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.
I started but didn’t finish POE2. As you said it had very little main story, which is an issue that the large, empty open-world games also often have. Is POE2 really a story-driven game if it has almost no main story?
I also wasn’t interested in the factions, and the character relationship system was a mess. In its favor as far as I remember/played, it didn’t have timed quests, which I hate.
For me if it is space & exploration vs strong plot, quests & characters, I always pick strong plot, quests & characters! This is also what BG3 picked, which is why I like it so much!
