I am a new player to the Baldurs Gate series, this is my first time playing any of the games, and I'm not familiar with the setting of Faerun or the Sword Coast. Something that was sead in passing above made me think of something; this game doesn't really give me a sense of the setting. Maybe it's because of how much faerun has influenced other fantasy stuff, but playing through the game, I haven't really gotten a sense of place from act one, no sense of why the area I'm in is unique in anyway. It feels like this could just be any random wood area. In contrast, when I played Solasta I got a sense for the vibe of the setting really quickly. Same with both Pathfinder games and the Pillars of Eternity games. Same with the Dragon Age games, I could go on. It doesn't really feel like I'm in a particular place, just that this is where the adventure is. I'm not someone hung up on having a day/night cycle, I don't think I need that for immersion, but the area we're in doesn't feel like part of a larger whole really. It feels like a generic "area of adventure" when someplace like the Stolen Lands from Pathfinder: Kingmaker really felt like it was a unique place with history and connections to the world beyond its borders. But with BG3 it feels like once we've left this place, it might as well stop existing. The druids will be there doing whatever it is druids do, the tieflings will be leaving about when we are, the destroyed village will still be destroyed, the cultists will still be there being culty, it won't really matter to anything.
I think another part of the problem is that we're kind of encouraged not to get invested in the area. We start off having a really urgent personal problem to focus on, which encourages us tokind of put blinders on to the rest of the area. It's abundantly clear that we're only passing through and there's no opportunity to set down roots. At best we just meet people who we expect to see when we get to Baldurs Gate. Even the characters we're most likely to have an emotional connection with, the tieflings, are going to Baldurs Gate as well. Add to that the fact that our character doesn't really have a set background or even a background we can really define in-game, so we have no personal anchor. Contrast this to the Dragon Age games, where in each game you have a clear history and tie to the place. Even in both Pathfinder games, you're a blank slate character but you're given clear, immediate ties and bonds in the area you end up in, so you can build your investment out from there, because you can give your character their own reasons to care about this place, because you know they're there for a reason.
This game does do some really good things in regard to investment though. The party after I helped the tieflings, I was honestly floored by that. It was incredibly gratifying and it really made me feel like a grounded part of the world and not some cypher just going around and doing things.
