Why Does BG2 Break Quests?

I've almost reached the limit of my patience with Torment. Annah wanting to leave my party because of Fall-From-Grace is really annoying. Accessing the Foundry is stupidly vague to the point I had to hit a walk through. There are great moments in the game but there are stupid bugs (vanishing NPC in the brothel cost me 3 hours reverting to an old save) and completely unclear implications over trivial dialog (such as keeping Annah in the party). I love the story in Torment but frustration is getting to me. The game is 90% about almost randomly hitting every dialog path to unlock the right thing to say. That's not depth in design really. It's just clicking through an often unintuitive tree.

"…it has to be in a blue-green bottle."

If I could I'd select the dailog option "Where might I find a mundane blue green bottle?" but of course that isn't an option. I hit a few vendors and naturally there aren't any blue green bottles.

I realize that in both the game world and the real world time is elapsing and I'm accomplishing nothing.

Officially quitting. I'll probably watch a "let's play" to see how this ends. The overall story here is very compelling but I just can't stomach the monotony of this game anymore. It is just incredibly pointless!

Huh?
Monotony? Pointless?

Obviously you're not playing the torment I remember.

OK I'll explain - no spoilers here…

The core game mechanic is very transparent and if you vary slightly off the designers intended path it can become incredibly annoying.
Normally you get some minor assignment and you chat up every NPC in the region until one gives you the related dialog choice.

OK that's nothing new certainly. That's the ubiquitous RPG dialog mechanic right? However, what if you have *already* talked to every NPC in the area and you *didn't* have the assignment yet? Keep in mind the number of NPC's in Torment we are talking about here and the volume of writing.

You get the assignment late if you break the designers intended sequence of interactions. Then it becomes a major chore of finding the needle in the voluminous dialog haystack of dozens of NPCs.

This has happened to me twice now and I just don't have the energy or motivation to deal with it again. Via a walkthrough I know where to go but once I hit a walkthrough I lose motivation. Since this game is pretty much only about these dialogs that's basically like playing in GODMODE.

Gotcha. Can't remember how I dealt with that. Probably looked at a walk through extremely sparingly. Using search functions prevents spoilers, but removes tedium for when I came up against crap like that. The story is well worth a little meta-gaming to move things along.

You are going to make me keep playing aren't you?

I'm also seriously pissed that the game won't let me keep Fall-From-Grace and Annah in the party together because of some trivial dialog selection I made 25 hours ago. If I could edit Annah's disposition somehow I would.

Personally, I think you made a mistake by playing it immediately after BG2 and IWD. You should have given yourself a break from the IE and played something else first.

Perhaps. But this is nothing like BG2 or IWD. I'm still playing but not enjoying. Now I need to find candy for an NPC. Hit the walk through again *sigh*. I ran across the candy last week and forgot where it was and who had it. If this were IWD or BG2 the candy would be easy to find but hard to get vs. hard to find and easy to get!