>>715069697
It's not too hard, you need to sprinkle events here and there, things to discover, especially interesting (and hidden) NPCs you can interact with. The problem is most devs make an open-world game where there is no cardinal direction and where every event is generically copy-pasted because they need to fill the map, this however is the anti-thesis to adventure. Open-world is anything but adventure, an adventure has a goal and a path in mind, even if it can deviate for a long time it will eventually find it's way back to the main road. So to make an adventure you need linear games with branching paths, make directed games where you control what the player experiences but give it some amount of freedom within that experience.