Basically I find the D&D camping system as it is implemented in the game cumbersome and it is sending mixed signals.
The main story calls for urgency and fast progress, however, this is not really the case, as you can not lose the game that way. Instead the story and especially the character interactions are brought forward through camping. So the story tells you to press onward, while you miss heaps of content if you do not rest a lot.
The gameplay focuses around resource management within and between fights, so you need to rest often to call upon your full potential. Now they are implementing a resource system for camping, which adds just another resource to manage. So either resources are scarce and you can not unleash your full potential all the time and will miss crucial story elements, or resources come in abundance and the mechanic is not needed at all.
Further, the camping itself is a time-consuming mechanic as it ties story and companion interactions into it, along with voiced dialogue, cutscenes and stuff to do, add and see while at camp. Be it Owlbear, Skelly, Dog etc.. So you might just want to rest up for important combat to find yourself tied into a 15 minute voiced monologue that is important.
I am a simple man and like efficiency. I like how PoE and BG2 do it. In the former you basically have all your skills ready for every combat and camping is necessitated through exhaustion, while in the latter it is a click and an interruptable cutscene. In both games story and companion interactions might be triggered by it, but nothing more.
I am not against a central hub either, but I prefer a set location for this, like the stronghold of both games I mentioned earlier. I also like companion interactions to take place in the game world being triggered by something instead through camping sequences, Mass Effect does that as well and while straightforward it is cumbersome. What I definitely do not like is being locked out of content because my pace is too fast, or too slow.
Also, I would like to point out that if they go the Divinity route, where companions are removed from the game after a certain event, the mechanic loses it's raison d'être, since you will have all your companions with you. So it is the skelly and the pets that is left at camp. Although I concede that we might get a home of sorts further down the road.
So I question the mechanix as a whole not how it is handled. More locations is better, roleplay additions are fine as well, but this is all not needed with the system of the predecessor, which is BG2.
Yet you learn, relatively early on, that there is something very different about your tadpole-& that getting it removed may not be quite as urgent as you first thought....unless you make a point of abusing your Ilithid powers. So I have no issue with a camping system given those facts.
