Skyrim had a huge world reveal coming out of a cave after the opening sequence.

I recall it being hyped up as a Cyberpunk GTA, which is very much wasn't and by the time I bought it and played it I knew that. I also waited until the first major patch and played on PC so overall my experience was pretty solid. I beat the game and enjoyed it, and I rarely make it all the way through a game these days.

I think for anyone who was expecting it to be a sci-fi open world sandbox it was probably a huge disappointment, but after that the only thing I felt let down by was just not enough interactivity with the world, which is something a lot of games don't do well anyways.

I was saying something about X4 in another thread recently regarding the on foot portion, but I feel like it does add something, at least for me. Egosoft started down that path with X Rebirth and it was pretty bad, and it seems like what is in X4 is mostly just a cleaned up version of that and they didn't try to add any more and attempt any FPS type gameplay because it almost certainly would have sucked.

But what it does is give a really cool sense of scale, being able to hop out of your ship on a giant landing platform and see a line of some of your other ships docked there, smaller ships buzzing about, even watch ships get built and take off. It isn't forced on you much at all other than to go talk to NPCs for quests, and otherwise is just a nice little bonus.

Part of this is also just the fact that simpler = broader appeal to a lot of companies which translates to more money.

The problem with Elite Dangerous is that it is basically an online game, even in solo play and they never bothered to figure out a way for solo players to pause.