I've made my original post a few days before release. I'd like to know how people now feel about this, as we have had time to play the game a lot.
I *am* having a blast playing this game, to get that out of the way, more than in most games I've played in recent years, and I think BG3 is great and deserves the hype it's getting - but I think the original criticism stands. The maps we play on are great, but they don't feel connected in space and time, only in story. I have no sense of the distance between the Shadow-Cursed Lands and the city of Baldur's Gate, nor of the distance between any other two maps except for the city maps. I have no sense of a greater world out there and I feel like playing a game set in a pocket dimension. Which makes the plot's hyperbolic assertion that, as usual for Larian, absolutely everything is at stake feel even more irrelevant and nonsensical than it usually is.
I consider this the second most relevant downside of this game, right after the feeling of incompleteness you get in Act 3, which is probably caused by the cut content, but that's discussed at length elsewhere.
How does everyone else experience this?
