Guys on /v/ love to circlejerk Morrowind NPCs giving you directions but the problem is that I am almost a 30 year old man, I kinda have things to do so I'd prefer to get my daily dose of fun in without wandering around. That being said, you can easily wander around in an RPG and make your own fun yourself. You don't need to spend 40 minutes trying to find a cave to be creative.
I am fond of the mutant games. Idk how good they are now but the monster designs are cool and the fact you can control them is cool too
I am basically agreeing with you. IIRC, I played the Witcher III with my eyes primarily glued to the minimap in the top right of the screen. The game had excellent visuals, but it was easier to tell where the navigable path was by looking at a tiny little circle than by looking at the beautifully rendered game world. Back when computers weren't powerful enough to do that sort of thing, developers found other ways to make the game world navigable.
Old-school games were impossible without guides. That's how they sold you on strategy guides or subscriptions to gaming magazines.
Yeah, but it was either a small space or linear, so controlling for variables was easier. Open world creates a lot of bloat that's hard to account for.
Outer Wilds did open world well. It sounds obvious, but the solution is to remove the bloat. Compare a regular open world map where there's tons of fluff, collectibles and side missions to this planet from OW. In that game, even if you don't know what you're looking for, it's very obvious what's explorable and what's connecting tissue between relevant places. That also applies to the size of the map. Making maps bigger isn't useful, especially if they're only gonna be filled with useless stuff to pad game time.
Making saves every .5 seconds and praying that you haven't missed/sold an essential item quest item you found, writing it all down in notebook?
But 40 minutes of exploration in morrowind is far more fun than 40 minutes of fast traveling to a linear dungeon in skyrim.
I can see this being an issue for someone with zero impulse control, I suppose, but not me. When I want to wander I wander, when I want to get a job done I want to do it efficiently.
This is pretty much where I am at too. Morrowind is the obvious example people jack off regarding this. I still love big RPGs with lots to do and see but when I want to do rather than see I find deciphering vague directions about "Heading West out of Balmora" to pick flowers or kill a mudcrab annoying rather than immersive. Especially bad when NPCs vomit literal paragraphs of text at you at a time.
Nobody said anything about the combat or not wanting to explore. It's about deciding to accomplish a task and being frustratingly devoid of the ability to complete it because you're at the mercy of unclear directions and questionable level design.
Thats all skyrim has. It removed all its social engineering mechanics. It removed any reason to trade since items dont have value. All of its auxiliery systems have been funneled into combat.
