Originally Posted by mrfuji3
Originally Posted by Gray Ghost
To your issue about tadpole urgency, Piff, youre right that it's ultimately not AS urgent as it's initially presented. The problem I've found is that the way they present that revelation that it's not so urgent. It's given through little bits of context clues scattered throughout act one. Hints and things that you can find out. And the issue with this in my opinion is that given how the urgency was built up at the beginning, the game needs to give some kind of definitive moment of catharsis where we can actually feel the tension come to an end, as opposed to scattered hints that it's possible to not internalize, or to miss entirely.
There is a singular moment of catharsis - the early party long rest cutscene, where everyone feels sick and Lae'zel wants to kill us because she thinks we're turning. But then we wake up feeling perfectly fine, conclusive evidence that our tadpole is different from normal ceremorphosis.

However, it is (was? Not sure if fixed in later patches...) incredibly easy to entirely miss this cutscene if you don't rest early enough. If you, reasonably, think that you're on a time limit and push as far as you can, other cutscene triggers can overwrite this one. Basically, Larian needs to adjust things so that we're forced to rest and see this cutscene. I suggest exhaustion; after finding Lae'zel, our party immediately gains a level of exhaustion (prompt cutscene where party members say they need to rest). If we continue to adventure, in another minute we get another level of exhaustion. And then another. And then another. At 4 or 5 levels of exhaustion we get more party dialogue saying they need to rest, and disapproval by most (approval by Lae'zel) if we continue on. So player's aren't completely forced to rest, but they're heavily encouraged.

See, I don't think that's truly conclusive though. All it does is confirm that things are strange. It's another mystery, one that potentially can happen early enough in the game that you lack any information to really extrapolate from it. Sure we can guess that what we felt was ceremorphosis being interrupted, but I don't think you get the effect if there's still uncertainty floating around. Also, just because it's different than normal doesn't mean anything firmly. It's all just adding a layer of mystery and uncertainty. My problem is that they seem to be trying to have it both ways and failing. Either keep up the sense of tension and uncertainty and design the game with that in mind, or firmly and definitively relieve the tension. Based on what they seem to want to be doing, Larian should find a way to firmly establish "we don't need to worry about changing anytime soon, we can take our time" and then postioning it so that the mystery of why is truly front and centre.

At the end of the camp scene you talk about, everyone assumes that it was just them having had a bad meal, no one knows what happened and the idea that it had to do with ceremorphosis isn't even brought up again. We as the audience can guess, and that's great for keeping us tense and wondering what's going on. But that's not catharsis. That's not a big, emotional release. That's building up the tension. Oh, we thought the big moment was here but instead it was nothing. Now we know less than we thought we did. The tension of this plotline doesn't rise to a crescendo. It rises and then fizzles out.