You can skip exploring then and go straight main quest. I very much enjoy exploring them and finding something hidden. Yes, this is exploration.
Same. At risk of poking a(nother) hornets' nest, it's one of the reasons I preferred FO3 to New Vegas: the former had more random stuff to be discovered; often inconsequential, but if anything that made it more poignant or amusing or just that sort of "...why?" that gives me something to wonder about. I was quite surprised when I made that point to someone who much preferred NV and they said outright that exploration and indeed pretty much anything that wasn't directly story-related was of zero interest to them and they considered it a waste of development effort. Then again, people have been as surprised when I've said I'm pretty meh about combat mechanics and that I prefer that exploration, random encounters and pretty much everything that isn't combat-related.
I consider FO3 a good game, but honestly I like the exploration of NV more, in particular with the DLCs. Dead Money and Old World Blues are just a joy to explore and there are many tiny details and secrets to find, however both I think do a great job at presenting a world to explore and rewarding that. They go for completely different aesthetics and go a little different with it, but both I think are games to look at with Exploration. Heck, personally, one of the few things FO76 did right was Appalachia and exploring it.
Err to put this tangent on topic, I do think BG3 could actually look at Fallout's different styles of exploring a world as something consistent in the series is the joy of exploring the world and finding small things.
