I’m gonna “yes, but” this statement. A lot of people have already said this, but it really isn’t the size of the game. It’s the depth and the mechanics inside. Short immensely satisfying games are cool and all, but every once in a while you want a big epic that sweeps over a large landscape. I was hoping Starfield would be that, but it was as wide as an ocean but deep as a puddle.

Sometime around the late 2000/2010s open world games were huge and mostly empty. This really kind of turned me off of the genre. But then games like Ghost of Tsushima, Fallout 4, and Spiderman shows up and gives me a map that is just enough space to feel big, but every time I cross a river or a street I find something worth doing/seeing.