>>535669676
>At a certain point, ease of transportation runs contrary to the design philosophy of "open world" games
That's the point of vehicles irl, to "skip" the travel times, because people want to get faster to their destinations precisely because they don't care about the "open world" irl. Never looked at it that way before, but it makes perfect sense, unless you're talking about a game world in which the stuff you see along the way is the reason why you're in the game world to begin with, so skipping it makes no sense whatsoever. I understand why you want trains and planes and cars to travel because you're interested in the destination but having vehicles in a game world sort of points to the fact that you're not enjoying the game to begin with.
>I do see respecting the players time as an argument for certain qualities of life
It's a battle between the vision of the developer and their greed for cash. Players can respect their time best by quitting playing video games altogether, but they somehow forget that they're in control of their lives. Devs have an incentive to bait all sorts of players, even those who have less than 30mins-1hour to play every day, so they will try to fool people into thinking their open world game isn't that time intensive.
The burden of choice always falls onto the player in the end however it's the dev's choice whether they want to dilute and destroy their vision for more money, which will 100% end up biting them in the ass later in terms of player retention, because players who skip playing your game are not attached to it. They will just end up leaving when Endfield or Silver Palace or Ananta or NTE comes out, because they're locust type players who play games because they're novelty, not because they enjoy playing them.