Its unfortunate that the wording of the title will bring out all the white knights when there's solid points in this post. I 100% agree that the open world leveling feels like something Circa 2000 and needs work. Its one of the largest turn-offs to new players. Most people rush past it via potd because its just not a good expiernace.

The world is actually extremely bland he's right. Some of that may be due to memory limitation on PS4 they can't add too many varied objects etc. but the answer to that is to make more smaller zones with more unique features. We dont need large swaths of barren red sand desert nothing going on. Repeated rock wall textures. Its boring. The ARR zones actually seemed to have more unique map features so it seems to coincide with the addition of flying that they felt they needed to make large zones but couldn't fill them with anything but repeated rocks and trees due to said limitations.

The game is fun but I have to agree open world needs more effort. Look at a Guild Wars 2 zone on a much older Direct X 9 engine and you'll see the difference in artistic creativity on a much worse engine.