One thing I've never understood about game devs is: why don't you pay modders peanuts to fill your game world with "little" things that add flavor and lore?

Take Stalker 2 as an example. The base game is fine (although has problems). But it feels empty most of the time. Why not pick people from the modding community, who would probably do it for free anyway, and get them to write up suggestions for "mini-content" that is then easy to put into the game? It would require no coding, only using existing tools and the base engine. Environmental storytelling, a note or PDA here and there, a small sidequest told via PDAs leading to a semi-unique (even useless, but sentimental value or just "cool") item. Some graffiti on a wall, a certain mutant spawning so you know it's THIS bloodsucker who killed this stalker's friends.

Some modders are geniuses too, so you could give them a freer hand. I bet a lot of these guys could bang out release-quality sidequests in a week. Or custom models/skins that would be easy to implement.

This solves the problem of tunnel vision by the devs. The devs are so focused on making the base game that they make it "broad and flat": basic functionality, but big empty areas. Modders excel at taking that base and saying "how can I tell a cool story with this little corner of the map, using only a few notes and graffiti on a wall?"

>Complete garbage enemy soldier AI that can see you in pitch black through 100 meters of ray traced realistic brush, but they just add damage fall-off so it's not a 'problem'
>Bloated story that was 4x longer than it needed to be
>Soundtrack leaves me completely 'whelmed' compared to the first game
>Horrible bossfights
>Not enough guides and bases so the stamina system just becomes a mandatory time sink between cool places that you want to see
Every time an immersive-sim game series goes open world it just becomes complete flaming dogshit

They are not going to fix it are they?

This is not even better than gamma and the coc derivatives at the moment