Baldur's Gate 3

The quest thing is currently getting me. I progressed into the Underdark, and got two side quests at the myconid colony: Destroy the Dueregar invaders and Rescue the deep-gnomes. I was sneaking around pretending to be one with the absolute until I came to some rothe that were being whipped. I used speak with animals and convinced the Roth to kill the dudes whipping them. They killed 2 dudes. We were off in a random corner where nobody else in the camp/base/temple heard anything... But it killed the dude I was trying to save, killed all the slaves I was supposed to rescue, and killed all the dueregar even the ones in the previous map area, and my journal only updated for the "kill the invaders" quest. I then spent 8 hours running around the map looking for a thing to fix another thing necessary to continue and never ever found it before moving on, finding some Harpers and then triggering a fight I can't run from nor can I win after trying to talk to what I thought was just a random NPC. One thing here is probably a bug. The rest is just horrible pacing. It's presented like I can't survive the area I moved into without a special lantern, but my special lantern is broken and after exploring every possible inch I can get into on all the maps I can explore at the moment, I haven't found a way to fix the lantern. I find notes or books seemingly related to the quest, but the text of them gives no insight. Half the time it's nothing more than a description of text you don't actually get to read.

It really does feel like the further I get, the jankier shit becomes. And not just the mechanics, but the pacing of the plot, and what triggers scripted events. Like Gale's personal quest keeps getting progressed but I don't have him with me and haven't spent time conversing with him to even know his deal. Usually with games like this in the past, if you never actually talk to the NPCs, you don't actually do their quest. BG3 seems to progress their quests based entirely on XP level or areas you explored, and it inserts itself very weirdly when you're doing side quests and not progressing the main one, since all their side quests seem to be tied to the main one in some way. This is where I've hit a point where I am seriously wondering what the hell the devs were thinking with some of the design choices I've encountered last night. I've sunk 40 hours into this game already, and it's starting to feel like I paid $60 for a $20 quality game.