Do we know better? Everything we see seems to scale, from temples to houses to chairs to cups. Distances are measured precisely during combat, down to the decimeter. Considering how detailed the world is, why should we assume the space between landmarks is abstracted and condensed? The world feels small because it is.
I don’t think it’s just a convenience thing. Larian’s design philosophy seems to be to maximise content density. The flip side of this is that the world is distorted to cater to the player, creating a theme park feel.
BG1 had big wilderness maps between cities and crossing them felt to me like experiencing a vast world rather than just a chore. Occasionally intruding on wildlife gave the impression that the world didn’t exist for my benefit. Wolves in the forest didn’t have to tie into the plot, they were just predators in their natural habitat.
By contrast, most of the wildlife in BG3 are there for specific reasons. The two boars you see are part of dialogues and nothing else. The birds have things to hide, the cows have clues to give, the rats are secretly evil. Larian can’t make a squirrel without giving it a feisty personality.
In my opinion, that’s what’s missing from Act I: wildlife for its own sake. Not just encounters disguised as frogs.
Well. Personally, I feel like it's obvious that the distance *between* locations is meant to be condensed for convenience.
That said, I understand where you're coming from. I feel like the stretches between could all be a little bigger, and it would be nice to confront random encounters that didn't necessarily have anything to do with the story at large. I won't say those are bad ideas.
I just have trouble seeing the maps stretched at this point to allow for that. And as far as animals go, with the ability to speak with animals, more has to go into random encounters with wolves than just avoid or confront. The wolves would have the chance to talk, and that would mean voice work--because Larian is doing voice work for every exchange of dialogue. Considerations like that leave me feeling like choices were made, and I find myself understanding of those choices.
I mean, I'd love everything Larian is doing and then more besides. I'd love vast stretches of wilderness with random wildlife and bandits and traveling merchants. But then I think about the amount of content I've already seen and it hits me that this is just Act 1. Imagine, how much more is to come?
At the end of the day, I'm impressed with a lot that they've done, and I try to be understanding of the things I don't think will get done, because of time, budget, choices, and visions.
