This game (and Larian's design style in general) suffers from the "Mario Level" design problem. The environment has too much video game and not enough realistic world. D:OS was particularly egregious with this, with practically every pack of enemies having mysteriously chosen to spend their lives on patches of ice or slime, with barrels of oil as their only shelter, the poor blighters. BG3 is a little less blatant with that but still does not come close to representing a believable environment. There should be gas vents where it makes logical sense for there to be gas vents, not where the developers thought it would be interesting to inconvenience the player. Who exactly went to the trouble of installing entire grids of gas vents in the rock floor of the Underdark? Why not make it a natural phenomenon present in certain parts of that cavernous world, instead of literal man-made traps? It's just so cartoonish, which is a complaint I have about BG3 in general. It's a playable cartoon.
Exactly. This is most obvious in the hag's lair. Why break the immersion and force me to play Mario? You could contrive a reason why there's gas vents (conveniently next to explosive flowers! Oops!) leading down to the "final boss", but in no way can you justify the Hag just waiting for me in an empty, large round room with a literal "damsel in distress" locked in a cage hanging over a bottomless pit. Cartoonish.
At least they worked around the barrel problem. Somewhat.
