In defence of driving for eleven minutes and doing nothing

The complaint about big maps is always that there is nothing to do out there. I want to argue that nothing to do out there is the feature.

The reason Blaine County worked, and the reason the northern snow in Red Dead worked, is that they were places where the game stopped asking you for things. No markers, no calls, no reason to be there. That is not empty content, it is the absence of demand, and it is the only time these games let you just exist in the world they built.

A state that is three times the size of Red Dead's map with six named regions is going to have a lot of that, and a lot of people are going to file it under filler. It is the opposite of filler. It is the part you will remember in four years.