idle thought re that dragon's dogma "travel is boring" post but I wonder how much of the classic sense of "just traveling through a space with nothing to do" that open world games often induce has to do with the 'consumability' of the world design? Like a classic ubisoft style open world game that is just icons on a map? Once you've cleared out the icons, that section of the world is truly lifeless, beyond whatever respawning encounters are present.
I really do feel like, in order to design a world where traversal feels continually meaningful, the world mustn't be a checklist; there needs to be a sense of surprise and wonder in simply walking around, and that means not just nooks to explore but a consistent sense that any time you return to a place it could be different somehow; that a trip, any trip, is a journey with its own unique ups and downs, that you could be waylaid at any moment by anything, even in places you know well. And that's a VERY different allocation of dev resources than filling a space with hand-placed collectibles.
