So I was playing through Nier for the past few months. Now I probably would have finished it sooner, but time's becoming limited. So I finished ending A. In the process I finished roughly 70% of the side quests. It took me like 20ish hours to do. Then I had to play ending B's which was a bit tedious. I think I was 24 hours in and I felt like I was playing for 50. I put it down to play a bit of Horizon's DLC since I haven't touched it. It was a bit better, but it was still a bit of a drag, since I was doing some side quests that were in front of me. Doing the main part of the quest was great though and it was involving. Once I was done a story mission I was analyzing the new area and I realized everything was so samey. Every area in Horizon had the same useless quests. Kill this bandit hideout. Find this Giraffe (Can't remember what the robot was called with the saucer). Do this dungeon. Etc. So I was pondering over whey I was feeling this fatigue and I was thinking, I never had this issue with older JRPGs, and it occurred to me. There wasn't this checklist of non-sense in the older games. I never had to spend every waking moment clicking on whatever herb, wood, rock, or whatever was lying around since I would need it to craft something. There wasn't cut and paste side quests that were all the same in every new area. Nier has this same issue. Spider-man has this same issue. Horizon has this same issue. Though with Nier my bigger issue was the item finding. I'm honestly starting to think it was better killing things in random battles and getting spoils rather than running around collecting things I may or may not need. This is honestly my number 2 issue in Breath of the Wild. I want to ride around with my horses and explore (Breath of the Wild quite possibly has the best designed overworld for exploring), but then I'm missing out on a bunch of items I need to craft with. Now you may say "Skip the side quests. Don't collect everything" and well yes, but if I didn't grab everything on the ground I wouldn't have been well stocked to take on the DLC in Horizon. I think developers need to rethink open world designs. Side quests need to be more meaningful (Which apparently Witcher 3 did). The checkbox (Kill these 5 enemy spawns) and stuff need to and item scavenging needs to be rethought, hell I'd take the farming back with reasonable drop rates than the press 'x' on everything.
P.S. When I went on to do ending C/D in Nier it was a lot better since most quests are gone by that point.
P.S. When I went on to do ending C/D in Nier it was a lot better since most quests are gone by that point.