I'm mostly chalking the dated design of BG1 and 2 to the designers at BioWare rather than the D&D rules, but there are definitely things about the old rules that are just horrific. AoE stuns that last for 10 rounds may as well be instant death when they hit your party (5e versions of the same spells only target 1-4 opponents), and then you get to things like Energy Drain that semi-permanently drain entire levels in 2e but only temporarily drain one stat in 5e; the things that remedy or counter those spells basically require you to know what's around the corner, and the game doesn't foreshadow them.
But again, my expectation is that I had other ways to go hostile against these folks, especially after the goblin camp. But that scenario is basically set up to make that combat encounter next to impossible, but I didn't know that ahead of time, because after you clear the obstruction, the state of the map changes.
I likely would have enjoyed it far more without the automated adjusted difficulty, which mostly just ended up being that the game recognized I had too much ammo on me, so zombies took more shots to go down. It was quite noticeable. Unlike Resident Evil 3 that followed it, the adjusted difficulty would only subtract things from you rather than give you things when you needed them, which made me dislike it more. I searched for mods that would remove this part of the game, scrolling past a handful of mods to enhance the wet t-shirt effect on Claire, but I couldn't find any mods that would solve this problem for me at the time. I did enjoy it plenty despite this though.
It's incredible so far. I just made it out of Act 1. For the most part, you can come up with plans and ideas on your own, and they'll usually work, which makes you feel like a genius, but I have to call out two times that this specifically did not work the way I thought they would.
some light spoilers ahead
Early on, there's a target that you have to either eliminate or side with, and I choose to side with them, with the express purpose of getting them to let their guard down so that I can separate them from the group and eliminate them. The dialogue options even allude to the fact that this is a strategy they want you to use. This target wants you to sneak into another (good) faction and open a gate for a bloodbath of an assault on that faction, but the target also leaves their battle plans out in the open. So I figure I'd steal the battle plans, give them to the other faction, and just not open the gate, and then that target dies. Well, it doesn't work that way, and progressing that far along with the target invalidates the other quest entirely. Bummer.
The second is a fight right near the end of Act 1 where you've got to eliminate or side with a target again, in a room with a lot of lava, some slaves you can try to rescue, and a lot of enemies. Depending on how the dialogue goes right before the encounter, you either side with the target against the room full of enemies (but the slaves die), or you fight everyone. There are about 15 enemies in the room, which means they get a lot more turns than you, and since they're all grouped in that room, there's no real way to isolate them and take them out stealthily ahead of the encounter. I tried using a bard Performance to get them to all clump up so that I could push large groups of them into the lava, which was fairly effective, but then the slaves would join that group too, and it was very easy to aggro them. Worse still is that the slaves will happily fight you if you aggro them, but they won't join you to fight the other enemies in the room that enslaved them, let alone the target you're trying to eliminate. The only way I found through it was to reload an earlier save and to make different dialogue choices with a particular NPC so that some of those 15 enemies end up on my side in that fight when the time comes.
end of spoilers
The game usually lets me get away with whatever crazy plan I come up with, but I just wish these two points so far were a bit more flexible.
I just played through Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and the game is incredibly straight forward until you come across some weird thing that nullifies all of your damage; or AoE stuns your entire party; or requires a +3 weapon in order to land a hit; or de-levels your characters; etc. I don't think it's the Infinity Engine to blame so much as the encounter design. It's been about ten years, but I remember having a much better time with Planescape: Torment.
This game came out pre-Twitter, so I've been surprised to see how many people hated this game. I've revisited it several times since childhood and still enjoy it quite a bit. The different Kong stuff made it feel somewhat like a metroidvania.
That downtime in a battle royale creates a really fun tension. Unfortunately, it does feel like dominant strategies emerge in that genre a little too easily, and then they become repetitive, so you don't get that early feeling with the game for more than a few weeks.
MOBAs can take many forms, and a lot of them don't look anything like an RTS, but they do usually give you the good parts of leveling up and becoming more powerful in an RPG over the course of about a half hour.
My go-to for this is Resistance: Fall of Man. Invisible walls everywhere, a cover system and a health system that were absolutely at odds with a gun that shoots enemies through walls, and an uninteresting story told in boring slideshows. The only reason I played through it is that my college roommate and I were broke and needed another co-op game after we finished all of the good ones.