After playing a while it's rather obvious that Larian created a game that is very much built in the same style as their previous titles , small cramped adventure areas that are full to the brim with stuff just precisly everywhere!
,You go from the druid area and a couple of mouseclicks later there is a completly burning building and a couple of mouseclicks later there is like the hyenas in one direction and a collpsed bridge in another wich leads to the small farm areas with the windmill ..
What I'm trying to say is that this isn't a very realistic world it's more like a very tiny area with problems all over the place and no one seems to bother that a huge spaceship has crashed and risks setting the entire forest on fire , there is like problems in all possible directions , no large forests , deserts , tundras, just tiny but highly detailed adventure areas with a specific road a normal party "must" take to not be overwhelmed , sure you can go everywhere but you will at one point or the other be forced to take another path (reload) or you will be slaughtered.
Larian gives good indications of those areas since the game starts to auto save in the middle of nowhere and one click later a group of hyenas is showing up..Its like they knew people would stumble into these encounters at the wrong time ..A beach that has a door ? That is untouched , It's a normal wooden door , and Inside is a long forgotten temple ? Doesn't the inhabitants of this world have sight ?
But for me this just makes the game world strange and i loose interest and Immersion drops by all the reloading , sure I cann just go with the flow and have half my party dead by these hyenas at lvlel 2-3 or the gith with dragon at the bridge if I accidently say the wrong things to them and they attack..reload , reload , reload
It was the same with Larians earlier games , If you have to reload so much it's not good gamedesign , It's design that is reliant on people reloading , to battle this your companions is sometimes trying to warn you of things up ahead but the warnings are all very quick and sometimes they drown in so much other stuff your bound to wallk straight into that trap or ambush , reload
Yes , the individual encounters are very well done , really well done !! It's just they would have been much better in a map system like the old Baldurs Gate , we could have had the crash site as one map, the druid/tiefling encampment as another and so o , this alone would have created a much more realistic world by putting some distance to each site of interesst and also create some land
