I think it's been a major problem with games for the last decade that they just make bigger worlds, but have nothing interesting to fill them with. [...] It feels big, but also empty and lifeless. I much prefer having everything close together than just putting a mile of green landscape between each point of interest.
Having long stretches of landscape devoid of game content makes the world feel big and credible, but it can make the game boring. Having all the encounters and places of interest close to each other makes travelling in the game's world consistently exciting and entertaining, but it can make the world feel very artificial and non-sensical. (In Baldur's Gate 3, this is one of the two main causes of the theme park feeling.)
It may sound as if devs have to pick the less unsatisfying of two options. But these are not the only two options.
24 years ago, a then-little-known game called Baldur's Gate used another solution. I don't know if it had been notably used before, nor what games used it afterwards, but it worked pretty well in Baldur's Gate. The solution can be summarised as such :
"Your journey lasted 16 hours".
By breaking the game world into explorable-playable maps, the game can keep exploration exciting while making the world feel big and credible.
I'm well aware that, at this point in Early Access (though that was quite probably also true months before Early Access), there is almost no chance that Larian will change this in BG3. But I wanted to stress the fact that there are more than two options.
Oh and Baldur's Gate handled the world-made-of-playable-maps quite satisfyingly as well. There was no in-world character stressing the division of the game world into playable maps. There was no teleportation portals referred to in-world but usable only by the players. It was handled through the UI. So we players could file it into the "video game rules" folder, where characters have HP and inventories, and we can save/reload games.
