What do you hope to accomplish by bringing this discussion this close to release? They're not changing it.
I'm interested in how people feel about this. I might've known this wouldn't have gone unobserved here, but I met too many people who didn't even understand what I was about when I discussed other games' implementation of time and distance, to make assumptions. That's why I might have been a bit verbose, too.
What you've written is right. You're going to get a lot of agreement. Larian made specific design choices that enhanced some aspects of the game at the cost of others. BG3 committed to the following:
-A seamless world space unbroken by loading screens or world maps
-A resting system
-No time or time cycle or timed events
-No open world, but heavily free movement
-Extremely densely packed content where every location has something to do
-A fully hand-crafted game
The trade-off is that time and space do not exist in gameplay, and only exist in the story. Distances are symbolic, but locations are not. The passage of time is symbolic, but event sequences are not. The world is a large theme park of events and stories, waiting for you to come along to happen.
