I'm a decent fan, but I guess my issue was I've been playing games for a long time. I have spent many hours in open world games, and I've seen them evolve. I absolutely hate 99% of them now. The issue is they create so much space that the developers need to fill that they end up spending very little effort on any bit of it. They create a handful of systems that they can scatter about so there's something to do everywhere, even though it makes it so there's no particular place that's unique anymore.

When I was younger and time didn't matter as much to me, I looked at the hours-to-complete metric as a good thing. I now see how flawed that was. Now I look more towards entertainment-per-hour. The longer your game takes me to complete, the more enjoyable it needs to be throughout. I don't want to spend 300h doing the same five tasks over and over. I'd much rather a 3h experience that does something unique.

That said, I do agree Hogwarts Legacy had great art direction. If there's one thing they did well it's that. It's just that I felt I had seen it all in a few hours. When art direction is the only thing you've got going, what happens when I have looked at your piece of art enough to see all the detail? That's not to say art focused games shouldn't be made, but they shouldn't be made to fill hundreds of hours. I think the game would have been much better if they focused on just Hogwarts and Hogsmead and made those full experiences.