I think they often might suffer of creative block. You know, when you are doing a lot of a same thing, like writing a text and revising it, or creating an art. Sometimes you are so used to do that, that you start overlooking stuff and some other aspects of it start to block your vision from going further. Perhaps if they had a second creative team and writers that would layer above the original, they could come up with a different assortment of content, less filler-like. My daily work consists on creative process, and having blocks is a pain. And also as an aspiring writer, the revising process to overlook mistakes when you are so used to them is pretty much common.
I usually play the opposite way EgoMania exemplified. My first playthrough I'm usually throughout, as an evaluation test, to learn things, get to know what there is to know, so I often explore things up and down, unless I conclude things can be skipped and I'm getting bored. Many of the "?" in Witcher 3 seemed not really important, just like lots of content in Mad Max, some of which were sort of hard to reach, but little rewarding. Some of W3 fetch quests really made me roll my eyes up and sigh too. MEA made me get bored mid game, in a way that I was losing interest upon exploration, even with the hype and the temporarily blinding shield cast on my eyes due that. I just think that ME, if they want to go down the Open World lane, needs finding balance with its own premise back when it was considered a masterpiece of a trilogy by a good portion of its fan base, of a very consistent story telling and very profound writing, intertwined plot and role playing. When a game makes me play 100 hours to finish it and still feels shallow, I deem there's something wrong with its writing and ambiance, specially a game that made its name on those premises.
I don't agree with the idea that games are being evaluated by the time someone is playing a game. It seems there's an inclination to make that statement true by force. How can one quantify or evaluate a person's satisfaction? Take for example the game Ori and the Blind Forest. If you are first playing it, you might take something like 5-8 hours to finish it. If you are experienced, you can try achieving -3h. The game cost me R$39 (something like US$12), but I truly had more fun with it, in those short hours, than with MEA's 130 hours. So, why the heck would it be logical spending R$240 on MEA? I mean, use time of playing to price things? Ori is a very passionate plataform adventure, with very emotional moments, wonderful graphics and pristine OST. I really have nothing to complain regarding that game (and the first time I played it, I died 470 times). Dota 2 is the game I most played in life (registered, that is), with 4,800 hours, and it's free (of course, what maintains it are cosmetics and championships). Then there's W3 with all expansion packs costing R99, less than half of what I paid for MEA; still I would exchange their prices if I could, to give the true feeling around my pay in time based on the experience I had with both of them. For products such as these, there's no casual, hardcore or whatever classification for players. Everyone pays the same for the product and then you keep paying the time you can afford, but, basically, everyone spends the same initial money. I still didn't see a hardcore version of MEA that makes a distinction upon gameplay features.
I think gaming companies should start earning our time and treat their products as such. The time we are spending waiting for patches with lousy gaming experience, buggy time, these are all hindering ourselves from the potential of really evaluating and en-richening our relationship with the game and the company, and failing at these basic venues only damage both sides. It's daunting that's a common practice, because it's an auto-destructive one. As you get older and get family and additional things to do, entertainment and 'free time' is ever more rare. It's a valorous commodity that's being ever less considered by bigger gaming companies. Most people seem to forget we pay twice for a game, and the second payment we are issuing must be appraised and enriched, preferably not by fillers, and apparent lazy work. This second payment is our time for entertainment. Like they say, time is money. You are devoting that time for gaming, a time you can devote for a plethora of things. They are proposing you to spend time, your life time, a thing you cannot get back, on something, so it must be worthwhile. I find it, to say the least, disrespectful presenting filling content on an already bloated game that seems like wasting our single-lasting time, even optional tasks, because the first time you are presented to something, you don't know it, so you want to learn everything there's to know about it, so you are easy bait.
If MEA wants to be an Open World game, I'm ok with, now that I know what to expect from it, but I will probably not buy the next one, because other games deliver a better OW experience and that's not what drove me to buy MEA, in first place. When they were selling this product, a ME game, which I was expecting the same, or a better, story telling experience, it soon transpired the game evolved a lot more on the action branch (not even mentioning the mechanics changed that could be improved a lot on top of that), but dwindled what I deemed be its strongest points. I expected a more balanced design regarding freedom of exploration and storytelling, because it was how I understood when watching trailers and some tweets. And this is also not mentioning some hindering bugs I came across every now and then and a multitude of very strange design decisions along the way. They even added microtransactions to MP, microtransactions that really don't justify because the only edge they give is what? Speed up the moment you get the best drops and then ... what will you strive for getting from the loots hence? I'm really at a loss to grasp a convincing advantage for players, even using the argument to giving value for your time, because you are not guaranteed you'll actually get what you were earning for. Not to mention that microtransactions are a lure for cheating and hacking, placing players under certain stress of annoyance and mild threat.
Although I can rather agree that rage and harsh feedback may sound toxic or perhaps doesn't really help in some ways, I myself won't judge people reacting that way, because I know not how they value their own time, how much their expectations were worth, sometimes misled by marketing management and careful wording, or, in some cases, lack of proper communication.
But now it's done. All there is to do is to wait patching of the product, 'trust' they know what to address thereon in, because we don't know what they know, and try to learn what we will really buy next time, see if something they propose later can make me feel like playing the game one last time.Certainly, I'm one customer that seems not the target public they want in future. It's sad, but that's what they are targetting, so I'll just use my time with another thing. Like VL said, sometimes it's just a phase of our lives, a privilege of time we can afford with something, sometimes a hard earned time off that can make us really disappointed when we end up spending with something that felt like a dud.
One thing has become crystal clear though, even after being warned by some people, who I choose not to heed: pre-order was a very, huge, humongous, god awful mistake from my part. And I'll be very little inclined to buy anything from companies involved with this product for the rest of my days, and pre-order will not reoccur for any other company for that matter.
