It's weird (but once again not exactly surprising) how many comments in this thread are opposing a suggestion that NO ONE really made, like "having big and empty seamless open worlds" or "cloning dozens of other games that play all the same".
Yeah, weird. Perhaps I should've mentioned that the game which, in my opinion, did this best was Pillars of Eternity 2. A game which was most definitely not a copy of anything except being a party-based, story-driven, isometric CRPG. It did not map story time to world time 1:1 as Kingmaker did, but maintained a consistent world time with regard to travel, and it felt more natural to move around the world in that game than in any other game of its kind. It also got a lot of other stuff right. Just too bad that the nominal main story almost did not exist and the real main story was a bog-standard faction fight. It *was* very good, but not good enough for a great game.
