With more maps everything could be bigger. Like i.e the forest that could be a forest rather than 10 trees... They would have a lot more freedom to design consistent and coherent area.
That is something i dont quite believe ...
You know, even curent map "could be bigger", there is litteraly nothing technicaly stoping Larian to split the map in two and simply adding another landscape ... it would take time, it would require some resources ... but its entirely possible.
But they decided to create *THIS* map, and they probably decided that for a reason (i dont pretend to know that reason, i simply presume some was there) ...
Therefore if they would splis this map to smaller parts, they would split *THIS* map, they curently have.
That seem as only logical expectation, hardly they would throw away everything they did til today, and start over.
If you want realistic distance in some kind of open world map you have to create a Real open world, which is something totally different.
The solution of more but smaller maps allow you to keep the distance safe without having to design a true open world.
In exemple the forest wouldn't look ridiculous if it was just the exit of the forest that leads to the blighted village. And it would have been easier to add a few more trees and wolves on a specific map.
The scale of the villages, camp, grove and whatever are fine in BG3. What's not is the distance between them and the size of the transitions.
Smaller maps allow to keep this "fastfood gameplay" thing without breaking the consistency of the world.
"Semi open world maps" aren't ever consistent even with a few more trees and roads.
Even if the actual map was divided it could be pretty okay and this wouldn't mean a single map with the blighted village, as I already said.
I also guess that it has it's own advantages from a technical point of view. It's probably easier to create smaller maps with "bigger elements" than bigger elements on a single maps.
