None of this distance stuff bothers me when I'm playing. I don't want more loading screens. I don't want to spend an hour running my character from one place to another.
I get that I'm travelling when I go from the grove to the Blighted Village. It doesn't matter to me how far. I don't need to know exactly. It's enough to understand that the village is some distance away and travel is required. It's all suspension of disbelief.
Getting super literal and measuring the distance out at a couple of city blocks seems like an active effort to break immersion.
This is a game. It's going to have boundaries. There are limitations to what can be done, and you have to meet the devs at least halfway.
You could sit around all day wondering how the duergar and deep gnomes got to this section of the Underdark. Did they have to go to the surface and then go back down underground? What about the dead drow by the illusory mushrooms who was scouting out a new path to the surface? Where did he come from? There's no path that we can find to his city. And what about the prisoner who gets tortured? He runs off and disappears? Where did he go? Did he teleport? Or should we just accept that the environment is more complex than what we're seeing... because there are obvious limitations and the game environment is all we have available. We have to accept that there are additional paths.
Just like we have to accept that the goblins have additional areas to explore while they're looking for the grove. Of course, for us, there's only one path. It's simple to get from the grove to the goblin camp. We can't get lost in the forest. All we can do is walk along the road.
This is why it's hard for me to understand the complaint. I feel like, as someone else mentioned, it's complaining for the sake of complaining. Like it's just actively pointing out flaws that are clearly meant to be overlooked because it's a game and not real life.
Hyperfocusing on this stuff isn't particularly insightful. We all get it. You have to suspend disbelief with some stuff. It's not complicated.
Frankly, I would much rather things stayed the same with the map than to sit through loading screens and get obsessive about how far the pine tree is from the river's edge.
