Playing Act I after having it already explored in depth during early access meant that I wasn't terribly surprised by various events or turns in the story. And so I took those situations and treated them as a D&D / BG3 puzzles: How can my group deal with this game situation most efficiently? Spoiler warning, but in my playthrough Auntie Ethel never left her tea house alive to hole up in the underground, I managed through several tries to find a way to kill her in the first round, before she could teleport away. I avoided being surprised by the Spectator with the use of a Darkness spell. And I avoided getting surprised by the Magma Mephits by hiding in Darkness and sending an animated skeleton forward to trigger their summoning. All this stuff isn't strictly necessary to win, but it helped me understand some of the finer details in the game mechanics of BG3, e.g. surprise from somebody who is already there, but invisible, compared to surprise from creatures summoned upon a trigger.

Looking at videos giving advice on how to play BG3, I noticed that I am playing on a very different level. Not really surprising given both my early access experience and 40 years experience with D&D. For example in several videos it is pointed out that you can use the "dip" action on your weapon to slightly increase damage output. Which is good advice if, and only if, you aren't using your bonus action for anything else. With more D&D / BG3 experience, the action economy (1 standard action, 1 bonus action, plus movement) becomes very ingrained, and I typically build characters in a way that they have use for their bonus action every round. For example the barbarian can use a bonus action to fly into rage, and then use his bonus action to make one additional attack every round afterwards, which is a lot more valuable than dipping his weapon into something. My warlock uses his bonus action for Hex, my cleric for Spiritual Weapon, and so on. I could probably play the game on the high difficulty level, but I do enjoy trying out various spells and things that might be suboptimal, and that works better on balanced difficulty.

The part that is the least fun for me in Baldur's Gate 3 is the gold economy. If you want to have enough gold, you need to click on every barrel, every crate, every corpse and loot absolutely everything. You can "send to camp" if that gets too heavy, but you still need to go to a trader regularly and sell all that junk. Junk loot, which only has a weight and gold value, but is either outright useless or simply not useful enough to keep, like a bunch of non-magical weapons, has always been my least favorite part of role-playing games. I much prefer games which have a lot less loot, but anything you do find is potentially useful.

I'm not saying that anybody should play Act I as I did, but I would like to end this post on a caveat: There are several story developments and interactions with companions that are scripted to happen during long rests. As I mentioned earlier, the game doesn't punish you for doing too many long rests, as long as you have the food for it. If you take relatively many in Act I, camp events simply stop happening, because you used up all the available cutscenes. But curiously you could theoretically be *too* efficient and play through Act I using *too few* long rests, and then these camp events would lag behind your progress in the main story. So don't hesitate to long rest.