I like everything revealed after synchronizing a viewpoint simply because im going to spend 100+ hours in the game and would much rather be doing the content in the game and completing it all as opposed to wasting my time looking for it.
Ubisoft is my #1 publisher and developer and have been since 2010 which is not going to change. My only issue with them is that they try to implement every formula into every game. For example AC now is what it should be. Ghost Recon should be like Wildlands. Far Cry should be like FC 3/4. Division should be like Division 2. Watch Dogs should be more like the first one.
All different enough but with different gameplay elements and loops. In general, every game is a checklist just like every game is repetitive. It simply comes down to are you enjoying it enough to keep doing it over and over until you complete the game.
I soak in the entire game. 150+ hours for Odyssey. 300+ hours for TW3 twice. Yeah, I soak all of it in. But I do while actually accomplishing what I want which is completing the content in the game.
The fox in Tsushima is fine. It's the same thing over and over (coughUBIcough) and the reward is okay. The bird is UGH. I don't care about a cosmetic headband. Waste of my time. And don't get me started on all these documents. AC has documents but holy crap, I think there's like 200 or some such shit in Tsushima. I have already stopped reading them. Want to give me lore? Do it with side quests and that's it. I don't get anything out of reading a document.
Any open world game that is like how you describe it in your second paragraph would be a complete skip for me. LMAO. I'm not traversing a massive open world looking for all that shit. Way past that point. My time is valuable and would never waste it looking for content in a game when I could actually be doing that exact same content.
I love bandit camps, forts, etc. and if the combat is great, even better. Give me a good story and characters and im completely fine.
I guess you're NOT interested in Valhalla huh? Hehe. Seriously, I get your point and what you want but for me, honestly, that would just bore the fucking shit out of me. But that's what's great about gaming - you play what you want and skip the shit that you don't.
It's never a waste of my time looking for content, that should be part of the fun. Why even be playing an open-world game at all if all you view it as is a nuisance to get to the meat of the matter?
Ubi is my least favorite developer (maybe slightly behind EA). They weren't always, back in the day of Sands Of Time and Chaos Theory (two of my favorites) they were decent. Now? They fart out, year after year, cookie cutter, assembly-line manufactured garbage, and their unimaginative, rote, mundane, and painfully unoriginal attempts permeate in their influence throughout the the rest of the industry to its detriment. It's a formula from long ago that they were largely instrumental in establishing that worked for the time, but is now doing nothing but stagnating progress in a genre that holds a lot more potential than their antiquated design philosophy can afford. The worlds created now are truly marvels yet remain muddled and compromised by a philosophy that needs to move forward.
I walk and trot everywhere in GoT because I like to role play and take in the environments very slowly. That's a large part of the appeal of these games for me.....immersing myself in the world and discovering content, not just doing it. I don't want question marks or markers on the map until I've discovered it of my own volition. I don't want to know where
"points of interest" are. Where's the fun in that? And I know you'd skip my idea for an open-world, but I think that's because you've been so inundated that you can't help but frame it in Ubi's formula. Looking at it in that sense I'd agree, it would be a fucking bore. But open-worlds suffer, from their inception, from a glaring disparity between the worlds that exist and the objectives that inhabit them. They're not organically incorporated with nuance, granularity, uniqueness and subtlety across the board, but are artificially compartmentalized which again, makes the world feel like an empty window dressing instead of actually being a place that is alive and dynamic.
And to its credit, this is why a game such as BotW was so captivating: through the implementation of physics and the player's ability to control them to various emergent outcomes, the world came to life instead of being a dull, lifeless catalyst simply there to be able to check off the boxes to progress to the end. And considering how much time and effort is placed into creating these worlds, it's really a shame and missed opportunity that that is so often the case with the genre.
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