Ugh, been in Skellige for a while now and ran into the first day where TW3 felt like a bit of a chore.
The problem is, if there are question marks (or anything really) on the map, I kinda have to do it. Now you could say that this is my problem and I should just get a handle on my completionist OCD but I know that I am not the only one with such a compulsion.
Now, in Velen and around Novigrad, exploring all the question marks was really fun. You ride around on Roach, have a look at the beautiful countryside and every now and then you get to beat the crap out of some bandits or a couple of monsters or whatever. Even when you spent a whole day just doing question marks, it was fun and never got tedious also because the things you discovered were kind of diverse (find the treasure, explode the nest, root out bandits from horseback, etc.). That was great.
On the isles (or rather between the isles) things are different though. Just going by boat from point to point in a straight line, just fighting some sirens when you get there and then get the smuggler cache chest may be ok for the first and maybe the second time but not the 20th. Now, you could say "It's your own fault, just don't do them all at once". Problem there is, the way it's set up kinda encourages you to do just that because you have to get into a boat and go to a fairly remote place. Once you are there, the next one is also remote but at least are you already half way there, so you better keep going. And so it goes on. If you were to go back in between, the whole thing would take even more time. This also results in the fact that I am doing half of my exploration overburdened, which makes it even more tedious and slow.
The kicker is, I am not even getting any useful loot out of it, just heaps of heavy junk armors (which arguably does yield a lot of money but money, I have enough already)
As I said in the beginning, you may counter here that no one forces me to explore all these caches at all but I ask, what point is there in content, the only good part of which is that it's optional.
Now, why do I write this rant here of all places? Because diving for the smuggler caches reminded me of DA:I's infamous shard hunt, because I don't want the upcoming ME:A to make the same mistake yet again and because I think the solution would be super simple: Just don't point out the filler content on the map, let the player wonder the world and stumble on the stuff that is just nice but not really good enough for seeking it out. I once stumbled on one smuggler cache before reading the notice board in the area (just when crossing between isles) and that was cool, I really wished they wouldn't have put in the question marks for these.
Now, I kinda feel bad for making such a long rant post about what most probably would consider a very minor issue and I don't consider this a big problem either. Everything else about the game is still great. I guess I was just a little disappointed because for 65 hours, TW3 managed to stay clear of any and all open world pitfalls (which is a remarkably achievement) and I was kinda hoping they would pull it through all the way. Alas, it seems even CDPR cannot resist the urge to copy/paste some filler content into their world.
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