I think many here are quite jaded to the starting experience because they've already done it. I played this game with some friends and we could work through it easily enough, most of them don't care about story so it was easy to just get through the beginning by talking and initiating combats randomly, or choosing options of aggression.
My wife, on the other hand, was plopped into this game without having that same sort of aggression, and was left puzzled 100% by what to do when you get in the town with tons and tons of people to talk to. You don't need to have a "GPS Tracker" as some point it to have a better framing to the start of the game. Yes, you -can- infer lots and lots of information from the beginning about what happened. But a little framing to the beginning of the game is not so horrible. We started playing the D:OS1 and she's been loving it. It certainly doesn't hold your hand at all, either, but the short animation in the beginning; the tutorial dungeon to set expectations. We are extremely early on in the game, level 3, maybe? And she's been way more receptive to it. She's trying to craft, despite it being very difficult in the first.
This game offers none of that, and I'm fairly sure its because its still EA, which is what I've told her. Even the beginning of DOS1 was developed further when it came to the Enhanced Edition. So I think its fair many people are expressing a concern about the intro to the game.
As furthering with my wife as an example. She didn't talk to the elf in the beginning, she missed her entirely by going the other direction. Everyone she talked to moved to be aggressive - something she didn't know was going to happen and we got thrown into constant fighting in the town. (I put it on explorer mode, because she's not tactical in her games - despite that I've done the EA in classic mode already with not much trouble.) But from her perspective, it doesn't feel like we've accomplished anything but just fighting people in the town, who are also slaves like us, for no reason.
This is a bit counter intuitive, as people who don't care about story (My friends) are fairing better than someone who does care about story (my wife). She looks at things from a general direction of what she we do, vs. most of my friends looking at it from the "what are we strong enough to kill" perspective. I think that needs a little toning up.
Nobody here is asking for something to hold our hands, but the characters expressing their interest at the start of the game would give us a better goal and something to look for. I think much of this just has not been developed out by Larian yet.
The open-endedness needs to continue, and the routes of getting there are good to keep hidden, but I think it needs a little bit of framework in the beginning section of the game. Everything post-fort is great, and hell, once you get INTO the fort it gets pretty damn good and exploratory too.
