I finished playing through early access and I found the story telling a bit weak at this point:

  • There are multiple hooks for removing the Tadpole, but they lead to nothing every time. Of course for the rest of the story to work, it can't solve the problem, but it feels very forced and frustrating that it doesn't give you anything for sacrificing both eyes, following leads to different sidequests, etc. It doesn't advance the plot at all and as such I consider it bad storytelling. In DnD terms, it's railroading. If for example you could cure companions, but not yourself for some story reason, this would lead to interesting character interactions and inject more background info. Would they stick around? If so, why? If not, will you meet again?
  • This cuts deep however: Because the main plot at this point is to find a way to remove the Tadpole and every attempt being foiled, I as a player have no reason to believe the next hook would be any different. Why would I follow the main plot at this point? I can see that the game is going for desperately grasping for any solution, but then there should be a justifiable belief that it's possible and more importantly a progression that tells us more about the problem. There was a tiny glimmer of that in the Hag solution, but not enough to get me invested.
  • The companions are a bit forgettable. For each of them you get the standard "dark secret", most are jerks and uncooperative (maybe with a nice facade) and cooperate because of story reasons, but their ambitions are at best to get away from their "dark secret". It would be nice if they'd differentiate a bit more and had more interesting goals in the future. Having a healthy variety of personalities and past-oriented vs future-oriented companion quests would feel a lot more satisfying. For example one of my favourite companions of all times was Kaelyn the Dove from the Mask of the Betrayer expansion for Neverwinter Nights 2: She didn't have much of a background story, but she wanted to storm the heavens for a percieved injustice of how the world works. Even if BG3 needs to stay with the whole evil party vibe because Baldur's Gate is a hive of scum and villainy, why not mix in manipulative evil, evil in the name of good, evil but loyal, evil for a purpose, pure-monster evil, pragmatic evil, trying-to-convince-yourself-to-be-evil, slowly-slipping-into-evil, ...
  • An issue (or opportunity) with most CRPGs: The companions feel isolated, with only the main character tying them together. More dialogue with more than two people would be interesting, to see how different viewpoints interact (requiring the previous point: different viewpoints). Part of why for example the Mass Effect characters were memorable was that they interacted more or less organically. That is possible with a relatively small cast of characters.
  • I personally would appreciate a "(sarcastic) Oh really, I'm shocked" dialog option at Astarion's vampire revelation. Or more fun: Make somebody else the vampire (though I suppose that's a bit harder) wink


I tried to make this as constructive as I could!