ME2 is a bunch of tangentially connected stories all in service of recruiting people for a vague suicide mission that only occurs in the endgame, and people consider it a narrative masterpiece.
I love the Mass Effect trilogy! I consider ME2 to be a character-based game, and it has amazing characters!đź’• It is also the middle part of a larger trilogy.
The problem here is this: if a game does not feature significant exploration, then the absence of mechanisms that account for its presence is no problem. If we arrived at Waukeen's Rest and had no motivation to go somewhere else and explore before we deal with the fire, the problem with temporal consistency would not exist, and the "long rest clock" would work since nobody stays here standing around for an hour to watch the house burn down (though it would be cool if that was possible. And it can't be made possible without in-world time).
My preference would be to have no “long rest clock” or resting at all, but I guess they had to have resting because it is based on D&D.
For Waukeen’s Rest I always dealt with it when I was there, though, so it never came up as an issue for me. With no combat, there was no reason for me to rest.
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.
But POE 2 is NOT a "large open world". It's your typical network of interconnected small locations you can reach out from a world map.
Is POE2 really a story-driven game if it has almost no main story?
It IS absolutely story-driven (not that this would be automatically a plus, anyway). It's just that very little of that story is "the main plot" and a lot of it is about (quite sizeable) tangent stories.
The narrative structure of POE2 reminds me of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls games because of its lack of emphasis on the main story and its focus on exploring. BG3 reminds me more of Bioware games, especially Dragon Age with its focus on story and characters.
