VGChartz Taneli Palola: “The best open world titles are carefully balanced between scale and content. The scale can certainly be ambitious to an almost extreme degree, but the content then needs to match that ambition. Ones that fail to find that balance either end up feeling empty, with not enough stuff for the players to do (No Man’s Sky at launch), or cluttered with too much pointless busywork (Assassin’s Creed: Unity). It’s a difficult balance to achieve and far too few games manage to find it, and unfortunately the only way to fix that issue is to design games with this balance in mind from the very beginning of production. Do that and we just might get more games like Yakuza 0 and Red Dead Redemption 2 in the future, and less the likes of Ghost Recon: Wildlands or Fallout 76.”
Source: N4G PC Open World Games and the Problem of Scale vs. Content