I like the map, personally. Then again I tend to prefer theme park designs in most games. All art is constructed after all. The way Larian design maps seems better suited for cities than for the wilderness, however.
And then, at the same time, They are also celebrating and trading loot from the raid on Waukeen's Rest - this is happening simultaneously as it was their major raid... And Waukeen's rest is still burning, actively, with people inside that you can rescue and others trying to save them still... this fire was only just set, this raid only just happened - we missed the goblins by minutes AT MOST... but they're back at camp celebrating already.
All of this makes it really clear that this map and these locations are actual distance, at least for THIS reckoning: the Rest is minutes from the goblins and the goblins are a two minute jog from the grove... They CANNOT be even a half-day away form each other, cannot be even an HOUR away, for any of this to make tractable sense.
This couples up with the fact that, through all of this our party will take their rest breaks, and only comment after the third or fourth long rest that you voluntarily take, about how no symptoms are showing - there is no "assumed" travel time here at all. All of these locations are necessarily within spitting distance of one another, for any of these interactions to make sense.
And as other discussions have explored deeply, that can't make any sense alongside anything else, and defies any kind of believability on its own as well.
This is where I find myself stumbling as well. Time in the game exists, but the game seems to go out of its way to keep said existence hidden. As far as I can tell, time passing has nothing to do with the amount of rests taken or distance traveled, but instead the number of npcs you talk to (?). It’s possible to arrive at Waukeen’s Rest with the fires out and everyone gone, but you have to take a circuitous route to make that happen.
My best guess is they did it this way because they didn’t want players to feel like they had to rush to complete quests or explore talking to companions at camp, but like… most of the quests imply a sense of urgency, so players end up rushing and missing content regardless. It’s the one area where the ludonarrative dissonance is too strong even for one like myself—who tends to just roll with whatever the game gives me—to ignore. I hope this is mostly to let players experience content in EA, and once the rest of the act/game is completed this will be tightened up. But until then it’s definitely the biggest flaw so far, at least for me.
