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One of the fantasies I have for a game is some kind of big budget story-game that is set in a truly huge open world.
A problem I find in things like GTA, Skyrim, Red Dead, WoW, Breath of the Wild is that to provide a certain ‘content density’ to the easily distracted player they all have these toy worlds, where towns have ten houses and cities have fifty, where travelling from the capital of one region to the capital of the other takes five minutes by horse but the characters talk about the huge distances in the world. It’s not that I can’t suspend my disbelief, it’s that I imagine sometimes what it would be not to (in this specific way).
I imagine a huge world, maybe fifty or a hundred times the size of Red Dead Redemption 2. The vast majority of it would be empty, the amount of content would probably similar. The major settlements would be mostly the same size, but the smaller ones would be more realistic than a thriving town that has like six buildings. There would be no instantaneous fast travel. You might be able to sail along rivers or the coast, ride a horse, whatever, but these things would all happen without ‘skips’.
Large amounts of the player’s time would be spent travelling, although there would be a lot of dialogue, camaraderie, interesting conversation choices on the road, while sailing, in a caravan, some random events. The game would take the player on a journey around the map, such that you would really feel, when looking at it, the distance traversed. If you wanted to backtrack to a city you were in at the start of the game, it might take several hours of real time to get there, which would require a difficult trade off.
There would be a lot of downtime to get to know companions, or maybe other players if it was multiplayer. You would feel, at times, truly far from civilization, have to prepare for excursions. In remote corners of the world there would be secrets to find that would feel off the beaten track, not like those RPGs where the secret dungeon entrance is spookily signposted fifty feet outside the entrance of the capital city.
IMO the key to good art isn't only choosing what to include, but what to exclude. Too much will overwhelm the player and take away focus from the best parts. Some of the best art is very simple, e.g. Balatro (one of the GOAT), or has a simple core, e.g. Minecraft or Roblox.
What you're describing sounds like a "life replacement" game. It would probably work better in VR, like Second Life or VRChat. You know Mark Zuckerberg spent billions trying to make VR popular and failed, but he was doing it with a big company and boring mindset, and now we have LLMs...maybe, I'm still not sure how much they increase development potential or if they only reduce busy work.
Except slow travel, I'm very skeptical about that. EDIT: it could be interesting to have the player exercise to travel. But most people can't or won't exercise for several hours and others at all, I think it would work only if it was completely optional.
There definitely does exist people who prefer a more atmospheric and slower paced game. Animal crossing, Pokemon Snap, and Firewatch come to mind as fairly chill experiences where the slow pace is part of the appeal. I think a game about exploring the vast areas of a fantasy kingdom and appreciating the scale of it all could work, and that there are ways to design such an experience well.
I think we are unlikely to see this as part of a commercial action RPG though. Mashing these styles together would probably end up reducing the appeal of both to most players. The fantasy of being a powerful main character clashes pretty heavily with the idea of spending multiple real life hours (or days) travelling without defeating a single enemy, or even seeing anything new. And the players who like the slower experience probably don't want that to be interrupted by Draugr or police chases.
That said, I wonder if 2rafa's proposal can't be done fairly cheaply with current technology. Procedural generation is one way, but maybe the simplest would be to create a Skyrim mod where the scale and movement speed of every plant and non-terrain asset is reduced by a factor of 5 in order to make the world feel 5 times bigger without adding anything new.
I think, as I said above, or at least hinted at, is that fast travel really only becomes attractive if getting there is basically a throwaway experience. If I can walk between towns and nothing happens and I experience no problems or dangers, it’s not worth spending time doing that. Skyrim’s slow travel was boring mostly because unless you made a point of going out and looking for something, you really never had to do much more than smack some wolves or low level bandits along the way. And the environment itself wasn’t a danger. You didn have to eat, your weapons didn’t dull or break, and even in blizzard conditions, you didn’t freeze to death (there is a survival mod that adds such things). Making meaningless travel take longer doesn’t help. Making it difficult enough that you’re glad you finally made it to safety helps a lot.
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More relevant in the context of long-distance travel are Death Stranding and American Truck Simulator. Note that American Truck Simulator's map is scaled down from real life by a factor of 20, and the largest of Death Stranding's three maps (across which you literally walk) is only about 2.5 miles × 2.5 miles.
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