A day/night cycle or an expression of time still doesn't solve the problem of how tight the world feels and how "distant" locations are right next to each other. The upside to this design, and I imagine Larian has this in mind, is that having a tight world allows for a seamless transition from fun experience to fun experience without taking you to an overworld map or making you travel long distances for the sake of long distances (Think that line in the Mass Effect trilogy where the game-seller is talking about how the cool old-school games had you spending real hours to get from place to place, clearly mocking it), or taking you to a loading screen. There are upsides, but the world is just so damn tight that it makes it hard to take characters seriously when they talk about not finding places (Goblins/Minthara and Druid Grove), or how many miles are between your location and Baldur's Gate. Adding more transition areas between locations with minor interactions could be a way to slice it (more and longer roads between areas that are winding and have a single interaction on them, but are mostly designed to give an experience of world-scope and distance). IIRC you couldn't enter every building in Athkatla and some were there to give you the impression of scope. I also think the teleport portals borrowed from DOS2 are a bad way of handling fast travel in this game because: the whole game takes place in midday (except camp), locations are tight together, and you can instantaneously travel across the map. Honestly you could've just had a fast travel mechanic.
The tightness and the size of features around us also give us a bad impression of the scale of the world. Hillsides and ridges are the same size as two or three character models stacked on each other. Everything in the world design tells me, "This world is small, and everything is close together; the people who inhabit this world are just too stupid to figure it out." I'm not fully sure how to solve the theme park problem. I don't think it requires changing the map as a whole, but there certainly needs to be some way of creating the illusion of scope, scale, distance, and time.
Ludonarrative dissonance. It's ludonarrative dissonance. The story tells me one thing, and the gameplay tells me the opposite. (I know it's not EXACTLY ludonarrative dissonance as described here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludonarrative_dissonance but it's something like it).
