That is true. When we get to the level of single encounters, things tend to work well in Larian's games. But that's exactly not the focus of what we're talking about here. It's more about what happens when you string events and places together. How does your sense of scale and location hold up? Is it feasible to do things in different orders? If you get an encounter that functions as a gate, can you run away and keep immersion, or do you have to wait to get killed and need to reload (again, the Gith patrol)? Do quests with multiple encounters have different paths through them (DAO did this well, BG3 appears to be good at it as well, we'll see)?
Also in DOS2 you were always motivated to just kill them all. Almost every non-civilian was awful, conversations rarely mattered because the quest had to work regardless of whether you killed them all without talking, and you really needed every single xp you could get.
Sure, I was just agree with Wormerine that Larian games and Dragon Age games are not as similar as they might initially appear to be.
But I do think the non-linearity has a lot to do with how the maps are built in BG3. I’ve been amazed how throughout the EA experience I have been constantly discovering something new each time I play. This is a direct consequence of Larian using large, single maps that are crisscrossed with a variety of intersecting paths. In games like Dragon Age or Pillars of Eternity, with more focused maps, it is very easy to tell when you have completely explored each map and experienced everything it has to offer.
While it is certainly better done in BG3, even in DOS2 you have more agency to explore and move around the map as you desire, even if that means sometimes encountering a fight you aren’t ready for yet. But if you do, you have more tools to break or even escape the encounter entirely.
It is interesting that you bring up running away from fights. This is one of my big gripes with DA Inquisition. The moment when I decided I hated that game occurred when I was wandering around the wilderness and accidentally stumbled into some bears. I wasn’t really paying attention (and to be honest, I find DAI’s combat really tedious, so I was kind of already checked out. The bears immediately dropped two of my party members and said “oh crap, I’m going to run away.” I then discovered that the game doesn’t actually allow this. When I got a certain distance away from them, they would just respawn right on top of me. I ended up just running all the back to the camp “safe zone,” with teleporting bears popping up alongside me all the way until I crossed the threshold which force-ended the combat encounter.
This was such bad game design that I decided I had seen enough and lost interest in playing.
