>>44268Open worlds are sadly too much work for gamedevs.
It was already terribly hard to keep devs motivated enough to hide some secrets behind a staircase or waterfall, because most players wouldn't find and experience it, so they thought: Why bother? But now its 100x worse, with the average player experiencing only 20% of the content. Thats why most open world maps are filled with, well, low quality filler quests that are probably randomly generated, because the gamedevs just don't bother with the quality, most players will never experience all the content anyway. Think the radio tower missions of Far Cry, or the collectibles from Assassin's Creed, but as generic quest, over and over again.
Remember MGSV? Where you had to enter the same mission area over and over again?
The other option is to have a completely empty open world that looks big by square area, or to bite the bullet and either make a smaller open world (that you can't market) or to just go back to linear maps.
Thats not fun, its a huge headache for the industry.
Huge open worlds work perfectly with sandboxes, but everything else, meh.