-No time or time cycle or timed events
-Extremely densely packed content where every location has something to do
-A fully hand-crafted game
I'd like to get back to these elements and their effects. With regard to being hand-crafted, you really notice the quality of location design, it's probably the most noticeably outstanding feature of BG3 as far as we know it as yet. And this has been Larian's strength for quite a while - I recall being impressed by Ego Draconis in that regard. So if that means maps need to be smaller because making a large map that way is too expensive, and that in turn means things have to be close to each other, I'd say that's an acceptable tradeoff.
What I do *not* understand is why you would intentionally make time and distance as irrelevant as possible, especially if you go beyond local maps. And it was intentionally. You don't make a game like this and end up with this level of "time and distance are irrelevant" accidentally. Also, it is close to impossible to implement plausible causality without timing. As that example at Waukeen's Rest clearly shows. Time is the directlon of causality, and we do NOT have a non-timed event here. It's just that the time is clocked by the player's long rests. Which is nothing more than a clock in that regard because the player's rests have nothing to do with what happens at Waukeen's Rest. They are used as an independent measure of time, a backdrop to place events against, just like the other games' in-world clocks. Only that it's much too rough, and too dependent on player behaviour, to result in plausible causality.
