I'm not against the tadpoles in theory. I'm not even against the tadpoles being special and it turning out that we don't need to really worry about changing, but I think the handling of all that isn't really that good at this point. And a big problem is that the game starts out by telling us how worried we should be about the tadpoles then walks it back in a bunch of indirect ways almost immediately, which hurts the experience because that urgency actively discourages exploration from an in-character perspective. I know in my first playthorugh I tried to rest as little as possible and went straight for the Gith patrol because I thought that was the main quest, I thought transforming was a real threat and I thought the druid grove stuff was just side content. As a result I missed out on a lot of companion content and genrally had a pretty poor first experience because my lack of resting made everything in the game harder on me. I've seen arguments made that the game gives a lot of hints that transforming isn't as much of a problem as it seems but I think that when the issue is touted as the first big threat of the game, hints aren't good enough. We're primed to be laser-focused on the tadpole problem by everything in the story, primed to be concerned about the ticking clock they present, all of that. I think that in the face of that, there should be some sort of cathartic confirmation that we don't have to worry about changing. Otherwise it's just a lot of built up tension that at best kinda fizzles. Even in the context of it all being a mystery, part of the fun of a mystery is that the story itself presents you with the answer and you can have the catharsis of "yes, this is what's going on, I understand now." Even if you can figure out the mystery ahead of time, if by the end of the book, the story doesn't actually give you the answer, it's not going to feel as satisfying unless the point is to not have an answer. And I know we're not at the end of the game's story or even the end of the game's first act, but if Larian wants us to behave as though the tadpoles aren't an issue, then they should at some point give us narrative permission to fully relax and confirm that "it's okay, you don't have to worry about this." Otherwise, what do they gain by not providing that?
