Planetary Map sizes

The thing is, different people like different stuff.

I haven't used fast travel in Final Fantasy XV yet, so I've driven around a lot.
Pretty much walk/ride/drive instead of fast travel in all games, I prefer it and yes it makes the game longer.

But others 'graze' so the density is very subjective.
More important is that side-content is interesting rather than that there is bland 'stuff' (Elfroot, bottles, mosaics, shards) every 5 minutes.

With DAI, BioWare were surprised that people tried to 'do everything'.

I always took that comment to be towards the people that were bored with being in the Hinterlands and refused to leave until they had done everything possible.

Issues over content density are closely related to content quality.

The example I'll give is what is in my opinion one of the worst side-quests:

Pressed for Cache (Exalted Plains - DAI)



You've released trapped soldiers after having cleared the Exalted Plains.
The Commander wants you to mark caches of fruit and vegetables around the plains for them.

• They have just been released, can't they go mark their own vegetables?
• How does a stick make barrels of fruit and vegetables any more obvious?
• I'm the Inquisitor not a vegetable packer
• I have to wander around marking 10 of these in areas I've already been? pfft...

The Nomad should also make a significant difference.

For example driving across the map of the large Mad Max game was about 4x faster than jogging.

Mad Max - crossing the map driving (13m)



Mad Max - crossing the map running (51m)

I didn't much care for the planets in ME1 where you have to drive across the entire planet, probably going over a mountain with a vertical wall at some point, because the third point of interest was far, far away.  And there was practically nothing in-between.  Maybe some minerals.  Definitely don't want that experience again.  

As for DAI Hinterlands, I remember reading somewhere that the devs didn't intend for it all to be done in one shot.  You could return later on to do more if desired.  The main reason I like to do more of the quests is for RP reasons - that is, I'm building a following for the Inquisition and want to keep my people safe.  Shards, though?  Please, MEA devs, no.

I really don't want bioware to become a W3 mini-me. That game was nothing extraordinary with lack luster side quests, at least as far as I could tell from the 20-30 hours I managed to trudge through. Every time I read desires for ME or DA to be more like it I cringe deep down inside.

Thank the Force. 

I find BioWare's surprise at fans complesionist tendencies perfectly logical to be honest with you. Way back when I first got into playing RPGs on the console I read an article on Skyrim specifically suggesting you should not do everything in the game in one play through. Because it does not often make sense for a character to do everything. Like be an assassin and a thief, just a random example. Its advice I've tried to follow.

Good lord, that's a giant reach, but Bioware's fandom has a tendency of talking about TW3 in a hyperbolic way. Can't take 'em much seriously, even more when one has a DAI avatar. Who knows. This is a first.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Excuse me while I go open that champagne.

Not especially. Understand that I think The Witcher 3 is a wonderful game that has incredibly poor design. I'll play it and I'll enjoy it, but I don't think it should be an exemplar for the genre for anything other than narrative design and sidequest quality. Mechanically, the game is sufficient enough to hold your interest between dialog, but completely uninspired. The loot is uninteresting, dolled out at a boring pace, and often mitigates the catharsis of receiving a legendary quest reward; the game would have been better off with only main quest rewards and spruced up Witcher gear hunts. The skill trees not only suffer from the same boring "+5% damage" boosts, but makes it worse by limiting the number of skills you can actively use (which doesn't really make sense in the real world, let alone for a professional Witcher); like the first Mass Effect, it would have been better off with less skills that matter more. The leveled enemies are an incredibly artificial way to gate the open world, not only because you're a professional who should have no problem killing any creature assuming you have the know-how, but there was really no reason to gate the open world to begin with (it's not like there's ); enemy difficulty should have been based entirely on preparedness, if we have the right tools and information, harder areas should be doable. And that's not getting into the quest design. No part of Witcher 3's RPG-ness works. It's not painfully bad (as the sales and praise for this game clearly shows), but they're not a standard I want to see in the industry. I don't want BioWare to think it can get away with poor design just because they make a fresh new world with neat stories and a bunch of production value (more than they already do).

I know that's a lot on everything other than the world design, but I have spiel prepared for every time someone calls me pointlessly contrarian or hyperbolic about Witcher. However, that is all to say that there's no reason to just wander the world, because you'll just get stopped by pointlessly over-leveled enemies, most POIs are just the lame guarded treasure/treature hunt/smuggler's cache, and the loot you get ijust sn't that rewarding. Hell, even when you do get to the right level, those fights are just the same old straight forward encounters. There are no challenges you need to think your way through, no puzzle dungeons, no interesting mini-bosses, just a bunch of nebulous stuff. Leveling up yields no new mechanics to Metroid your way into new areas or through enemies, so there's no mechanical progression to the world. It's just kinda there.

Moreover, I don't think Witcher 3's open world is any good because it's just like DA:I's and recent Assassin's Creed's and so many other games that merely stitch together their good narrative content together with activities and lame random encounters. No AAA RPG developer, CDPR included, have yet to realize that Bethesda's success isn't based on making big games with lots of stuff strewn about them, but rather fairly small games where all the stuff butts into each other. Skyrim's core mechanics may be quite shallow, but world design creates an almost trance-like flow that inherently keeps players engaged. The Witcher 3 doesn't have that. With neither the design competence of a Metroidvenia or the flow of a Bethesda game, there's not much Witcher's world does but look nice. All of its good content is spread out among specific points of interest, so the rest of the world, visually beautiful as it may be, is merely the space between you and the content you want. It works not because it's good design in and of itself, but because the content around it is enticing enough that you ignore it. 

Again, Witcher 3 is a great game. It just doesn't have any mechanics BioWare should copy. It's sidequests aren't actually all that mechanically superior to Inquisition's. CDPR just had the benefit of more production value to throw at each quest. Clearly, BioWare need to up their narrative design department, but that's essentially all we can learn from Witcher 3.

I'm sorry that my particular opinion of the game sours you, but I have no intention of making anyone dislike the game. It's got more than enough going for it. However, you could at least grace my somewhat lengthy post with a half-decent rebuttal.

Maps three times as big as the Hissing Wastes, just as empty, with splotches of regenerating enemies all over and an inability to pause combat.

...

~shudder~

I think it would have helped.

To be honest the shard quest is not even a problem, it's just a standard "collect the optional items" thing. The story behind it was good, but in the background and the codex. 

The issue is that a lot of the side quests were in the background and the codex. You didn't interact with a lot of people. Some of these quests work quite well that way- discovering ancient ruins and hidden temples in the Exhalted March, Hissing Wastes, Emerald Graves and the like was fantastic.

But we lacked that quality in smaller quests. All of the Dalish quests for example felt detached because it was not in that sort of cinematic milieu we would expect. Same with the Hinterland questlines, and so on.

In Witcher 3, they give you cinematic time for a simple quest in finding a ring. If Inquisition did that for their questlines I would bet people wouldn't care as much about the shard quests being filler. Not a lot of people cared about the hidden treasures or optional monster killings as being filler in Witcher 3, in comparison.