This is what I mean when it's important to make sure that the story is consistent, that there is setup and payoff - the universe might be the DM-s playground, but provide the wrong toys and tools and no one will be interested. I of course don't mean to criticise the way you enjoy playing your DnD sessions, but when it comes to assessing quality and creating an immersive story, you can't break and bend the rules as you want on a whim. (And to be extra clear: You can of course create a universe where the Mind Flayers are all benevolent or something like that. But it has to be very clear that this story is set in it's own universe, and it's also important that the writer/storyteller puts in the work to establish the rules of this new world)
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And I'll say this as well - it's not that incredibly immersion breaking to see someone live way past their natural life cycle (of which by the way, previous commenters pieced together why that is very likely possible). But as I said before in this thread, the more holes the audience have to fill in, the more work the audience does for the writer, the story's quality worsens. It's a snowball effect.
This is all true. If BG3 was a book, we could rip it to shreds on these things alone. But it's a videogame that didn't have unlimited resources. We can't have EVERYTHING explained, but it's absolutely true that there things that should have been explained but aren't. I'd say Acts 1 and 2 do their job fairly well with a few exceptions (the Chosen not getting enough screentime, for example. Nere gets zero build-up and his arc is inexistant unfortunately), but what really makes the writing insufficient is act 3. Imagine all the lore tidbits we could have had in act 3 that would explain so much of the world - Baldurs Gate is massive, it has such diversity, there are opportunities to introduce ANYTHING in there. Any plotholes that are found can be filled in act 3, even if the devs don't touch any of the previous acts.
I'd love it if we could just say "show us" and Larian would snap their fingers and make it happen, but it's not that easy. I'm sure they are paying attention to this thread and are going to at least show us some things for the definitive edition. The definitive edition of D:OS2 did SO MUCH for story, it was incredible. I'm sure Larian will do as much as they can for BG3 too.
And I will say this - telling a story in multiple media outlets is plain and simply retarded. You can't make up for certain mistakes or establish a timeline and / or rules in a medium that no one is actually going to interact with as your main audience is already in the video gaming world.
God, yes.
It's already risky when we're taking up some extremely old videogames, written by different writers, made on a different engine in a different style, etc etc. I'm fairly certain catering to the restrictions of consoles and handheld devices held BG3 back a lot.
The only time this worked out well (imo) was when someone actually took all the dialogue from the Planescape Torment and wrote just enough to tie everything together, so that people who do not play videogames could enjoy the amazing story in written form. It wasn't perfect still, but what we're seeing these days is incredibly bad. WOTC basically sells their licence to whoever has the money to pay for it (have you seen those horrible p2w D&D mobile games?) and check if people actually liked the content - if they did, WOTC starts "canonizing" things, including them in modules and novels. The result is usually disgusting, buying the Baldur's Gate novels is one of my worst book purchases. Characters like Lae'zel and Astarion are already included in one of the idle cashgrab games, I don't even want to know what their in-game descriptions look like.
