And to add to that, it also gives you the tools for discovery. It’s not just “Ubisoft, but they hide the icons”.
The shrine detector (which can become an anything detector), the ability to look through binoculars or whatever it is and stamp a limited number of visible waypoints onto the map. Tears of the Kingdom gives you a slightly obscure ability to highlight all the cave entrances nearby, which you can then try to mark up and see if you’ve been there.
Other games have started trying to do some of this, but I think a lot of it is added late on in development and doesn’t really work well. Like Jedi Survivor gives you the ability to mark things with icons, but what for? You can’t see the markers when you’re walking around. There’s not really much to discover from a distance, and it’s pretty far from being a vast open world.
Is it perfect? No. The last few shrines are often a complete ball-ache to find, although a lot of them are just a generic fight and they’re pretty optional, it feels like you should do them.
Is it better than a world as a menu screen as offered by Ubisoft and those that copy them? Yes.
I think in general a lot of developers should take a long look at what they’re actually trying to make before going with the open world approach. It’s getting tired, and they’re mostly doing it badly.
I was enjoying right up to the point where I stopped making progress and started getting frustrated at the random aspects of it. Even some of the self contained puzzles were taking a bit of trial and error.
The last puzzles are likely going to take a lot more hours than I’m willing to give it, not because they’re hard but because they require the stars to align before it’ll let you even try them. I stopped playing a while ago now, and I haven’t felt the urge to go back.
I’d say it’ll backfire when people can’t play those odd Xbox games that for some reason never came to PC, but there’s so few people using Xboxes anyway, I doubt it’s going to matter. They’ve well and truly dropped the ball since the Xbox 360, and don’t really show any signs of being interested in picking it up again.
Everything just points to them making enough money from everything else to not really care. This is as token an effort as it’s possible to make in the handheld space.
If somebody put strychnine in the guacamole, I’d expect Walmart to remove it from the shelves and offer refunds to anyone that bought it.
If somebody distributed malware through Steam, I’d expect them to stop it also.
Not that there is currently malware in Borderlands 2, but their EULA says they could put it there if they wanted, and there’s nothing you could do about it.
As usual, money is the best message. So if they do put it into a game you’ve paid for, request a refund. If Valve starts losing money, they will change their rules.
You’re right that it’s not Valve they’re mad at, buuuuut…
They could regulate that no games they sell can have rootkits and delist the ones that do, as well as offer refunds if a rootkit is patched in in the future. They have lots of rules already, and I don’t think that would be a bad one.