice, like in Dragon Age, still it is quite refreshing not to have that, from my point of view it makes the encounters feeling quite real. You have to plan-in real time, Nightmare mode in MMORPGs isn’t forgiving, and most of the time you do your stuff in real-time. Still to get hit while in a Conversation must be a bug, which I never encountered. Maybe the fixed it?
Anyways the scaling doesn’t work out, therefore I’m back at mods And if scaled right, no misclicks, everyone should be knowing whast they’re gonna do like in any NIM mode
Oh, I am deep into modding. Have already well over 50 mods for BG3 (and hundreds of mods for Skyrim). WASD movement is a godsend in terms of controls, 5e spells is a must-have if you like spellcasters, and I have many more mods for convenience, equipment, subclasses, races…
I will also try out some difficulty mods on my next run.
I don’t get how it can be “refreshing” to not have a pause function at all in a single player or local multiplayer game. Having to decide in real life generally is fine, but real life sometimes demands you to go away from keyboard. Also, regarding damage/death during cutscenes, maybe you just got lucky? I know that I am not the only one who had characters die because the game did not pause during a cutscene. I read quite a few posts about similar things on Reddit, sometimes (almost) ending honour runs.