open world games are as much of a fad as realistic graphics are tbh, it's the two main things that get "better" by spending more money on it and you can show that it's better because the number of things in the game went up, which means guys at big companies have metrics to make their business decisions around.
Even though the vast majority of of open worlds in games are either near empty or filled with the same shallow things the whole way across it
all I'm saying is that a beach, a little island, a hotel, a roundabout, an office block, some bombed out apartments and a container yard was all Disco Elysium needed to create some serious art