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.
A big thing that I think gets missed a lot about most Japanese open worlds is that, philosophically, in direct contrast to western ones, they're much more directly descended from domestic adventure games than action games beyond maybe basic combat mechanics, when they even have any to begin with. When open worlds started to appear in Japanese games with the PS1 by way of stuff like Mizzurna Falls, Japanese devs, perhaps seeing the challenges in sufficiently populating such environments to fit other genres and gameplay styles, were primarily interested in exploring ways to engender a tangible relationship between players and the environments they're meant to inhabit, which is naturally easier to achieve with slower, more methodical games.
It's why Deadly Premonition, for instance, combines those really long car drives with York's extended monologues, to reinforce the idea that he's operating in a remote American mountain town where the population is scattered and nothing gets done quickly; as a Colorado native who's lived in and around the Rockies plenty, I can tell you, I've gone on plenty of meandering drives exactly like that. It's also why Irem's long-forgotten Pachipara games on the PS2 don't let you drive cars until pretty much the very end of the game, to the point where they're all but useless unless you engage in post-game content. You have to either walk, bike, or take the train everywhere in the meantime; your character is down on their luck and largely impoverished for most of those games and those limited means really impress upon you the urban, working class struggles they're pitted against. (Yes, the pachinko RPGs really explore these themes!)
I could go on and on with examples, but it's very much an approach that you only see when developers are comfortable with taking away players' control over their environments and I think a lot of western devs erroneously conflate complete or even relative player freedom with the format when, narratively and especially experientially, that can be more of a hindrance than an asset, at least if you're looking to do something genuinely different in the space. We're beginning to see people outside Japan come around to that with the Zelda games, which, for as explicitly derived from Bethesda and Ubisoft games as they are on a surface level very much so elaborate on those styles from that same lens. But I think it's fair to say there's yet to be a more widespread recognition that there are more ways to make a big open world than a GTA or a Skyrim or an Assassin's Creed and Japanese games have been investigating that for at least 25 years.
