It's a good point, a lot of the trouble seems to stem from how we're all making up our own answers to what's going on. We have a lot of questions about the structure of the game, how does time work, how directly does the map relate to space, and how does that interplay with time, before and during our participation, but Larian so far has avoided definitive answers most of these questions.
This map conjecture is just another outgrowth of not having a time system in place, just like our questions on how camping works.
One of my biggest fears is that they’ll implement a day/night cycle but keep all of the timed quests bound by NPC triggers. That has the potential to be incredibly jarring.
The Harpies on the east bank. Why the druids letting them nest there? They've obviously been there awhile. Druids would not let them nest so close to their borders.
I always thought the harpies nesting so close was a clue that Kagha was aligned with the shadow druids. I’m not sure it would make sense for Alfira and the tiefling boy to be much further away from camp. There’s also a discussion about more and more monsters moving into the area recently if memory serves, that’s partly why they want to perform the Rite of Thorns. If one aspect of that were to change they’d probably have to rework the entire encounter.
Same with the grove and the goblins camp while the "central hub" would still have the size of the actual act 1 map.
The central hub in this scenario would probably be the blighted village, although I agree it’s highly unlikely anything changes.
Talking about timed quests, i think the map is also pretty lackluster from that point of view. It should be way more stream-lined than it is, with the swamp and the paladins positioned in-between grove and temple/patrol, considering how much it's drilled into our brains that we've got no time to waste. It felt stupid and immersion breaking that half the time i was going the opposite way of where i was supposed to, for exploration sake, and it routinely took away any semblance of urgency the game tried to build.
People would complain that the map feels too linear if they did that. I think it works in its current state because you can effectively investigate three routes for the tadpole (Ethel/Githyanki/Goblins) and the paladins are along the route to the Githyanki patrol. Albeit easy to miss… I definitely was unaware of their existence my first few play throughs lol.
