Both have merits but I feel big open world is easier to get wrong... or perhaps harder to get right.
Majora's Mask I feel is a similar example to Yakuza as a smaller but more densely packed world, also benefiting from a re-use of assets.
It's a smaller town and its environs over the same span of three days. Each character has their own schedules, their own lives, that they attend to. It gives an intimate sense of a time as well as a place.
72 hours until the moon falls. How each person reacts to that or finds themselves incapable of reacting to that. Fragments of the everyday in the face of an increasingly undeniable doom.
Shadow of the Colossus is an emptier open world that worked well. It didn't try to scatter small rewards everywhere to incentivise exploration - it understood that exploration can be its own reward. The places you find, the vistas you discover. I think they consciously avoided distracting the player from that with arbitrary gameplay loops. And, at least for me, it worked.
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Re: Soapbox: How Yakuza Proves Bigger Open Worlds Aren't Always Better
Both have merits but I feel big open world is easier to get wrong... or perhaps harder to get right.
Majora's Mask I feel is a similar example to Yakuza as a smaller but more densely packed world, also benefiting from a re-use of assets.
It's a smaller town and its environs over the same span of three days.
Each character has their own schedules, their own lives, that they attend to.
It gives an intimate sense of a time as well as a place.
72 hours until the moon falls.
How each person reacts to that or finds themselves incapable of reacting to that.
Fragments of the everyday in the face of an increasingly undeniable doom.
Shadow of the Colossus is an emptier open world that worked well.
It didn't try to scatter small rewards everywhere to incentivise exploration - it understood that exploration can be its own reward. The places you find, the vistas you discover.
I think they consciously avoided distracting the player from that with arbitrary gameplay loops.
And, at least for me, it worked.