BG1 have what little modern games have: a sense of exploration. This is precisely where the ‘Venture forth’ comes from. No action packed feature can compensate BG3 railroading.
Ah, that's an amazing sense of exploration.
There is nothing like "exploring" completely empty maps where all you can find is a few enemies or one npc.
You might as well remove half of the locations from the game and it would only be good for the game.
For comparison, BG2 is much better done. Most of the maps are not nearly identical, yet there is a lot more content on them.
