I don't have the game yet, but I can certainly see the point here. I definitely do not want to read a 4-page, in-game book to get a sense of the local history. But at the same time, the local stories need to be told somehow. I thought the bartender/tavern chat was a great thing to have in the original Baldur's Gate, just like in a D&D module. But in my first try at the Friendly Arms Inn, I got drunk from five golden meads, never got any real information, and then had to go to bed. They set the cups threshold way too high and ruined the feature. I never tried it again.
"Say there Bluffer, put up a dram to soothe me dusty throat. And while yer at it, 'afore I get clear this darkmans, pray tell, where can a willing ear with a rum bung be told of the place called ... City of Brass, eh now?"
They're likely to say "The City of what now?" to that query, since we're not on the elemental plane of fire, and we're not at a mage's conclave, where someone might know anything. "Local stories" are just that, local. To pull one example from the OP, news about Waterdeep wouldn't be local. I live in the central US, that would be like me going to a bar and expecting to get gossip about things in Tokyo. Gale has a lot of exposition, about the Weave, and Mystra, because those are the things that consume his thoughts. I have no idea what kinds of conversations are going to be possible in Act 2, or in Act 3. Nobody does, but it's automatically "we're not going to learn anything about it".
In regard to actual local stories, we do get information. It does require doing some reading, and chatting up various NPCs, though, as opposed to being spoon fed the information. One of the iterations of this thread went on for pages because the entirety of the Pantheon wasn't laid out in the prologue, because SH is a Shar worshipper. Hence my previous comment, because in order to "catch up" with "the story so far", there would have to be a resource that covers nearly 40 years of material, from 1st Edition forward, so that someone that's never played, or isn't a lore junky, will be "up to speed". All of this material is available, even in updated "you don't need to read anything but this" formats, for the current edition of the game, and I'm not talking about BG 3 here, but Dungeons and Dragons in general, but expecting someone that wants to know these things to actually look it up is a bad thing.
Someone sitting down to talk with me is going to be disappointed if they're looking for news about where I live. I'll talk about games, and my motorcycle until the cows come home, but I won't be talking much about the city I live in, it's not prominent in my experience, it's just a backdrop for the things that are important to me. So, when I see a character in a game doing it, I'm not surprised, in fact, if I hadn't read about it here, I wouldn't have even noticed. If Waterdeep figures prominently later, I expect we'll get some exposition, but I don't expect we'll get 40 years of "what came before", but instead that we'll get information pertinent to what we're doing. A good example would be the Chanters in Candlekeep in BG, doing the "The Lord of Murder" chant. I had no idea that it was relevant to me in my first playthrough. I was in the dark about a lot of things Faerun back then. But I didn't hit a forum looking to complain that nobody laid out the full story in the prologue.
