I don't play many PC games these days because of how woke a lot of the shit is. I got burned on Cyberpunk, so now I pretty much play FS2020 and that's it these days. The last game I played through was System Shock remake, which I found to be decent enough.
BG3 won game of the year from Worth a Buy, but I hear it has a lot of gay sex?
I'm not a fan of Larian's level design, 5E D&D, or the plot in general.
-Making the life cycle of illithids the main story, then just ignoring it for plot reasons is really weird to me
-game has you fighting out of depth monsters at level 1 like the mind flayers and cambion, for the sake of "drama" and getting the player hooked. I hate this and think D&D games should start small. If you want to hook players, make the first few quests really quick and easy, don't try to overwhelm me with over the top nonsense.
-After the bombastic intro you are just dropped into some random woods. You spend most of the rest of the game wandering through these insignificant woods and caves to get to the city. It's myopic and uninteresting.
-Small, cramped levels. The whole game feels like a dungeon, which is dumb. It shouldn't be this hard to just walk to the city. I would rather see a proper world map instead of this kitchen sink woods.
-Because you need every bit of XP to survive, you have to comb the woods for every last thing to kill. I'd rather pick and choose from quests and interesting activities than be forced to lawnmow an extremely boring map.
-Backwards quests. Often you walk into an area and there's a bunch of NPCs in the middle of some shit, and you get a quest to deal with it. This is backwards, the PCs should be picking up quests and then going in search of adventure. Stumbling into every random shack and cave that has some epic quest in it makes the game world feel, well, like a video game.
At one point I walked into an area, immediately got like three different quests about duergar and a tower and myconids, and I thought this was all weird and random, and turns out it's all the main quest and you need to do it to proceed in the game. WTF is even this design. I have no concept of a goal or destination and the game is just randomly saying "well this area has to be completed now because shut up, that's why."
I do agree with you on all your points. Especially the first 2, I was starting to feel I was the only one annoyed that you can fight a hag, beholder and drow at level 3-4.
The illithid part aside, the entire evil plan was just so that 1 guy can take over a city?
Isn't that underwhelming? In BG1 it was take over a city to make war with Amn, create a massacre the size of a continent in order to become the lord of murder and he did not even have a god power crown to help.
The small cramp level and the world feeling more like a themed park rather then a large world is how Larian does games, this is just DOS2 but with 5th edition D&D rules. Them changing how the game is made would have been complete trash of a game, it was better to let them do what they were already familiar with.
I disagree with that that you have to get your quests from a questhub somewhere its not an mmorpg and even there I hate it makes exploring no fun if you just collect all quests in a city and follow the quest markers to the goal.
Also the area with duergar/myconids is optional you can also go over the mountainpass (no underdark needed) and directly into the shadowlands if you can beat/avoid a few level 5ish undeads where the shepards can rezz the ghouls.
Overworld map would have been great but devs probably didnt want to balance the game arround the legendary items in the city.
I've played tabletop for 20 years and I've never seen a campaign made this way. No one just wanders around and finds epic quests under every rock and leaf. Players start from some kind of safe point and go out in search of adventure based on requests, rumors, and current events.
Landing in a random patch of woods with so much crap going on in a 100 yard radius is absurd. The goblins and druids are 3 minutes away from each other, and yet they "can't find the other's location."
All they had to do was let you find a tavern or inn on the road after crashing and hear rumors about the various quests there, and then made them discreet locations. Like BG1, not MMOs.
Do you have any specific quests in mind here which dont fit while you travel? It really arent that many epic quests really on the road. Only one which comes to my mind is the chest with beholder bottle in it. And that only really gives you an option to trade in the zentarim hideout. And the only tavern early on you find is burning. The Githranki on the road make sense because a giant ship crashed near by.
Cant really think of any major quests you cant pick up in npc hubs unless you count the Ravengard rescue from the burning tavern. Nightsong quest starts in the druid grove which is a big quest hub.
This is exactly why I never finished Divinity: OS2. This game is exactly like it.