Hi Brian! Thanks for taking the time to write a detailed response. I fully agree with your points, I’ll just take your message as an opportunity to give additional context.

I arrived on the project months after it began and shifted to another one at the beginning of this year. Game design is a job, you do what you’re hired for with the resources and time you have. There are dozens of designers on a project like this, many directors and plenty of company executives involved. All the decision-making doesn’t lie in the hands of a single person, and certainly not mine. As you can imagine, we have specific scopes and the more critical/macro decisions aren’t taken at the bottom of the corporate ladder. I’m far from perfect myself, who is anyway, but even if I was like the most relevant person ever, I’d still be one among many.

Secondly, I do not want to make my opinion a bigger thing than it is. My thoughts are based on my experience, my tastes in gaming. I know and acknowledge towards the end that exploration isn’t an expectation for most, I’m just trying to brainstorm on why it might have worked for me but didn’t at the end.

Generally-speaking, I analyse a specific problem and the specific solution that was brought, the piece is not about should we have exploration in the game, not about how it could be done either. This is a very broad topic as you know, there are many things to consider such as what type of places and how the world reacts to your actions. I see that you have a lot you want to read and talk about regarding this game, I try to participate but sorry it’s not my place to speak for the whole team, we were hundreds :)