I think it’s fine to have a AAA “reboot”. I mean look at the DOOM games. Not everything needs to be new IP and there is some old IP that definitely could use if nothing else a coat of paint and some UI/UX updates.
I don’t play competitive games unless the community is generally decent or I have the option to just turn off voice and text chat for people I don’t know.
Hunt Showdown is the one arguably competitive game (in that its PvP) that I still play … the community there is generally great. There is the occasional trash talk but mostly it’s just people having fun.
Sometimes people on enemy teams will be willing to negotiate and you both walk away from the fight.
Sometimes they’ll just have fun with it and make sound effects. One guy just the other night I was in a shoot out with was making sound effects “agghhh my leg!!! You got me you got me, it’s over!!” Only to come back a few seconds later with a bomb thrown at me and my buddies.
Occasionally there are toxic people but it’s really fun when you shoot them, take their stuff, and burn their characters bodies … then report them. Taking the extra time to be inflammatory or make noise to trash talk on an extraction shooter can easily get you killed and make you lose a fair amount of stuff.
If being a toxic egomaniac is your jam, extraction shooters are a bad fit.
Open world is really only good if it’s something like an MMO where the content is built up over the course of years and there are multiple story lines.
Aside from that, it works well for racing games not much else.
So I got on that game and it was kind of fun up until the first town when my friends were like “we need to talk to people to figure out what to do.”
I don’t mind games having a bit of lore and story but … I want to be doing (read: typically fighting) stuff in my games not just talking to a bunch of people… And when I don’t even know what people I need to talk to, to most quickly get back to the action, I’m out.
The one exception to that is possibly RuneScape because I’ve been playing that game for ages. However, even there I use quest guides and sometimes just spam through all the dialogue.
I think you could go two ways with that. The psychologist could be under a mandate to give feedback to ensure your game is not going to be an addiction or they could be under a mandate to make it as addictive as possible. The latter is way more likely but I wouldn’t totally rule out the value add of any psychologist to any game.