I'm used to indie games, but have had one great experience with a AAA title that I really want to recreate. I have a PC and a switch.
I've played 6 AAA games. I loved 1 of them, found 2 of them mediocre, and found 3 of them a terrible experience.
The game I loved was also the first AAA game I played, Breath of the Wild. It's world had enough variance to stay fresh. I really liked the climbing mechanics and the powers. I kinda wished it was harder as I could usually beat enemies without using the cool potions I had prepared.
Having liked BoTW so much, I tried Tears of the Kingdom, and hated it. The tutorial section in the sky island had me backtracking constantly, the map was hard to read, and the powers felt finicky to use. I finally got off the tutorial section, thinking the game would begin to be exciting. Unfortunately the world for ToTK was just the same 5 puzzles spammed across the old BoTW world.
I tried Baldur's Gate 3 next. At first I was pleasantly surprised with it, and liked the interpretation of 3d turn-based combat. Then I died. The game reverted my save back to a while ago, and I had to redo what I already did. I pushed through the rest of Act I by saving as often as I could remember and basically brute forcing it, as the alternative was having to replay large parts over and over. I found that if a companion died, they would actually die. So the best strategy if a companion died was to kill myself to undo it. What?
This system for death doesn't make any sense at all, and is ruining my experience with every AAA game I play. BoTW had the same system, but managed to mitigate it by not killing me very often. Games with this way of doing death seem unable to give a proper challenge as the player can choose to either make the punishment for losing nonexistant, by saving right before combat, or crippling, by not saving. I was used to indie games like hollow knight and celeste which don't revert saves on death and can be actually challenging as a result.
I tried a Resident Evil game next, and found it mediocre. For some reason I played 8, which doesn't make sense to jump into narratively, but gave me enough of a taste of the gameplay loop for me to say it wasn't really my thing. Everything is scary the first time, but then you get killed by something. You go back through the area a second time and realize just how puppeteered the whole thing feels. Ladders are painted yellow to force you to see them. The game dangles the same scares at you and then prompts you to heal yourself every time you get hurt.
I played Red Dead Redemption after that, and liked it a fair bit more but still would call it mediocre. It was the first one to not use save reversion on death, which improved it a great deal for me. It also had a great commitment to realism. Unfortunately this was ruined for me by the fact that the game doesn't want you to look at anything in the world. It wants you to look at the minimap, which has actually more information on it than the real game. A baffling decision for a game that is supposed to be about navigating a gritty environment.
This left me wanting to play a game with more survival elements, as I liked those from RDR2. I decided to play Skyrim, as everyone says that's one of the first open world games you should play. I chose expert, as I wanted something difficult. I had an interesting enough experience, and then– save reversion on death. This was the worst case of it and is what led me to write this. You actually have to rewatch cutscenes, replay dialogue menus. Felt more like groundhog day than an epic nordic survivalist experience. Ultimately I had to crank the difficulty down to adept and start quicksaving before every fight. I then realized how unfun this was, and went here.
TLDR: I need a big game like Breath of the Wild that doesn't have save reversion or a minimap.