Originally Posted by mademan2
The companions react appropriately to what they feel is imminent doom, but while we, the players know we are in no actual danger at the moment, the characters, including ours do not, this is the inherent issue of giving us a timer like this but not providing any clear way to actually rush forward and try to at least learn that we are somewhat save as soon as possible. Thats on your Larian, you chose to put a death counter on our heads and yet let us wonder this world as much as we want without reprecussions, but honestly, I wouldnt mind this, if I had the feeling I am at least progressing towards a specific goal. We do have that goal but progressing towards it feels, as I said, like bunch of separate adventures that jus happen accidentally.
You find out via camp, there is several dialogs that lets you and your companions acknowledge the threat from the intro isn't normal (time restrained). Problem is its locked inside the camp system and the requirement to actually use the camp system is non existent. My first play, I went for a really long time before even sleeping/camping, getting by just using cantrips and basic spells along with pots to heal.

Originally Posted by mademan2
This I believe is in large part due to the world design and imo could be largely fixed by separating the world map into smaller places, like it was in previous Baldurs Gate games, this si something I hope will be added because the map already has several map icons, and it would also solve the issue where you can easily miss out on important plot elements if you do not take your time to explore everywhere, which feels very countrintuitive given that you are on said timer. You can add these interactions and important events as "random" encounters between the maps, its been done in the likes of Dragon Age Origins or Pathfinder Kingmaker and it works great in my opinion.

In regards to the main story not being very cohesive, or at least the pacing being off, I dont know how to improve that per say, but I do think more detailed journal system and more specific choices in terms of where to go and which quest you chose to follow would help. Also some kinda scene where you discuss it over with your companions and make a decision together, which way to pursue once you have more than one lead, they already express their opinions about it if asked anway.
This whole problem however stems from my second issue and that is the single player feel, by that I mean that the single player doesnt actually feel like its designed to be single player very much. From the way the game simply doesnt pause when you use esc., to the world being so large and interconnected, with multiple solutions to everything to account for more than one player at the time, it can be felt in pretty much all apects of the game.
This is certainly an unpopular opinion, given that many people will want to play this game with friends, at least upon further replays, but personally i do not plan to and I absolutely hate that the multiplayer level and game design from D:OS games is here in BG3. If anything, this is the thing I do not want taken from D:OS.
The game is simply designed for freedom of play, decision and movement of several players instead of one and it feels clunky and unwieldy (Is that a word?) when playing in single player. As I said before, being able to so easily miss out on important aspects of even the main plot, is imo down to this decision and the way multiplayer is implemented. It clear you wanted to follow the D:OS design philosophy of providing multiple ways to achieve and reach things and while this isnt neccessarily an issue even for single player, it makes the game feel incredibly disconnected, as if exploration was an enirely different part of gameplay than progressing the story and you simply cant avoid it.

This is a very hard thing to solve, id just mostly ask for better separation of single player and multiplayer, some of the issues can be aleviated with what I described above, cleaner ui, more information in journal, separate map, to give us better decision making, but it mostly comes down to the game feeling like its single player is the second most important, behind multiplayer and thats a feeling I very much dislike.
This has been an issue I had in D:OS 2 as well, I loved the lore and the story, but it was told in chunks and easily missable ones at that, it wasnt a coherent narrative the first time around at all and you know what, that was fine, because D:OS is a different series, but this is Baldurs Gate, again, this is the instance where just a new coat of paint on what you did in D:OS is not the best solution.
I could see the separation being helpful, generally I think it's related to map layout and everything being to close to each other. You can't run without tripping over something else. For example there is a goblin base just down the road from druid grove, go right gnolls, and go left swamp. There is a small road just to detour away from all this.

Greefall lets play, picked a random vid for world building example.

Originally Posted by mademan2
And my third issue, please correct me here if I am wrong, I very much wish to be wrong.
I hate the origin characters. I love them as companions, but the idea of origin characters is terrible and I am stunned its being continued with, especially in BG.
Pretty much, in DOS2, I don't remember the exact reason but I always got that the feeling that my custom character was inferior to the premades. There was some kind of in-game feature or something that caused this, think it has to do with the tag system and custom characters getting generic lines where premades get unique. It's like playing a pnp d&d game where the dm makes his own character, there will be favoritism in some form.