Technology

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I am soooo fucking sick to death of everything needing to be 'open world' (for some reason) that I could puke. Sure, some games may benefit from - or hell, even be downright enriched in some manner by - their use, but outside of a few, notable exceptions (Elden Ring and RDR1/2, in particular, spring to mind, for example) when I see a studio touting their "new and improved, expansive, X times bigger, blahblahblah" open world, all I can think is two things:

1. There will almost certainly be no more than five types (and likely significantly less, tbh) of copy/paste activity I'll be expected to engage in shotgunned haphazardly across the map. The studios that go 'above and beyond' MIGHT attempt to switch things up a bit by slightly altering building or adversary layouts in places, but that's usually a 'best case scenario' kinda thing, and you'll probably be fortunate to end up with some sort of palette swap. How compelling, eh?

2. I'm going to be subjected to either a veritable fuckton of bland, faceless NPC's with an equally bland line or two of 'dialogue' that is ultimately meaningless or a flimsy pretext to go over there somewhere for... reasons... or a handful or so of them that are inexplicably absolutely VITAL to (or otherwise the impetus behind) everything that is plot - which they have a flimsy pretext for, natch.

Look, I played WoW back in the day already. If I really desperately wanted to waste dozens of hours of my time delivering imaginary packages to forgettable people, or being sent in search of someone who is the only one who can help stop BBEG/the apocalypse/whatever - and will totally help, but need a favor first... Ugh - then I'd go back to the good ol' WoW treadmill. I left that shit behind because I was sick of it all just feeling like checkmarks someone had to tick off somewhere to appease the C-Suite douchenozzles that don't understand why we can't add in a battlepass. (Those are SOOO hot right now!)