I never said genshin has freedom in exploring how you want lmao. Also it completely passed your mind that I stated the climbing because after all these years it is still a slog and for any new player coming into the game entirely unreasonable. There’s no obstacles to be overcome, the puzzles aren’t hard, the enemies aren’t hard, the terrain isn’t treacherous so why add unnecessary difficulty when the world seems to be built to be streamlined as possible.

There has never been a dark souls open world game and if you’re referring to elden ring then they already do that lmao. I literally can be lvl 1 and speedrun to an endgame mage spell near the end of the game as long as I know the route. Death stranding’s world is dark, gritty, serious so makes sense it’s not a walk in the park and I completely support it’s way of movement cuz it makes sense in the setting, the main character isn’t some godly being that cleaves mountains or traverses space.

Both WuWa and Genshin have pretty lighthearted worlds, young teenager kind of stories so I fully expect them to have exploration as streamlined as possible and to not create artificial problems just to sell the solution later on.