While I kind of agree with your complaint to a certain degree, HFW is nowhere near as bad as some other open-world sandbox games for this. I managed to get the platinum trophy in a little over 30 hours, as many of the collectibles and side missions are optional for trophy completion. Even if I’d gone for 100% though, I suspect I’d be able to wrap everything up in another 5-10 hours max.
I simply dont like this kind of modern formula concept where they make the world look like
it will have so much variety in content because its so big
but then you notice that you already saw 99% of the different types of content
in the very first region (of 4, 8, 16 whatever regions in total)
Its exactly the same thing with games like Assassins Creed Odyssey.
You are playing for lets say 4, 5, 6 hours and it looks like
it will offer endless content and you didnt see anything yet.
But its not true at all, you pretty much already saw everything,
you are going to do the exact same things in all of the other regions.
Bandit hideouts, hidden caves, some kind of get me that thing mission,
some kind of kill that thing mission, some tower or whatever to uncover parts of the map ...
you know, these typical 3-5 type of missions and its just the same task again and again and again
just in different regions of the map. There are no surprises, you know what you will get.
Even the cities all have the same layout with the same merchants and so on.
Theres nothing really unique. It all just looks different on the surface.
Its such a waste of potential. I remember how i imagined Ghost of Tsushima
with whole unique villages in some mountain area and some unique fisherman villages down by the river ...
all with different shops and flags and colors and so on ...
turns out all of the villages have the exact same type of house model which they simply mirrored or rotated,
same for the things inside the houses. Even the loot inside is always in the same two spots
and the layout for merchants is always the same too.
I dont like that about modern open world games.