One thing I will say is that I actually don't think the game does a good job of immersing you in the setting because having played through as much of act one as I have, I don't really have a clear idea of the setting. Like, I can guess it's classic medieavel fantasy, but we get hit with so many strange things that we don't really have a baseline for what normal is in the Forgotten Realms. I'm unfamiliar with the Forgotten Realms, and having played this, I only have a vague sense of how rare tieflings are, I only roughly know the place druids have in the setting. We don't actually have a sense of their power because Halsin, the leader of the druids, was caught by goblins. But those goblins were allied with powerful leaders, but we don'tsee any real displays of his power. Gale is a supposedly a powerful wizard from Waterdeep, a city we don't get to really learn anything about, but he's level one, so how powerful is a typical wizard in this setting? What place to they hold in the setting? What role does magic typically serve in the setting? Astarion has been a vampire spawn for overa centure but is still level one. And how common even are vampires in this setting? And Githyanki and mindflayers are unique creatures. I get the sense that they're rare, but are they as rare as vampires? Rarer? And we don't have any sense of who our player character was before this, and so we don't know if they're someone who would have special knowledge or not, so when dialgoue implies our character knows something, we can't really use that as a measure of how commonplace that knowledge is. So whether it feels like Baldurs Gate or not, what it doesn't feel like is a cohesive world. We don't ever get a good sense of how things normally relate to other things, so we can't fully appreciate just how weird things are. Sure, we took a trip into hell, but then we get to the grove and hear about an entire city that got pulled into hell. So...how much of a constant threat is going into hell in this world? Is it a standard thing that adventurers can expect to experience? The large number of tieflings (my favorite race by the way) would suggest that the presence of hell is at least somewhat pervasive.
People point out that Wrath of the Righteous also starts out really epic, but that's not entirely true. The first thing you experience, however shortly, is a festival. You get to look around a little bit and see "okay, this is a standard medieavel fantasy world. The place I'm in has a dragon protecting it and demons are a threat, but this place is an exception in those regards. It gives you a quick baseline for what normal is like. Plus you even get a glimpse at a few early companions. Then even after the demons attack, you're told that such a thing should not have been able to happen, so you can appreciate the gravity of it. On top of that, you can appreciate the horror of a day of celebration turned into a mass slaughter by horrific beasts. If WotR truly started like BG3, then your character would start off right as they were falling through the ground, seeing the demons swarming above them.
Regarding the companions issue specifically, I made an observation a while ago that I think still holds true; it's possible to make a crpg where an ensemble cast of the player and companions are all equally important and get the chance to shine, but I don't think that's what Larian is doing. To me it feels as though what they're doing is making a story where one character is meant to be the central character, but the story doesn't know who that central character is yet, so it's written to allow any of the characters to fill that role. And I think that's a mistake that keeps the group as a whole from feeling like a cohesive unit,
