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'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 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."