Unfortunately, there are not a lot of quests you can work into escaping from a prison. In Divinity you started in a town, so there was more variety and more interaction right off the start. I doubt the Larians would drop that in Beyond Divinity, but the initial location kind of limits the quests you could reasonable expect to encounter.

Other than the lack of a 'select all' hotkey (to reduce mouse travel), I didn't have any problems with the combat system.