It's Dr.　　　　　　　　 Tim

its like how people like the spidersman games because you're not just going between places, you're swinging through the city because the traversal is fun and there's lots going on everywhere, right?

Horizon Zero Dawn did a good job on this. I almost never used fast travel because the entire game was basically a love letter to the beauty of nature, so there were a lot of pretty sights to see, and because it was a good opportunity to hunt things along the road for fun and profit. The sequel didn’t do quite as good a job, but it was still nicer to fly a mecha-pterodactyl and see the sights than to just teleport to a campfire.

I like the Like A Dragon approach of just making the space feel nice to be in. Not just with side activities, but the general sense of life and the architecture.

even though the gasoline mechanic was much maligned (i liked it) i really loved the traversal through the world in Days Gone. riding a motorcycle through rural Oregon is great and trying to go as fast as possible is a fun challenge!! and the occasionally respawning bandits that set up steel cable clotheslines across the road really keep you on your toes. the game has a lot of flaws, but the world and traversing it is a joy

It's interesting where the lines are around these things. I actually found OG Dragons Dogma really boring to get around as I don't actually think the world they built is all that interesting. Granted I thought that game was all around more miss than hit so maybe if I had found the story or combat more interesting it would have done more for me. And then you get something like Breath Of The Wild which I honestly found just as checklisty as any Ubisoft game just with an anime aesthetic. Which is fine, I just never thought that game was the revelation everyone else did.

(And if you catch me in a really pissy mood I would go so far as to say it's just a shit ass creed clone that ripped off infinitely more interesting Ghibli films for it's look and overall vibes and slapped some half life physics puzzles in there and would never have been received as well as it was without the Nintendo logo on the splash screen. But now I have a Lexapro prescription and a therapist so it's fine now. No really it's fine I'm glad people liked it)

The best open world I’ve encountered still has to be Outer Wilds. Not only is the discovery process in that game incredibly satisfying, but traversal both on different planets and through space is just incredibly fun.

I would really like to see more being done with NPC and community simulation and having the decisions of NPCs influencing the world and your experience in it. But it’s just not a focus for most people or companies. Guess I’ll just play Dwarf Fortress for the rest of my life.

While I fast travel in Elden Ring a ton, I also stroll around aimlessly because it’s fun to do, which is a credit to how much craft they put into the world.

I stumbled into one of the end game areas forever ago, and lit the travel point there, but I recently made the perilous journey on foot to that area simply because of how fun it is to adventure around. I also revisit places that I’m sure I’ve completed just because of how pretty they are, which leads to some fun discoveries that I missed on my first time around. It’s not quite the living world experience, but it’s pretty darn close.

(Not having seen the post in question). I was never bored traveling in Dragon's Dogma. I loved setting up my own fast-travel network manually and for my own changing tastes. It's the whole reason I'm buying DD2 on day one. I will gladly hear how wolves hunt in packs a thousand more times, for just a bit more Dragon's Dogma.

Thinking about one of the big thing in BotW while traveling wasn't monster camps, or koroks or any other 'collectibles' but instead it was the one eccentric NPC hidden on some forgotten beach somewhere, the horrible cook 'practicing' her bad cooking far away from civilization; etc.

It was sending my horse auto-running on the roads while I am idly sketching in my sketchbook, only to cross other travelers. Sometimes even familiar faces.

And they weren't the most original NPCs all the times and some were sometimes generic, but at least they had recognizable features and still had dialogue that sometimes even changed based on some factors. And it wasn't a lot but it was at least more than "animated background dressing you can't even really interact with" that I see in many games.

Similarly it actually had towns I could travel to and back from around Hyrule; ironically this was one of the aspects I liked less of Tears of the Kingdom because the way the surface was modified by the fallen ruins and open chasms didn't feel as convenient to just.... travel through in relaxed fashion so I ended up just using fast travel much more often than I'd ever did in BotW where I could play the entire game without using it(but I will give ToTK the credit that it felt there was more to "do" in the actual towns with not just new questlines but sometimes outright new minigames etc).

And that's when the open world actually even has NPCs and/or settlement to visits that exists. There's been 'open world' games in the past that feel like one was lucky if there was anything close to even one hub/settlement the player could visit and explore as a part of the world to see what kind of NPCs were there to interact with).

I've seen that "Ubisoft" style derisively referred to like a "boring level select screen." I talk about it as being very "Content"-brained. The open world is treated like a big vessel to fill up with Content, rather than the world being the game itself.

The biggest reason I was excited about Death Stranding before release is it seemed like a game that actually took place in the open world. It wasn't nearly as detailed and punishing in the landscape traversal mechanics as I would have liked, but at least it tried to make the world the actual game.

I recently had the joy of playing Elden Ring. The most useful spell in my inventory was one that negated all kinds of poisoning, including the super "scarlet rot" that dominates several areas of the game. And where was it? In a random spot, in a military camp that looked identical to all the other military camps, easily avoidable.
I often think about how I might have missed it if I hadn't been actively exploring.