Timed events would be awesome but it's hard to make event based on time without the disliked "timed quests".
Hard but not impossible : not sure what the druid ritual really mean but even without druids - you can still find Halsin, you can still save the Tieffling, you can still side with Minthara to kill the Tieffling,...
"Timed" quests are actually great, as long as the timeframe allowed is forgiving enough to push the players just a bit without forcing them to rush anything and as long as the terms and conditions of how much time you are allowed to achieve a goal are made clear enough.
They get a bad rep just because some games didn't exactly handled these two factors flawlessly and because a certain portion of the user base is simply rabidly phobic about them on mere principle, without any actual consideration of how the system is affecting them.
Ironically enough I think BG3 has already some timed events that are more unfair/easy to miss than in some other games of the past that made people mount an uproar about timers.
For instance the fact that as soon as I enter the druid groove I HAVE TO rush to defuse a couple of events triggered that I may even not be aware about or miss them entirely is far more annoying than being told upfront "Here's a mission. You have two weeks/a month to complete it".
Or as Wrath of the Righteous is doing now: "Here's a bunch of quests that need to be completed before you trigger the ending event of this chapter or be missed entirely".
An example I already mentioned several time in the past year is the first MAIN quest in Kingmaker: you are asked to defeat a brigand baron in a three months timeframe (which is WAY more than you'll ever actually need if you are not a complete inept who rests after every two cobolds killed) but you'll get a bonus reward if you do it below a month. Which is still absolutely doable while cleaning 100% of every map in in the area accessible to the player, but requires for you to A) travel light B) try not to rest too often if it's not necessary C) optimize your traveling patterns at least a bit without going continuously back and forth between already-visited areas.
