Spitballing: We need a new term.

Honestly it's fandoms in general. This is the fourth major fandom.i have b participated in online and they've all sucked. Hell this one is actually pretty mild.

"error" in your understanding of the term, nothing more

"open" world is just about where you can go and not what you can do there
even an empty open world is an open world

though it does not make much sense to have an empty open world, look at it like this: MEA is a filled open world and by the end (100%) it is an empty open world

for an open world to utilize its full potential, you have to make it a sandbox as well and the more features this sandboxing provides, the better

without sandbox, you need a lot of content, so it takes longer before the world becomes empty and thus pointless to play

so, I have no idea what all this fuss is about open world, why is everyone so obsessed with open worlds? an open world is virtualy nothing without sandbox... look at MEA... I like the arid Eos, the desert Elaaden, the icy/snowy Voeld and all this work for nothing, because when I am done, I am done

This.

And... when you get a new game from Bethesda that is open world and sandbox, like Skyrim or Fallout 3/4, you kinda expect it to be buggy and have a lot of issues, and this whole sandbox stuff? Sure it have "less" content and the content it has is of lower quality, but it is so damn intertwined, problems are expected.
Maybe it is better to compare MEA to a more similar game... how about... Witcher 3? "Closed" in the beginning, reagions open as you progress through the game, just like MEA and heavily based on the main story and side content. But it is like what, 10x bigger/more then MEA? But does it have 10x more bugs and glitches? NOpe.
And last but not least and actualy mainly: someone said that already here, BioWare was never about great stories and great characters, but about SUPERB presentation and MEA failed. Bugs can be fixed and people will calm down. This weird animations, facial expression, camera working (always love this minor conversation wehre the cam just zoons in on Ryder while the NPC keeps on with his daily routine and walks off screen, while Ryders keeps talking to a wall), that can be fixed as well, and people will calm down (remember the shitstorm after ME2 when people found out BW stripped the inventory? Didn't last long.). But what realy kills the game, is the gameplay. If we split any feature into a few stages (yah said that already in another thread) like first idea, implementation, half done, finished, polished... EVERYTHING is stuck in stage 1-2, nothing is finished, nothing is done, nothing is polished. Take ANY feature of MEA and you will find a dozen ways how to improve it and make it better within 5minutes. Try this with Witcher, you play, and you say "yah that feels about right, nothing more to add to it". New features? Sure, but those that are there? Nope. They are fine. This can be fixed as well, some with patches, some with DLCs. But that harm is done. People will calm down about it, eventualy, but the game will not be remembered as ME or ME2.
What bugs me more then BW or the state of the game, are the people saying MEA is great. It is not all fail and bad and awfull as some say, I actualy like it more then ME3, but it is far from being great.

Single player MMO.

GTA and Saints Row are sandboxes because they're go anywhere and do anything kinds of games. You can roam around and explore, you can cause havoc, take on sidequests, watch the AI seamlessly fight each other--sometimes with player input--or tackle unscripted fights yourselves.

Open world games, you get to explore bigass environments, and maybe explore, but everything is still relatively confined in regards to what you can do or what your environment does to react to what you're doing.