What CDPR did with the witcher 2 was honestly brilliant (2 game in 1), and many games who launched recently showed that you don't have to ride on the openworld wave to become a commercial and critical sucess. I would even argue that a more "intimate" setting would have been a better introduction to night city (watson lockdown doesn't count in my book) if they plan to do a sequel. Right now, some parts of the city are really underused as far as the msq is concerned.
Upside is that the underused parts can eventually be used. I'm kind of hoping they explore that in the DLC. Maybe we can have some life path stuff.
It's funny you mention scope. A couple of games really made me think on this, just recently.
The first was Metro Exodus. Being a much smaller studio, grand open world isn't really their MO. But because of that they picked the open world aspects carefully. You started off totally linear, but got dropped into a semi-open space, just open enough for real exploration, but not so much to shock the system. And when you leave that space, it really feels 'done.' The next part is pretty much totally open, bigger, lots of stuff to do. By the end of that, it's getting long in the tooth, but that's okay, because the next part is the most concentrated and that feels like a nice change of pace. And then you go fully linear to tie up your story and that's it.
The thing that makes it work isn't whether it is or is not open. It's the pacing. The distribution of assets. The placement and relevance of tasks. You are always being guided. The magic is in the ways it chooses when to hide that from you more or less. When it wants you to feel freer, you feel freer. When it wants to buckle down and show you something, you want to see it.
The other one, oddly enough, is Plague Tale: Innocence. I actually loved that game. One of my favorites. Played it many times. It really opened my eyes to the reality of 'spread'. Not a single asset goes wasted or overused. It is a small, but dense and complete experience. And nothing about it really feels 'small'. It feels grand in its own way. It feels like there's something more to the whole world than what there is.
A fully open-world model is sort of becoming a dated concept to me. It takes a lot of ambition, a lot of raw power, and a lot of painstaking, detail oriented work. It's hard to test, hard to fix, hard to polish. Done right, it is an experience like no other. But it is such an undertaking, and I think maybe we need to start talking about how fully opening the world limits other areas of the game. What's the saying that goes around? "Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle." Indeed, that tends to be the issue. Conceptually, it is diametrically opposed to depth. You kind of can't have both. Not at this point in the developments in design and tech. I think the whole concept needs to be boiled down to what really is and is not needed to really make it work. When I first started playing, I had choice blindness. And then I realized none of it mattered. What's the point of having a bigger world if it makes it more superficial?
Personally, what I would have liked... and maybe this is what they originally wanted, was if the first third of the game was life path stuff. Right at the beginning, it says V just got back from Atlanta. Maybe make the smaller, tighter opening experience there and tighten the funnel. Have a fully fleshed out little story arch to play through in a tighter world. And only after that do you get the keys to Night City.
And... you farm Street Cred quickly, which unlocks the higher quality shop items so you can also spend that money well. One word of advice - watch the level gating and mop up the lower difficulty stuff first, or you will find it harder to level later on. The encounters don't return!
