Finding it slightly hard to keep playing, game starts to feel like a chore.
-Too few combats that take too long. Larian seems to take heed of the common (bad) Codex advice of "no trash fights!" The result is every combat has to be a 'puzzle' that often requires reloads or heavy resource use just to get by. Even the goblins are like this, basically no straightforward battles where you and some enemies square off; everyone is spread way out, everyone has consumables and bombs to throw at you, forced ambushes (beholder), etc. The rest of the time you wander through the empty areas bored to death while picking through 1000 empty boxes. Not everything has to be a miniboss, sometimes you just encounter some orcs to wail on as a warm up and there's nothing wrong with that.
-"I'm going on an adventure!" said Bilbo, then dicked around in the Shire for 5 weeks. No urgency, it's a random collection of events/quests with no coherence. Just "stuff to do". It feels like nothing has happened and I'm still in a prologue. I liked the random hard to find Kuo-toa hideout in the underdark, yet there was nothing in there worth looking for or seeing besides the kill XP. Which brings me to...
-Lame loot and rewards. Every time I find a cool chest or hidden bit of loot its like 10 gold and a potion. Itemization is terrible because it's all conditional stuff like "+1 damage every other Tuesday if your male companions are on fire." Hey remember finding Carsomyr for the first time and reading the description and being like "OMG I'm rerolling a pally just for this!" Or finding awesome gear like Gauntlets of Ogre power on some random evil halflings in the planar sphere. Idk if this is Larian's fault or if all of 5E is this weaksauce. (tbf all the loot in BG1 was also lame so I guess there's that).
I find myself partially agreeing with this criticism. On occasion I've raised the same problems while playing. However, taking the opposite side, I'd counter-argue this to your complaints:
Too few combats that take too long, and feel like puzzles
I can classify combats into two rough categories - "extra credits" optional combats, and combats which you trigger as one means of solving a quest. It's the latter category feels more puzzle-like to me. In the optional combats, I've usually been able to get by with basic attacks/cantrip casts. YMMV of course, because I'm playing on Balanced.
wander through the empty areas bored to death (while picking through...)
Man, if you are bored, by all means don't play. Resist the unhealthy urge to stay glued to the PC and mechanically click your way through the game. It's spoiling the game for yourself. Find something else to do, take a break. There is life outside the Steam client
Rest assured, the itch to go back to the game will visit you soon, and if it doesn't, it wasn't meant to be. Don't turn your fun into a job. If you let go of a game for a day or two it doesn't mean "the game defeated you". If you want to show persistance, show it in an activity that's improving your health - like go do pull ups, it pays to be persistant in that. Enternainment activities are not an area where you would benefit from being persistant and going forward "in spite of" something.
I swear there must be people on this forum who even mastrubate out of habit, not because of a physical urge to do it
You can tell by the way they shittalk games before, during, and after having played them for ~100 hours. It's the same mentality.
no urgency
Again, feeling urgency is up to the player. I can get a work email with the subject prefixed with "[URGENT]" and still not feel urgency, so what's to say about a game quest?
Anyway, speriously speaking, urgency in a cRPG is a double edged sword - you are screwed if you lack it, you are screwed if you have it. In a PnP campaign, it's easy to pull the leash on the party and to give them some time according to your discretion. In the videogame you have to play both DM and player.
I had some deliberation when thinking would my character even want to go into the Underdark after having finished the monastery. Shouldn't he feel the urgency? I decided to RP the decision such as the venturing into the Underdark is done because I have the respective NPC in the party. Shadoheart is determined to check out what happened there, and we don't intend to entangle ourselves in anything more. Which of course is merely the initial plan...
Lame loot and rewards
I think there are some very significant items that come as rewards from quests (The Blood of Lathander), but most of the time it doesn't really matter which of the 4 greataxes I equip in Laezel. However I'm not a fan of swapping weapons too often. I currently have a gith greatsword equipped on Laezel which incurs bonus psychic damage if wielded by gythianki. The more level stats of items allows me to RP equipment choices more, so there is that as a positive.
