The one thing both me and my game character felt at the end of the game - freedom .
Freedom at last.
For her it was freedom from the brain eating tadpole and for me - freedom from this soul-sucking game. I will not be returning. One playthrough is more than enough for me - I have no desire to come back solely to make other, evil decisions, well, because I'm not evil.
The game is not necessarily bad. I think it's worth playing once, at least for the challenge of the tactical turn-based battles. I do recommend waiting at least another year before buying it - the game is certainly not finished. While Acts 1 and 2 are playable enough, Act 3 is messy, filled with game breaking bugs, which took me hours to overcome, and runs in the city under 30 FPS even after patch 3.
I'll break down my main issues with the game:

World-building
If I ever played BG1 and 2, I think I would feel more connected to the setting. But I don't believe game design has to rely on previous knowledge of the lore. As it is, in Act 1 you are thrown into this fully established world you know nothing about, the books you find are very underwhelming and the NPC you encounter are not helpful at all in terms of learning about the lore. I am a big fan of Bioware games - they did it right, in my opinion, as you move through their games you keep learning about the world from every source imaginable and it's all incorporated very organically within your gameplay, not in a form of info dumps or just no information at all. The books you find in Bioware games are also infinitely better. As a result I just didn't feel very connected to Baldur's Gate world.

Companions
Bunch of horny not fleshed out enough archetype characters. Why does everybody want to sleep with me? All the romances are extremely quick and unrealistic. When even the Emperor came on to me, I just wanted to take a long scrubbing shower. Seriously, it's just too much. Also something that I noticed, is how much Astarion, one of the more prominent companions, resembles in his story and heritage Fenris, a companion from Dragon Age. That of course may be just a coincidence, but I really didn't want to draw the comparison. Regarding gameplay, all the process of camping and inventory management across the companions. is very tedious, and also unnecessarily prolongs the game. Why can't I check someone's inventory without him being in my party? Why doesn't camp inventory have filters? It's all very basic stuff.
Biggest drawback? I didn't get to have bear sex. Halsin offered, I agreed, it just never happened. Disappointing.

Storyline
Coming back to the world-building point of this review, the setting itself and as a result the storyline felt too alien for me. Zero immersion, zero connection, zero caring. Moreover, I didn't feel at all that there is a lot of variety of how to resolve quests. Three ways to enter a building? Five ways to kill an enemy? Fine, but who cares? In the end, there is only good decision or bad decision, and also quests and content you could have missed on the way and accidentally get yourself locked out from, so now you have to come back for another playthrough. No, thanks. So you can be evil or you can be good, or you can be chaotic - sometimes good, sometimes bad. Why would I want to make bad decisions that let someone die? I'll never understand that. I finished all of the side content, I made the decisions I wanted to make and got the outcome I expected. Was it epic? Not really. Did it have an impact on the world? Maybe in one instance in Act 2, but we get to see it in one lagging cutscene and can never come back to the area, so...
Anyway, any kind of resolutions can feel very underwhelming or just non existent. You think you get some kind of reward or at least a mention in the end if you didn't succumb to the tadpole powers temptation during game? Think again. And thus we get to the ending. The ending. Oh, the ending. Before the spoilers let me just say, ♥♥♥♥ the final battles. Tedious, long, mind-numbingly boring, just another way to prolong the game. So all of this amazing "variety in gameplay" comes to the conclusion in form of battling the Netherbrain (again, the alien feeling) and guess what there is only one way to do it - someone has to be or become a Mind Flayer. So it can be the Emperor if he eats Orpheus, ♥♥♥♥ the Emperor, it can be Orpheus, whose storyline is the only one I felt somewhat immersed in, or it can be Karlach (but only if she happens to be in your party at the moment), the only companion who I liked because she had a spine, or it could be me - the one who resisted the tadpole powers throughout the game, think in her naivete someone noticed. Well, ♥♥♥♥ me. You see what I mean? It only seems there lot of ways to play this - but it doesn't change the outcome. You can of course betray everyone in the end and become an Absolute, doesn't mater how good you were all the rest of the game - the only thing that will change is you won't see the very limited and underwhelming outcomes of your companions. The only scene I liked in the end was Karlach scene in Avernus.

In conclusion, as you can see I put a lot of hours in Baldur's Gate, and I just don't feel it was worth it for all the important reasons. I didn't mention a lot of issues in this review, honestly my hands are already tired. For anyone who felt at least a bit like me during this game, I can recommend a game called Atom RPG - the character creation, the roleplay, the party turn-based combats - all the things we love in those games, but much easier to connect to the setting and to immerse yourself in the storyline.

Thank you for reading.