Open world is amazing, as it allows the player to actually belong to the world and experience it not only through neverending battles, but through strolling around, exploring, finding new characters and forging their own story. It's an unmatched level of freedom that we inherently need to actually live our experiences through.
Bosses break the world by introducing unreasonably powerful characters that "just happen" to be immensely stupid, unreactive, and predictable. They are made so that the player would feel proud he "outsmarted" and "outreacted" a much more powerful entity with total disregard to the fact the boss is intentionally made into an idiot to cater to the player. Bosses are simply toys to scrub your ego itch, and while doing that, they sacrifice immersion.
Tetris is literally just blocks falling down to close the lines. If not for its iconic status, this would be an absolutely mediocre and outdated game, yes.
Something like Skyrim, Fallout series, Cyberpunk 2077, Assassin's Creed, Deus Ex series.
Yeah, one may argue they do have bosses, but for the most part, they are left for the culmination of the game and most commonly there's only one, so most of it is nice.
Would love to have final bosses removed as well though - except for Skyrim, which is one of the rare cases the final boss is reasonable and lore-backed.
Did you just cite assassins creed as an example of a good open world? As well as skyrim and fallout??
If you said TES3/4 or fallout 3/NV I'd be inclined to agree, but including the mediocre games in their series as examples of the pinnacle of open world design is laughable
I cited them as examples of open world mostly without bosses that I had fun with, not some "pinnacle of game design".
I didn't specify the Fallout games, and I had fun with NV. Fallout 4 is actually not bad, too, despite all the negativity.
Like it or not, TES 5 is good and highly appraised; it became a phenomenon of its own. Yes, Morrowind and Oblivion are good games for their time (and Oblivion intro still gives me chills), but from a modern gamer POV, they are more nostalgic than great in today's terms. They were great hits in their time, however, and I appreciate their legacy. I did play parts of all games in TES series, starting from Arena, I have Morrowind still installed on my computer, and I'm not ignorant when I say Skyrim is good and is my absolute preference.