This is something I've been thinking a lot about with regards to the popular games these days that aren't F2P and I often poke at open world stuff to see what makes them tick. Take away the large scale world and what do you have aside from that? An extremely basic third person controller, a bunch of weapons they probably spent five seconds doing and then a soft body physics simulation for vehicles and vehicle damage.
They seem to spend most of their time spamming art assets all over the places to make the game seem bigger than it really is but if you actually try to 'game' in it you quickly realise that there's fuck all to do and they've put tons of empty space between the game. Seems like people who enjoy these games are the types who are easily distracted by all the shiny stuff and don't really care much about the gameplay of which there is very little.
It's so bad now that when I look at any modern game I check for whether it's linear or not and make sure there's no designing mechanics in there. The reason being is chances are if it's linear the developer probably spent more time with the level design and making it fun than simply scattering assets about the place and overcompensating with procedural generation.
They are lazy and retarded. More people are noticing this and now gravitating to traditionally structured content that they refer to as "set pieces."
They all follow the same pizza-style format where you have a few towns peppered throughout an arbitrary plane of land with smaller areas of interest interspersed throughout. It is boring and beaten to death.
The only exception is the DLC of cyberpunk where they gave players access to a tiny town called Dogtown. It was small and packed to the brim with enemies and shit to do that it was more fun and made more sense to walk everywhere in that small town. You would have a firefight in front of a major building and as that clears up, a payload drops and initiates a turf war between factions while you jump into another clusterfuck of patrolling enemies.
The DLC was certainly a better 'cyberpunk' experience and more in line with what was promised. However I still feel completely cheated by the overall game especially when it came to the lifepaths bullshit that they're still trying to advertise as if they matter. Realistically you could cut all of that out, have Vee do a default start and then that would make more sense if it was a bit more of a linear style story.
I would fix the story by properly killing off Vee because I didn't find him particularly likeable as an MC anyway it it's blatantly implied in all scenarios that he dies. It would give CD Projekt Red more opportunities to explore the lore of the game and fix the crap they pulled while still being able to re-use assets.
They won't do that though, they've got this weird Vee obsession, second DLC in which you know they're going to do it's probably going to be another tacked on mess because normie sales have given them the leeway to do it.