I don't believe that CDPR should focus on making open world games for their Triple A titles and big projects. I feel that their best strengths (writing and characters mostly) work best given visible boundaries and restrictions. The more open-world the game is, the more the overall story and characters suffer.
People play GTA not because they really care about what happens to the generic and replaceable criminals that always star in those games, but because of the unparalleled freedom through "emergent gameplay" that the series offers. The same is true of Fallout 4, which was widely regarded by most as perhaps the worst Fallout story thus far, yet what drew people in was the atmosphere of scavenging around in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that all Fallout games offer. What about Elder Scrolls? Does anyone even remember the name of the final boss for Skyrim? I remember when fellow students were hyping up Skyrim it was all to do with gameplay possiblities rather than the narrative. Pickpocketing entire towns was more engaging than progressing the main story. Do you see where I'm going with this? Open world games are played not for their writing, which is never their strength and in fact is usually their weakest point, but for the gameplay. The games that manage to do alright on both fronts (New Vegas, RDR2, Witcher 3) are rare for a reason.
I know I'm in the minority, but I was actually severely disappointed by Witcher 3's story. The entire game's main narrative essentially functions as a fetch quest for Ciri, where you chase after countless leads and scraps of information until you finally find her and reunite. The main antagonists - the titular Wild Hunt - were laughably forgettable. I highly doubt people even remembered that the final boss's name was Eredin. I know because I played a lot of Gwent and thereby knew all the Witcher characters by heart through countless repetition, but I'm pretty certain that for most players he was just some nameless moron in a spiky suit who went down faster and more embarrassingly than Imlerith. Hell he's even bleeding from wounds Crach inflicted upon him by the time Geralt manages to fight him, which only serves to make him look even more weak then he already is. When you do defeat him you're left wondering if the only reason Vesemir died at the earlier fight in Kaer Morhen was because he overdosed on swallow potion or something. The most praised antagonist of Witcher 3 (Gaunter) comes from a DLC. The most praised character and quest chain is the Bloody Baron which is just a side quest and side character. Besides Ciri you don't really end up caring much for any of the other main characters besides (possibly) Triss and Yenn, and if you played Witcher 1/2, Letho/Thaler/Roche (I'm still mad that they cut Iorveth and Saskia tbh).
Not only are open world games really hard to pull off a convincing and engaging main story in (oh we have to find Ciri - oh wait lemme beat a billion people at Gwent first!), but they are also technically ambitious to the point of insanity.
Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Witcher - these universes come with the built-in advantage of being sparsely populated due to the time periods and universes they are set in - comprised mostly of sprawling empty environments stuffed with the occasional monster and NPC, and "cities" with NPC counts that usually don't go over 30, nevermind 100. As soon as you try to make a project with a much more urban and technologically advanced setting like the Cyberpunk universe, the NPCs that you have to program, the cars that you have to assign routes to, the buildings and skyscrapers you have to create and fill - it becomes overwhelming in scope and scale, and Cyberpunk's glitchy and bug-filled launch is proof that CDPR bit off way more than they could chew.
Even GTA V - someone on reddit actually tried to manually calculate population NPC spawning density for Los Santos a while back:
Look at how green the map is (green meaning less than 5 NPCs). Even Rockstar isn't able to pull off massive NPC populations outside of limited and selected areas, even with the amount of extra money and expertise they have compared to CDPR. Compare the open world genre to something like Hitman, a game whose levels can be stuffed with hundreds of NPCs because they are linear levels that don't force the player to load into an entire world at once, with all the technical difficulties that would cause.
All this to say that I think CDPR does themselves a major disservice to continue chasing after the open world AAA trend. They work best with smaller, more linear areas (Thronebreaker, Witcher 2) under which they can give a laser focus to characters and story and (for Witcher 2) actually offer compelling choices. Unfortunately they still haven't managed to top themselves in terms of overall story changes after Witcher 2, but I think that if they remembered their roots and went back to their tried and true system (smaller levels that lead to other/different levels depending on your choices) rather than chasing after the open world trend, they would not only make better games but also maybe even break the constant cycle of death march crunching. I still think that if Cyberpunk had been Witcher 4 with its much reduced NPC population instead of Cyberpunk they would have pulled off another success, but I also don't want them to keep chasing this trend because, again, it focuses on things that aren't their strengths (minute-to-minute regular gameplay and systems).
People play GTA not because they really care about what happens to the generic and replaceable criminals that always star in those games, but because of the unparalleled freedom through "emergent gameplay" that the series offers. The same is true of Fallout 4, which was widely regarded by most as perhaps the worst Fallout story thus far, yet what drew people in was the atmosphere of scavenging around in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that all Fallout games offer. What about Elder Scrolls? Does anyone even remember the name of the final boss for Skyrim? I remember when fellow students were hyping up Skyrim it was all to do with gameplay possiblities rather than the narrative. Pickpocketing entire towns was more engaging than progressing the main story. Do you see where I'm going with this? Open world games are played not for their writing, which is never their strength and in fact is usually their weakest point, but for the gameplay. The games that manage to do alright on both fronts (New Vegas, RDR2, Witcher 3) are rare for a reason.
I know I'm in the minority, but I was actually severely disappointed by Witcher 3's story. The entire game's main narrative essentially functions as a fetch quest for Ciri, where you chase after countless leads and scraps of information until you finally find her and reunite. The main antagonists - the titular Wild Hunt - were laughably forgettable. I highly doubt people even remembered that the final boss's name was Eredin. I know because I played a lot of Gwent and thereby knew all the Witcher characters by heart through countless repetition, but I'm pretty certain that for most players he was just some nameless moron in a spiky suit who went down faster and more embarrassingly than Imlerith. Hell he's even bleeding from wounds Crach inflicted upon him by the time Geralt manages to fight him, which only serves to make him look even more weak then he already is. When you do defeat him you're left wondering if the only reason Vesemir died at the earlier fight in Kaer Morhen was because he overdosed on swallow potion or something. The most praised antagonist of Witcher 3 (Gaunter) comes from a DLC. The most praised character and quest chain is the Bloody Baron which is just a side quest and side character. Besides Ciri you don't really end up caring much for any of the other main characters besides (possibly) Triss and Yenn, and if you played Witcher 1/2, Letho/Thaler/Roche (I'm still mad that they cut Iorveth and Saskia tbh).
Not only are open world games really hard to pull off a convincing and engaging main story in (oh we have to find Ciri - oh wait lemme beat a billion people at Gwent first!), but they are also technically ambitious to the point of insanity.
Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Witcher - these universes come with the built-in advantage of being sparsely populated due to the time periods and universes they are set in - comprised mostly of sprawling empty environments stuffed with the occasional monster and NPC, and "cities" with NPC counts that usually don't go over 30, nevermind 100. As soon as you try to make a project with a much more urban and technologically advanced setting like the Cyberpunk universe, the NPCs that you have to program, the cars that you have to assign routes to, the buildings and skyscrapers you have to create and fill - it becomes overwhelming in scope and scale, and Cyberpunk's glitchy and bug-filled launch is proof that CDPR bit off way more than they could chew.
Even GTA V - someone on reddit actually tried to manually calculate population NPC spawning density for Los Santos a while back:
Look at how green the map is (green meaning less than 5 NPCs). Even Rockstar isn't able to pull off massive NPC populations outside of limited and selected areas, even with the amount of extra money and expertise they have compared to CDPR. Compare the open world genre to something like Hitman, a game whose levels can be stuffed with hundreds of NPCs because they are linear levels that don't force the player to load into an entire world at once, with all the technical difficulties that would cause.
All this to say that I think CDPR does themselves a major disservice to continue chasing after the open world AAA trend. They work best with smaller, more linear areas (Thronebreaker, Witcher 2) under which they can give a laser focus to characters and story and (for Witcher 2) actually offer compelling choices. Unfortunately they still haven't managed to top themselves in terms of overall story changes after Witcher 2, but I think that if they remembered their roots and went back to their tried and true system (smaller levels that lead to other/different levels depending on your choices) rather than chasing after the open world trend, they would not only make better games but also maybe even break the constant cycle of death march crunching. I still think that if Cyberpunk had been Witcher 4 with its much reduced NPC population instead of Cyberpunk they would have pulled off another success, but I also don't want them to keep chasing this trend because, again, it focuses on things that aren't their strengths (minute-to-minute regular gameplay and systems).
