There's only one chest in Luxurious' room that cannot be opened based on choices.
The dragon statue is at the bottom to the right; down the path from the runes. You should reach it before the Prancing Seahorse.
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Its not that map loading cannot be done. AFAIK its only that it is not implemented. The focus for this game is obvious: game content over fit and finish. There is no unique tech going on here. There are no complex AI; hostile NPCs can certainly attest to that. This game is being developed by a small team. In comparison a game like Dragon Age is developed by a company with 20 times Larian's employees. Personally I don't think they should trade-off extraneous features for content.
Games that support transparent loading usually break up maps into tiles that are loaded based on the player's current position. The world's #1 MMO does this. There will still be loading screens if a player transitions to a zone that is more than a couple adjacent tiles away. However, in many cases the transition is fluid.
If you want to comment on a true lack of tech, you only need to highlight that this game does not have an indoor outdoor system. It neither uses portals to do this, nor enormous textures and geom cache. In fact it does nothing. When you reach an in-out transition you must load. But again, these features are more polish and finish than actual game. I would have liked to see a more polished release from Larian, and I have also be personally vocal in picking apart these lack of features. But at the end of the day, these missing details are trivial and do not detract from the overall game experience.
Can a game like Divinity get features like this? Certainly, but they will likely do so through licensing. By the time the next release is ready, I'm confident many of the features you claim as faults will be non-issues.
I know you commented on the creation of Oblivion and to be honest there no comparison with the approach. Bethesda is a company cut from the same cloth as id software: a company devoted to pioneering game tech. In fact the development styles were so similar there was a recent merger by their parent company with id. The tech overlap will definitely be put to good use. Licensing is a strength of both companies and an option for an outfit looking for a good base for their project.
BTW, 24Gb RAM is not common. In fact only recently has the average system specs moved to 4GB. System memory is cheap but fast video memory is not. Until we see more card with more than 1GB video ram and GPUs being able to efficiently address this memory, it is unlikely that a large push towards mega caching. Its more likely that extra memory would be used to push prettier pixel to the screen. The loading issue is mostly decoupled from system memory and does not require an extreme amount of memory to implement. Like most game tech, the fluid environment is an illusion designed to fool players. It can best be compared with movie magic: CGI, facades, and 1-D props. Features that look like they should require mass memory really do not. Every feature adds requires a mix of resources, not just memory. Cumulatively it adds up and it is up to the developer to optimize these features in a way that balances gameplay with eye-candy and mechanics. Until processing power scales up as well, it is not necessary to utilize excessive memory caches. This isn't to say that a developer cannot utilize 24GB, but there would need to be a killer feature to persuade gamers to purchase additional hardware.
