i think the issue most likely it was designed so that players don't waste much time on moving from point A to point B as the whole party is on foot. if they are designing the game having more spaces and traveling perhaps every characters may need a mount. not sure if dnd5e has mounts but that will be interesting though and also may required lots of efforts in getting it right too.
Nah. Simpler approach. There is virtually one way out of the Beach/Dank Crypt area. Provide a transition Area Exit portal. You pass through it. Loading screen. Grove area loads. Game has text appear as new area is loaded. "2 hours have passed.". You are now brought into the grove entrance area.
This does multiple things.
1. Gives players a real idea of how much time/distance has been traveled. It is much further between major story zones than a few seconds journey.
2. Map locations don't need to be so big, thus making each area quicker to load. You can then add additional effects like weather without creating severe lag for lower end computers because you don't have such a big environment that the effects are effecting.
3. If you want to continue to have nebulous camps that don't actually have locations on any map, this is now explained by "your camp is somewhere between the two map locations.
4. As Ragnarok keeps saying, this then does actually add content to a single adventuring day as opposed to "I went 30 seconds through a village and my party is now tired? Seriously?". If I know my characters woke up and traveled a few hours between the grove and Moonhaven, that means they've certainly done more that day than traveled a few hundred feet.
5. They can then expand each environment to make it appear bigger. The forest around Moonhaven can appear to have more forest all around. You just can't explore all of it. You have select area exits that seem to lead deeper into the forest. Things like that so each region actually seems like a real region.
Overall, it makes the game more immersive to have smaller maps within larger environments.
