Open World games were an interesting experiment, but the result is clear: the good ones are good despite the open world, not because of it. Not a single one managed to not feel like the developers copy-pasted content in a desperate attempt to fill the empty game world. At that point maybe don’t make such a huge world? And replayability suffers too, because replaying the game means working through a list of things to collect before the actual game can start.

That said exploring the world in Elden Ring was probably the best time I ever had in a video game. The repetitive dungeons not so much.