@Hellboy:
I really don’t like dungeon crawls being padded with filler content ad nauseum as you describe as in “Wandering in the Dark”. Not only is this an artificial way of claiming higher amounts of gameplay time, but it turns something that is supposed to be entertainment (playing a game) into work (mindless repetition that you can’t avoid).
Also, and IMHO the worst thing about such filler, is that it breaks my suspension of disbelief. What do the scads of enemies in the dungeon/ruin/whatever eat, where’s the sewage plant, etc? If I’m always meeting large gangs of bandits on the roads, why haven’t they conquered the region for themselves already? And how do they keep recruiting more bandits to come here—surely they know by now that I’ve killed 200-300 of them already :). How can the peasants raise livestock here if the country is so full of lions, tigers, and bears?
In a fantasy game, you can always say all these things are possible due to magic or whatever. However, that doesn’t work in a game based on real life such as KC:D. There, you can’t have ridiculous situations. The only “monsters” are humans, we all know how they live, what they require to live, and how many people a given land area can support. Going beyond those limits will really be obvious.
That said, this is a time of war so armies have increased the population temporarily. And there will be stragglers turning brigand in the neighborhood. But armies are a finite size that’s always decreasing due to short-term feudal call-ups, desertion, disease, and casualties, and they can’t remain in the field very long due to needing supplies, especially if the other side burns the crops and villages. So even in wartime, there are still limits to what realistically should be in the game world.