Too much open/unused space distracts from the better parts of the game
I feel that while overall, Open World is nice to have in terms of minimal load screens and more fluent gameplay, the large swathes of open, unused spaces in the game where you constantly pass through really make the game more boring than not.
I get that its "realism" and "realistic" that an ocean is big and a continent is large, but there is a fine balance in games between realism and fun.
What I don't find fun (especially as a completionist player) is spending hours driving Geralt by boat across the Skellige Ocean to loot random Points of Interest that have shabby/useless loot or riding Roach across vast expanses of swamp/forest/snow between locations with no monsters/quests/NPCs in between (a pack of trivial difficulty respawning Wolves every so often doesn't count).
I feel that CDPR could have shrunk the world size by maybe 20% and still gotten as much flair and realism into it and keeping the adventure/action/story going without boring the player with endless, dull travel.
In my mind, it greatly reduces replayability for a completionist when you get to "look forward to" spending hours on end just holding down Shift to travel.
Yes there are fast travel spots, but 1. you need to unlock them first and 2. a lot of places are nowhere near these spots.
I felt that even in similar Open World games, such as Skyrim, there were less "random open spaces" than in Witcher 3, and preferred the more compact environments of the previous Witcher games.
In summary: Quality (places that matter) would be more preferrable to Quantity (empty open spaces for the sake of "having a realistic, big world")
I feel that while overall, Open World is nice to have in terms of minimal load screens and more fluent gameplay, the large swathes of open, unused spaces in the game where you constantly pass through really make the game more boring than not.
I get that its "realism" and "realistic" that an ocean is big and a continent is large, but there is a fine balance in games between realism and fun.
What I don't find fun (especially as a completionist player) is spending hours driving Geralt by boat across the Skellige Ocean to loot random Points of Interest that have shabby/useless loot or riding Roach across vast expanses of swamp/forest/snow between locations with no monsters/quests/NPCs in between (a pack of trivial difficulty respawning Wolves every so often doesn't count).
I feel that CDPR could have shrunk the world size by maybe 20% and still gotten as much flair and realism into it and keeping the adventure/action/story going without boring the player with endless, dull travel.
In my mind, it greatly reduces replayability for a completionist when you get to "look forward to" spending hours on end just holding down Shift to travel.
Yes there are fast travel spots, but 1. you need to unlock them first and 2. a lot of places are nowhere near these spots.
I felt that even in similar Open World games, such as Skyrim, there were less "random open spaces" than in Witcher 3, and preferred the more compact environments of the previous Witcher games.
In summary: Quality (places that matter) would be more preferrable to Quantity (empty open spaces for the sake of "having a realistic, big world")