Yeah I believe all that till I saw Witcher 3 and the Assassin's Creed series, they got absolutely no excuses whatsoever. They can pull it off they just don't want to, nothing is impossible to do the word impossible is cop out, if anybody said it is impossible they are limiting themselves and others do the impossible everyday. They need to think inside the box and use their imagination to achieve to something greater, storyline and character development can only go so far all I'm saying.
"and the Assassin's Creed series". I would rather watch paint dry than play Assassin's Creed. Witcher 3? The only open world game I can remotely stand and it still feels like a chore to play it a times.
I already have to drive places in real life. Travel time in a game is not fun to me. Oh and I played Witcher 3 at 1440p, looking STUPIDLY better than a console, where it would occasionally make me appreciate how pretty it was, before I realized, yeah this sucks I have to travel over here, kill some dumb enemies that might be around on the way, that I do not care about to make it to a quest hub I do care about.
One more thing. Even at 1440p? Witcher 3 looks WAY worse than Mass Effect 2 or 3 at a 4k downsample with texture packs. Why? Because it is impossible to make a "open world" game look even remotely as good as a game you could make on rails. That is not a knock against Witcher 3's graphics. They are amazing for an open world game (Fall Out 4 looks like something I played in 2005). It is just another problem that occurs with open world. Non open world and ME 4 could look like Battlefront, which looks darn near photo realistic on my PC. Open world? It will probably end up looking worse than my modded Mass Effects from ANCIENT Unreal Engine 3.
IMO "open world" was devs suckering people into playing empty, poorly written, copy and pasted forgettable terrain, poorly voiced RPG's, where modders have to make them look remotely good years from then, on much more powerful PC's than they were originally designed for (like Skyrim).
Witcher 3 is the ONLY one to have an even remotely good main storyline and all the sidequests still felt like sidequests. The Citadel, Omega, Tuchanka on rails, still felt more real to me than the world or areas in the Witcher 3, or even the incredible technical accomplishment that was Novigrad. I appreciate it was an incredible feat. I still couldn't tell you where anything is other than the main quest hub places. The rest was just a bunch of crap I had to run through, that took time I didn't want to spend looking at strumpet #134523535 of 1243535353 saying the same stupid thing as all the other strumpets.
"care for a little diversion"? No thanks. I would rather have 10,000 of you be replaced with one NPC I give a darn about that has a backstory or any story and that I can actually interact with.