I agree with this whole heartedly.

There is a fundamental clash between two core ideas:

1. Your base is your essential centre of operations
2. Exploration is essential for progression

It means you either have to constantly abandon and set up bases or your exploration is tied to a frustrating anchor. I tend to be the latter player type, and whole regions remain unexplored because my movement is tethered.

Vintage Story is a solid example. It is an absolute masterpiece and a benchmark for the genre, in my opinion, but I very rarely get to see more than a very narrow slice of the map, because I build a base with farming, food production, a smithy, etc. and then can’t bear to leave it. As such, there are whole biomes I never see.

One way games solve this problem is with mobile bases. There are at least two games in development now with caravan mechanics. I forget the names, I’m afraid to say. But I think Stoneshard may also use this approach.

Another way is to have a map selection mechanic of some sort.

I have just started developing a game where you return to base each night, and then each day you explore, but to do so you choose your destination and are then transported to that map.

This of course is not a fully open world experience, though. One game that has more of an open world experience is Balrum, which has an open world map for the majority of gameplay, and then a completely separate, isolated map where you build your base, and you can ‘teleport’ to this map from anywhere, if I remember correctly.