Curse of Strahd is built as a closed sandbox (that is, you can't leave Barovia, but there's nothing explicitly telling you that you have to go anywhere, either than you probably should round up the MacGuffins to kill Strahd.)
All of our games are pretty combat heavy no matter the system, because I have a small group and at least one of the players loves combat.
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After Curse of Strahd, I think I wanna get Adventures of Middle-Earth and hack parts of it for a homebrew campaign...a grittier, lower magic affair.