I feel very strongly in the subject of exploration because it ties into the reward dynamics as well as the significance of your choices. That is to say that in the current build of the game your choices amount to no more than fluff and often at the end of exploration the reward is a trinket, bauble or treasure chest. I think there is room for more variety, significance and improvement and in the current build it feels to me that you are not really exploring as much as you are picking a direction in which to move.
Older games are not flawless in this regard, but this is the renaissance of the genre and we should be setting the bar much higher than similar or barely better than games that are decades old. As much as I do not enjoy how CDPR and the Witcher games apply these ideas it is hard to deny that in the original Witcher the impact of exploration and discovery was much more significant and could have long term ramifications even on the main story. I would like to see areas populated with higher quality, not greater quantity. I would like exploration to be more involved and involve more puzzle solving of non artificial puzzles. I will give an example of what I mean off the top of my head.
You come across a cliff face and hear the occasional cry of a large bird near the top. You look around for the necessary gear to scale such a cliff and provided you have the stats to do it you can scale the cliff with the party members that meet the stat requirements(or a party wide average requirement). At the top you find a giant eagle mourning the loss of her eggs to a predator. You can kill the giant bird, you can use a druid to speak to it or placate it for experience, you can talk to someone in town about it being a threat or do research and discover what kind of predator may have destroyed it's eggs. The optimal good solution would be to find the predator and if it is dangerous kill it and return to the noble eagle to placate it at which point it could reward you by allowing you to call on it in combat or during certain story event's as an alternative solution to a skill or stat check / roll. This is a very bare bones example but it's something that I feel is currently lacking as most of the content ends where it begins and it's effects on the game feel localized and limited.
