It's so funny that Ubisoft had such a chokehold on the genre that at one point, the Assassin's Creeds, Far Cries, etc pretty much defined what "open-world game" means for most people, and it sucks ass. A map full of icons to clear like a to-do list. And then Breath of the Wild came out and thankfully steered our collective tastes towards better pastures.
And then Genshin Impact came out. And then Elden Ring. And now I've been spending ages in Wuthering Waves alongside those two and damn... They're VERY different games even if they all seemingly derive the same open world formula from Breath of the Wild.
It's, I don't know, Elden Ring has all this wide open spaces. Genshin has a tighter view. You look up in Elden Ring and you see majesty, you look up in Genshin and your mind is making a mental map of how you should proceed. Wuthering Waves is on the surface a bit like Genshin, but it's a lot more faster-paced, with a much smoother traversal. Genshin asks you to smell the flowers, WuWa lets you speed past them, Elden Ring warns that those flowers might be poisonous so you might want to think twice before smelling them at all.
And then of course there's A Short Hike, who manage to simplify the whole deal by really locking in how its camera and control feels. Mmmm. Maybe I like open world games after all.
