Bigger is not better, but try tell that to Larian’s writers.
This is the exact problem, I think. Even with a more 'serious' tone, Larian's writing tends to go maximalist.
That can have its own charm, but it pretty much kills off any chance to establish stakes and atmosphere - and in general it feels like a poor fit for a level-one DnD opening to introduce the player to the setting and story.
When I was playing the first sequence of BG3, I kept thinking that a BG2 (or Icewind Dale, or Mask of the Betrayer, or any of the earlier set of DnD games) might have set up the story more gradually, like this.
The PC awakens in the darkness of a crashed mindflayer ship, freeing themselves with a gasp from a defective pod. All around them are bodies - mindflayers, thralls, and others. It's eerie, and dank, and strange down here. Most of the machinery is broken, and a few vicious scavengers are skulking the wreckage. The PC also has a horrible headache, a feeling of weakness and pain, and doesn't know why.
Gradually, they must navigate the dangers of the dark crashed ship, find their way to the exit and daylight, and en route they encounter a couple of other former prisoners who reveal that the PC has been tadpoled and is at risk of being turned into a mindflayer.Now, that's not fine art - but I would call that good RPG writing. To me, that much slower pacing is a chance to establish atmosphere and mood, and to engage the player with the PC's situation by building up the mystery one piece at a time. (What's happened to the PC? Why are the mindflayers dead? How did the ship crash and where are we now?)
It establishes a clear sense of place and starting after the crash gives the game a chance to build up the weirdness and alien-ness of this ghost ship environment, which then means that the escape to the surface will be all the more satisfying when it comes - a real sense of relief that rises out of the contrast between the empty, dead ship and the living outdoors.
And it gives the player a clear understanding of their own vulnerability, too, the sense of being alone in the dark and having to scavenge their way to freedom surrounded by the corpses of their far more powerful captors.
By contrast, BG3 has the PC wake up on a crashing ship with fire everywhere. There are imps and thralls and red dragons and intellect devourers and big red devils with giant swords, and we're in hell and now we're not in hell, and everyone immediately knows what's happened with the tadpoles so they just shout at you to follow them, and-
-and there's a frantic busyness to that storytelling that kills off the atmosphere and mood right away.
It feels harder to take the PC's plight seriously or to be intrigued in finding out more when there's so much going on. There are too many threats and no sense of how dangerous they are to the PC. And we can't fully appreciate the strangeness and creepiness of the illithid environment when everything's on fire and crashing all around us.
