I love open worlds and believe that almost every game can be improved by adding a well designed one. Being able to have the freedom to explore and just go where you want and do what you want is amazing and keeps you immersed. The problem is that 99% of them are poorly designed. The are all bloated with way too many mundane things to do. They have the Ubisoft syndrome where there are just putting shit in to pad the game to 100 hours. There’s no reason why every game in existence needs to have some version of climbing a radio tower or 80000 different collectibles and your reward for exploring the nooks and crannies of the world is just more collectibles that do nothing and hardly ever have an actual in game lore reason to exist. Make a smaller but really interesting world to explore with environmental story telling. If I find some cave in the middle of nowhere it needs to have some sick armor and a cool story behind it. Not a handful of common crafting items and some old jar to add to my set of random old jars I found across the map. You can also have short open world games. There’s no need for every game to be 100 hours. I’ll take a game with 10 well written and unique quests over a game with 100 fetch quests or dungeon clearing missions any day.

Micro transactions.

I don’t think any have disappointed me but tbh the only game I can remember even playing this year is BG3. The times before BG3 seem so long ago and blurry.

Oh I got NHL24 for like $20 for Black Friday and quit playing after a few hours because it was too buggy. So I guess that would be my biggest disappointment but it’s not like I expected much from it to begin with.