I love the map design with everything close by and hand-crafted encounters.😊 To me it is much better than the large, empty open worlds that are filled with fetch and collection quests and respawning enemies.
I also like it when quests wait and only change based on choices rather than time. To me it feels bad to miss out on a quest or have a bad outcome on a quest because of time. I like how it is handled in BG3 except for the world events that fail when you rest.
Large and empty maps with lots of collection quests wasn't really the hallmark of the other isometric party-based RPGs, except for BG1 which had the large and empty maps. But they all maintained a consistent world time. In fact, that BG3 is committed to a continuous world space like the open world games - which it doesn't even have btw - creates some of the problems, since you now can't simulate distance by implementing a travel system.
