As fun as the Witcher is, the world may have been too big. Not every location had a quest, not every quest was necessary.... some side quests were kinda bad. And it had a lot of collection bloat. The first zone wasn't too bad. Small and focused, with collection stuff. It's pretty nice. But trying to 100% everything after that is a nightmare.

Skyrim is a weird one, the main game is not the main story, but rather all the side stuff. It had collection bloat, but in the form of dungeons and quests. It didn't really do the whole "legendary gear is in this obscure chest on the top of this random mountain that you have to visit on the 3rd Tuesday at 5am" thing. So while Skyrim is pretty big, it doesn't feel like nightmarish, collection bloat that's overwhelming.

Red Dead Redemption 2 was able to take both these approaches and make it work. It has a tone of secrets and things to collect. But it was done in a way that It didn't feel mandatory. You feel satisfied doing the main story, but also by just going around and doing the side content like in Skyrim. But like Skyrim, sometimes people just want to stop the msq at certain places and just chill in the game doing random whatevers. However, like Witcher all the random collections and side content does feel overwhelmingly impossible to complete in its scope. I found a few YouTube channels dedicated to secrets and obscure side content in this game and its insane how much there is. And a lot of it is missable after certain points in the story. There is no way to 100% this game without a guide. With Witcher and Skyrim its at least possible without a guide.

25-30 is perfect to me. I’m currently playing Mass Effect, and I’m at about 30 hours and on the last mission. Just long enough to get in the world but not so long that it wears out its welcome.