These are people who feel compelled to explore every inch of the world and then turn around and complain about its emptiness. These are people who spend 200 hours trying to get 100% on the game and then complaining about the grind. Impressions so far have come from people dedicated enough to the franchise/genre to import the game from Japan (frequently without knowing any of the language), which is so far removed from how most of us will experience the game to be almost worthless. It's hard to know what to make of this game. I think the director was quoted saying the final product had a 200-hour completion if you went for every sidequest and the like? The combination of enemy difficulty forcing you away from those areas (and thereby pushing you to become stronger) as well as the newfound resource mining, enemy slaying, objectives, and continuous guild quests the game will have for each hex of the entire map mean this is going to have quite a bit of content. Not only to the continents all look quite beautiful, but I'm sure each will have its fair share of hidden paths, nooks, and crannies to discover. Exploring that game was a wonderful thing because so much care was put into the locations, and I doubt that Monolith would just throw that out the window with a sequel. To be honest, though, it's also a reason I loved the original Xenoblade, which had plenty of terrain and challenges that were facilitated by the level design. It's one of the reasons I liked Skyward Sword. I also enjoy a world with tight geography that enhances gameplay.

The layout of Frontier Village is really confusing since it's so dense making searching for a specific Nopon really difficult, on the other hand Alcamoth is just too spread out with not enough warp points. I would have liked a bigger mini map though, when you go to the big map it doesn't have the detail of the smaller one and sometimes you just have to wander round until the mini map picks up the quest icon. The massive world of Xenoblade is amazing and it has plenty of quality of life improvements over older RPGs that stop the traversal from getting tiresome, like the way you can teleport from anywhere, change the time easily, look up NPC locations and routines, the optional arrow that would lead you to the story objective and the quests that you don't have to return. I really couldn't get into Skyrim's battle system the way I did Xenoblade, maybe it was the way I had spec'd up but nothing felt satisfying and the moment to moment strategy was non-existant, the only remeeming factors in my eyes are the emergent side stories you stuble across at random giving it a very organic feel, and the modding community.

Fallout 4 or witcher 3