This is entirely fine in and of itself, but the character is then given very clear and obvious breadcrumbs to follow to resolve that ticking clock, which require you to functionally ignore the entire game if you want to pursue them in a realistic fashion.
Absolutely nobody is going to concern themselves with a refugee crisis when at any moment they could turn into an illithid and turn the refugee camp into a new illithid hive, and, importantly, they know exactly where they need to go to potentially prevent that eventuality.
Very little needs to be changed to fix this. The first is to remove any reference to anyone having seen Githyanki nearby, and to make the implication that nobody has ever seen gith before the crash. This ensures that while the ticking clock is stressful and threatening, there's no clear way to resolve it, and the player can decide how their character would go about trying to deal with a looming threat with hypothetical resolutions (greater restoration, gith shenanigans) but no clear path toward any of those solutions because they don't know where they would find a powerful enough healer, or make contact with the Githyanki.
One bonus to this method is that it transforms the mission from "go find the gith" to "do your best to find something to help you, while waiting for the gith who were chasing your ship to show up" which actively encourages you to stay in the immediate vicinity, and involve yourself in the local concerns. The gith patrol can still trigger identically at the same location, gameplay doesn't need to meaningfully change, but there's a big difference between the player knowing to progress the plot they need to go to X, and the character knowing that in order to save their life they need to go to X.
Very fine point. I remember back when I played Divine Divinity, when I was very new to cRPG and clueless about how to play that game (and my English was still pretty poor too), there was this sense of having no idea what to do and where to go. I just wandered the whole maps, exploring, talking to new NPCs, killing monsters, trying to follow every lead I could get a firm grip on, trying to reach unexplored areas, etc. Eventually it worked out and I reached the end of the game after quite a while. I must say, the experience was rather magical. It was the summer holiday and I essentially forgot everything about life and was absorbed into the game.
I for one would prefer Larian to maintain the "not holding your hand" approach. You're just left somewhere in the game world with very little clue as to where you should go next or what you should do next. It just feels good when you finally stumble upon the next major clue without seeing it coming.
The thing with doing this, however, is that the so-called "challenge rating" of encounters probably need to be balanced in a different manner than they are in DOS and DOS2. Playing DOS and DOS2 you get a pretty clear idea the
intended route that you should take looks like, thanks to the not-so-subtle enemy levels sticking to enemy names, and how level difference affects combat. To allow players the freedom to roam and the flexibility to go to different areas and can still make decent progress, combat has to be designed in such a way that it is possible for the party to beat "higher level" encounters, even though it may be tough. Of course, encounters that are meant to be very tough should still be very tough, but you know what I mean. One nice thing about the old BG games is that you have a lot of freedom - at least during the early game - to pursue a wide range of quests and go to a lot of different areas. The quests are not on the same level of difficulty, but by "playing smart" you can beat difficult encounters which could be said to be meant for a higher level.
