Simply put, I've gone through a large chunk of act one and I feel as though the game has done little to nothing to really introduce me to the setting of Faerun.
As someone whose knowledge of the setting is only gleaned via the players manual and snippets I've gotten from the forum, I don't actually know very much about the setting at all. I can make reasonable guesses, but I don't know much. The game seems almost allergic to giving us clear worldbuilding. And that's to the game's detriment I feel. Obviously we shouldn't get long, dull info dumps, but we know virtually nothing about the world beyond this nameless area. I have no sense for what's normal, in the world. For instance, we're dealing with the Hells a lot in some form or another. Should I as a player assume that the Hells are a common foe for adventurers? What about this talk of Elturel being dragged into the Hells? Should I assume that that's something at all common? I assume it's uncommon, but how uncommon? Is it almost unheard of? Or is it like a natural disaster? Something rare, but common enough that everyone's at least familiar with the concept, even if they've never interacted with someone who's experienced it first hand. What about druids? How common are druids? Based on act one, I would assume that druids are a thing that everyone knows about, though most people haven't ever actually met one. Gale talks about Shadow Weave, but what actually is that? Aunt Nettie can potentially tell us the tadpole is influenced by netherese magic, but what is that? Why can't we ask Gale about it?
This goes beyond just broad questions of baseline normality. Our characters are supposedly meant to be from Baldur's Gate, but we know next to nothing about the place that the person we're playing as is supposedly from. And yet we have a fellow Baldurian in our party that we could talk about the place with. We don't know anything about Waterdeep either, when Gale seems the type who would happily talk our ears off about the place. However we do get a loving description of the Astral Plane from Lae'zel.
Compare that to something like Dragon Age: Inquisition. You get dropped in the thick of things, but after a handful of hours playing, you get an understanding of what's going on around you. And by the time you get to Haven and go around there for a bit, you should have a sense of what the baseline normal of Thedas is. Then there's Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. You spend your first few minutes there getting introduced to the setting in surprisingly subtle ways. You learn that demons are a threat, but they're a localized one, and that the city feels they have it under control. You're injured and you meet someone who uses divine magic to heal you. As they do so they say prayers, so you know that magic has some sort of connection to the gods. And you get a few minutes to see a section of the city and get a feel for it before the crazy stuff happens. And after you get safe finally, you can talk to your companions and learn more about the world through them. Not to mention talking to various NPCs.
Am I the only one who feels this way? The game just doesn't seem interested in actually conveying information about its setting and I hope that changes.
