I didn't play all of the wilderness areas but things that were good about the gameplay content of wilderness areas in Baldur's Gate seem to have flown over the heads of everyone at the company.
Baldur's Gate had a lot of wilderness areas and not all of them were fantastic but various ones were memorable because of the unique content. Each area had at least one mini-quest and most had some unique encounters. Most areas also had some cool treasure. They also had random encounters of trash mobs mixed with placed encounters of trash and non-trash mobs.
In contrast Obsidian took away from this - Placed encounters of trash and non-trash mobs and treasure. Most treasure found isn't very cool because the itemization of the game isn't very cool. Unique content, if it existed was also extremely bland.
The best wilderness area was Magran's Fork because it had a non-hostile NPC encounter (you rescue some guy from some wolves or some shit and he gives you a potion, although it's not a quest) - still pretty generic but at least that somewhat invokes a BG1 feel. It also had a hand-placed encounter with some bounty hunters. One of them had a name, but unfortunately they had no dialogue, they just attack you. I remember finding one hidden item that was alright as well. I still consider the area sub-par to most BG1 areas because of the lack of dialogue.
Every other area is worse than this, often by a significant margin - most other areas only contain hand placed generic encounters and maybe have some shitty items to find. I'm not completely surprised given that most wilderness areas were designed by new Obsidian hires or people that had not worked on a game like this before. That being said, I think it's also poor oversight from the leads as well (OR just that no one re-played the IE games and critically thought about the design
).
I also recall multiple people at the company stating a preference for the "Black Isle" style of areas - which is fine. However content-wise this was not even remotely close to replicated either unless of course you consider replicating the worst IWD2 areas (like some of the ones on the way to the Shaerngarne Bridge - pure trash mobs, no dialogue or neutral npcs). Talk about regression.
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Here is an average BG1 area - The Waterfall area with the Dryad. This area is far from perfect, particularly combat-content wise, there's not much here.
http://www.forgottenwars.com/bg1/ar5200.htm
It has two unique self-contained mini-quests. Protect the Dryad from the hillbillies and find Drienne's Cat. Both quests have some dialogue and you get a reward (unless your reputation sucks). Yes, this was BioWare's first RPG back in 1998 when it was the first game of most people in the company and this self-contained content is sub-par to what you might find in an RPG like Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, or Fallout 1 or 2. The important thing to take out of this is the
formula.
There are also two other encounters. A gnoll warns you of the Gnoll Stronghold to the west - I don't remember the details but he's abandoned them for some reason. Ludrug I believe is a Hobgoblin that wants to rob you. Both of these creatures have a name, and they have dialogue - once again, question the quality of this content all you like (I thought both were fitting enough) but note the
formula.
Take this formula - two unique creatures with dialogue and some possible optional combat, and two unique self-contained mini-quests and dump that into a Pillars of Eternity wilderness area with "Obsidian style writing/content" and you would suddenly have much better area design, content wise. Can't do much about the combat encounters though, they're unfixable.
