Engage suspension of disbelief.
Most games set in a large game area have similar issues, and different ways of dealing with them. No one needs to trudge realistic distances to get from one place to another.
So you either have several small locations and some kind of map travel, or if you want to create a more open world, compress it a lot. With more open worlds it’s all about creating the illusion that the world is much bigger than it is. The Witcher 3 did it pretty well, but you can still literally jog from one village to the next in a about a minute. It’s quite laughable if you stop to think about it, but it still seems like a big world. Oblivion on the other hand always seemed weird to me, even back in the day. I remember first time I played, I left the capital, walked over the bridge and there was a ruin full of undead right next to the city gates.
So map travel is a way around that, but I’m not convinced the game would better for splitting the area’s we’ve seen into smaller parts just for the sake of the game telling you it took x amount of time to get from the Druid grove to the goblin camp.
Passage of time is another thing that’s almost always gamified. Games with hugely accelerated day / night cycles is again frankly a bit odd too if you want total realism. In BG3, night is whenever you take a long rest (it might be slightly different in the city), and I think that works well enough. It might be weirder if the game told you what time it is- you get up at 7am, have a big fight and go back to bed at 10am and suddenly it’s night again. Maybe it’s better to just let me head canon that whatever I did was totally a full day’s worth of activity?
TLDR: Most games don’t really make a lot of sense if you think too much about it. Maybe you are used to or prefer certain ways of doing things, but my advice is to try to put it out of your mind and enjoy it for what it is.
Last edited by Dagless; 28/07/23 06:07 PM.
