I'm legitimately having difficulty following the flow of this question. The formatting vacillates between question and statement, and I am sincerely having trouble fully discerning the connection between points.

I think this post comes from disappointment with Star Wars Outlaws, which by all reports largely follows the Ubisoft formula for open world games. For this, yes Ubisoft has struck upon a formula that is applied to seemingly all of their open world games, which is indeed overly predictable. For that, I do agree that the rote steps of a collectation heavy game where the player secures territory of the game in order to advance the story is overplayed.

Otherwise, I am stuck trying to tease out the rest of the post's intention.

Recently the 2 “highly praised” Star Wars “open world” games

I don't know what the other Star Wars game referred to is supposed to be. Is this referring to Jedi Survivor? That game did have a number of technical problems, but it wasn't ever intended or marketed as an open world game. Putting even that aside, why are two Star Wars games used as the pillars of western AAA games? What is the point or critique here?

Companies aren't innovative. Once they land on a formula they just keep using it. Eventually it gets stale and the company crashes or buys another company that had a good idea and runs it into the ground. Innovative games happen when a AAA company happens to acquire an indie studio at the right time to give them runway to properly polish their game.

If the intent here is to discuss games that are actually doing something new and different, Space Marine 2 really needs to be in this conversation.

At first glance it's just a very, very polished third person action game, but the more you pay attention the more you'll notice the excellent mechanical design of the combat. There are some very smart, very subtle choices that have been made in the gameplay mechanics that affect the dramatic flow and tension of combat in surprising ways. Someone designing this game actually thought about the pacing of fights, and that's something you just don't see in games all that often.

Also on a purely technical level there's the extremely smart bit of coding that allows them to render ungodly numbers of enemies in screen at once, behaving as coherent swarms that move and flow together, and dear God is it incredible to watch.

The first game was a great Warhammer game (for the time). This one is just a great game, no qualification needed.

As I see it, the difference is that we now have capable game engines freely available. Indie studios can, for the most part, offer the same quality of gameplay. AAA studios can only really differentiate themselves by how much content they shove into a game.

In particular, this also somewhat limits creativity of AAA games. In order to shove tons of content into there, the player character has to be a human, the gameplay has to involve an open world, there has to be a quest system etc..

I suspect a big part of the process has shifted focus from making an enjoyable experience to how we can milk this for every dollar it's worth and then some.

It's risky trying to explore new avenues as a large company you're expected to deliver unimaginable returns on your investment. So copying the games that did well will hopefully perform better that quarter. As opposed to spending resources on expanding the engine or trying out a novel idea.

On top of that I suspect the executives are envious of the addictive cash burning cycle that gacha games provide.

I feel like too many games have and continue to copy the formula established by Minecraft and Far Cry 3. I find the experience of exploring a new zone, climbing a tower, unlocking material xyz then rinse and repeat. To be boring and unimaginative. But it seems like I'm the weird one here and people seemingly adore it.

I thought the inventory management of BoTW was awful. It's not fun to complete a cool quest line get a cool item and for it to break forever after two fights. Wtf

Crafting games such as Valheim have nothing to do aside from grinding for the sake of grinding. Sure building a cool house had some appeal but it's overall just intentionally tedious.

Baldur's Gate III was a breath of fresh air. I actually have been thinking for a while that maybe I just didn't like games anymore until it came out.

I'm also about to start my first Elden Ring run with a group of friends for the first time soon. Excited for that.

The Dark Pictures Anthology has some fantastic stories if anyone is interested.

It's great. I don't have time for AAA games anymore anyway.

How much innovation can you get when you have to spend millions of dollars on large teams to develop games now, compared to even 10 years ago? It's not really all that surprising that companies want to play it safe. It's a large investment, and they don't know if there will be a return on it.

That doesn't even get into the fact that there's only so many combinations of things you can do in a video game.

I feel like the problem right now is that we have too many open worlds as if every game needed to be one.

As much as the ps3-xbox 360 era was the FPS Era, the PS5-Xbox X is the open world era.

I hope that soon we will go back to more variety.

Right now I’ve adopted a rythm where I force myself to play a linear game between every open world.