I'm not interested in the game using a carrot and stick approach to control the narrative and turn the game into BG3: Zerg Rush. If you "push the player towards the main objective" all the time, you will end up with a game that tries to take the steering wheel from the player too often. I'd rather the game lets the player drive however they want.
The issue with the current design is that so much content is tied to camping, the narrative starts to break if you don't spam rests often enough. So the narrative is build around a specific playstyle. Changing this design so that npc content would become available as you travel in a party would go a long way, without limiting players too much.
