I like quest results to be based on things such as dialogue choices not time.
I guess to each their own, probably not something that everyone will agree on. But at least on my end, I think the game is better when we have many kinds of choices, as a whole, rather than treating dialogue as the only, isolated opportunity for our characters to make choices. Confining choice to dialogue makes the world, and our dialogue choices, seem inauthentic and disconnected.
Again, if someone is trapped in a burning building, crying out for help, and I ignore the situation for two days, and come back to see nothing has changed, why should I ever bother to help? They aren't actually in danger, and this fire isn't doing what the NPCs told me it would in our dialogue. So why should I actually value dialogue choices at all, if the problems they describe don't actually exist unless I acknowledge them?
In fact, if the world only confronts you with problems when you have declared yourself ready, the best way to solve all the problems is to never be ready! To me, if the encounter itself involves an
imminent danger (fire is
currently burning down the building with NPCs trapped inside, the antagonist in front of us is
actively threatening an NPC, etc), but the danger we know to be occurring at this specific moment never actually comes to pass, then it is completely world breaking, the NPCs are clueless, and there is nothing for us to solve because our best solution is just staying in camp.
A game that shows us an imminent danger, but then does not honor that, ensures that players no longer believe in whatever stakes the game is trying to convince us exist. And in a narrative driven story like BG3, that's a real problem.
