I don't personally mind 300 hour games but the way AC and most other games present them is exhausting. I don't want my map full of shit to do. I want to get the core experience, which should be the main story and after that sprinkle of stuff to do here and there which is all optional and there if enjoyed the world enough to keep going.
Why Ubi and others haven't figured this out, I have no idea. It's the best of both worlds.
Yeah, would much prefer depth of content to breadth. I love exploring and finding things as much as the next completioninst, but if it is just filler, the world feels hollow. Last handful of AC games have been massive maps with very little uniqueness outside the main story. Also hate auto generated fetch quests and mobile game stores they shove in.
Ghostwire Tokyo felt like a pretty good length for an open world game. There were a bunch of relatively short side quests, and the usual collectibles but the whole thing was 100% complete in under 30 hours. Thier rougelike DLC add-on might push it over that, but it's basically a whole separate game.
Same, and I didn't even finish Inquisition. Bioware didn't need open world filler injected in its narrative based games and worlds, and those forced elements are what killed them off for a while. Then there was the disaster that was Anthem, which also had big, shallow open world and a craptacular mission design that forced you to a full stop to grind dumb boring shit (at which point I quit) before continuing the not terrible, but barely adequate campaign that I would've probably managed to finish if not for that grind gate.
When BioWare announced they had made each planet on Andromeda bigger than the largest area in Inquisition, my stomach sank, because Inquisition had already been pushing it with the bloat.
I watched a review by this YouTuber who hated Andromeda but decided to give it another shot on a whim, only this time to just do the main and loyalty missions, and he said it was like night and day and the game actually was good and the story felt better and like there were actual stakes. All that more for the sake of more hurt the game more than a lot of folks realize.