>>717922682
For me all of that is a given. I just sometimes forget that NPCs have yet to realize it. For me it took Skyrim and a handful of games between 2009 and 2011 before I started going "Oh god, not more Open World shit" because it's a conveyor belt approach to game design.
Part of it literally is just a shift in game-dev organization. At the time I did computer science in 2015 they talked a lot about how recently the "agile" approach had become even more normalized and developed. If you check out GDC talks of games around this time a lot of them will talk about "agile" as well.
It literally is a model where you're kind of planning less in advance, and you're just "filling out" things iteratively, which leads to the Ubisoft model where you just have a basic skeletal structure in your sandbox, and the production consists of having large spreadsheets you give to designers and go "Okay, Region X needs Y amount of quests, spaced no more than whatever amount of distance from each other" and it's literally just 30 different designers each making their own homework, and there's no real oversight and most of it just gets to ship in the game how they made it.
In the past you had levels, which were often led by just a few designers but usually there was more of a concerted effort to make sure the level was coherent from beginning to end, and bridges well with the rest of the game as a whole.
The Ubislop content model, which Zelda also uses now, is literally just the "Make a huge map first, then fill it out with slop and give participation trophies to every designer."
What you get is just a less coherent experience, and a lot of busywork.
