recent: tears of the kingdom, or as i like to call it botw 1.2, its the same thing all over again just with one or two added gimicks, the open world is dead, npcs are boring and nintendo just got away with it like that
not so recent: i cant stand persona 5, joker and his entourage are annoying teenagers, the time management is a horrible gameplay addition and the artstyle is just a visual overstimulation
with that being said,~~ plz dont kill me~~
It just doesn’t feel as hand crafted as the older games. There’s a current push and pull between “exploratoration/discovery” driven open world games vs “content bloat, sensory overload” open world games, but so few developers seem to be asking “should this be an open world game at all?”