I liked Arkham City, it felt more like the game they initially wanted to make. Batmans movement is a bit smoother, you get some fun gliding elements, and it opens up the map so there is a bit more of an exploration/investigation element.
I think Arkham Knight might have gone too large, and I feel like the batmobile sections felt too tank like.
The concept is really cool, and I hope to see some more interesting attempts to incorporate more of that adaptive kind of dialogue and gameplay, but its not going to be easy to figure out how to make it work.
It’s not that the dialogue doesn’t sound right, it’s that the dialogue is disconnected from the game.
A great example was someone did this with Skyrim a while back. In the dialogue they convinced the NPC to join their party. But there isn’t any code logic to allow that, so the NPC is talking like they joined the person’s party, but the gameplay itself doesn’t support it.
Now for animal crossing you could make it work a bit easier cause the character can’t directly interact with the NPCs, but then again it also makes the endless dialogue less impactful.
The biggest issue I have with all of these is that the dialogue is never connected to the actual actions of the npcs.
Its easy to have an npc say something, but tying it to gameplay mechanics isn’t. So we end up with people asking for this in new games, but all you get is conversations disconnected from the gameplay. I’m sure there is someway to make it feel more “right”, but we’re a farcry away from making true open world games like this.
While it got a lot of flack, I thought the smaller contained worlds of Outer Worlds can be a better in between. Open spaces to explore and run into things accidentally, but constrained enough that the world and plot can still flourish.
You can have mysteries where progress and knowledge aren’t tied to each other. For example in Professor Layton games, there is an overarching “mystery”, but it’s a linear game you progress by solving effectively random (and mostly disconnected) puzzles.
I thought it did a good job at capturing the Star Wars feel, but yeah it feels like every open world game. Lots of fetch quests and running around in a massive world where every encounter/quest/battle feels the same as the last.
It may just be me, but most open world games suffer from trying to be too large. Although I think BOTW and TOTK are some of the weakest Zelda games, so maybe my opinions on open world games aren’t popular.