Yeah I've had the same feeling, kinda. Even tho I'm not a deeandee player, I like my games slow. It's typical for RPGs however, when you have helping tooltips pop up and get killed by some rats or goats, and 5 hours of playtime later you're expected to kill a god or something. We can hope tho that we barely scratched the surface of the underdark and all this initial epicness is just a flashy intro which can be toned down even more in act 2.
For example, at the start we're flying a illithid ship that some illithids never had a chance to fly, we fly through hell, we witness the fight between an illithid and a demon/thiefling/whateverimnotadndplayer and so on, but right after that we're running around the remains of the crushed ship fighting illithid minions and imps, which as I see it are less important creatures, and right after we escape this starting area it already tones down quite a bit with enemies being mostly humans or goblins, and a couple of ogres to boot. However you get more interesting things if you explore. Pretty much all of the "too much" things you see after this initial moment come from straying from the main quest path and exploring. What I'm trying to say is that if you behave like a naive simpleton and don't explore anything, you won't see much apart from goblins.
