I haven't read all 8 pages, but yeah, the OP makes a good point.
I am one of the people who never played the first two BG games. I did just pick the Enhanced Editions of them on GoG recently, but I've never played them.
Larian does quite well with detailing local areas, but it doesn't do so well at painting an overall picture of the world, and that's been pretty consistent through most of their games - not just BG 3. For instance in D:OS 2, walk around Driftwood and there's lots of people talking about Driftwood, lots of information about the local Driftwood scene... but the next town over has fallen into a fiery rift and I don't think many, maybe not even ANY people talk about that. I would expect that if the neighboring town had fallen into a hell pit, people in Driftwood would be talking about that a LOT, if only to be worried about their own town falling into a death crevasse.
Other plot points fall flat too because there is just too little information presented on the setting. For instance, Beast's story arc in Arx:
The queen of the Dwarves tries to wipe Arx off the map because of the Magisters. She sees that faction as a threat. But D:OS 2 doesn't explain the context well. What is the leadership of the human race? What is the political situation like that makes genocide seem like the best solution?
We don't know, the game doesn't provide much information about the political situation. The problem is that it's trying to hinge character stories and choices on geopolitical issues which the world doesn't provide sufficient information or context to give the player anything to latch on to.The lack of world-building information is a blind spot in the writing which Larian could do better at.
The screenshot from Pathfinder was a good example of a way to help alleviate the issue. I think some sort of codex with brief blurbs like the example would help a lot. Common knowledge should be there from the start, and more niche stuff could get unlocked as it comes up. It doesn't need to involve changes to spoken dialogue, but perhaps as certain things get mentioned, a little notification could pop up, something like: "[New/Updated] Codex entry: Waterdeep", for instance that players could freely ignore, or read if they really do want to know more. A lot of the lore already exists, which could save time creating it, although deciding what goes into the entry could be a lot of work, not to mention finding all points in conversations where things come up, so it would still be a significant amount of work.
