Open World Games are much harder nut to crack when it comes to writing. For example the recent The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, its prequel Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring and The Elder Scrolls are notable for giving players great amount of freedom with little to nothing to keeping the player from going where they want when they want with no issues outside of how well leveled you are. In BOTW and TOTK you can skip straight to the final boss battle and ignore the rest of the game as you see fit.
However, even many hardcore fans of these games will admit that story wise, they're all rather weak. Not bad but they aren't exactly considered memorable as the story isn't really the main draw the world itself is and as such story takes a major back seat and IMO that's to the ultimate determinate of the games. For me, Tears of the Kingdom was a major let down for the same reason Avatar: The Way of Water was. We waited 5 years for this?
Not to say that I didn't enjoy it but the trailers had all been putting more emphasis on the Story of TOTK rather then the open world and in the end, I didn't think it was that impressive as the story again is more of a background thing instead of a major focus.
I get why these games are so popular but as someone who loves a stories I felt let down by how TOTK was more the same as BOTW.
Meanwhile I actually like Horizon a lot more then BOTW and Elden Ring. Don't me wrong I get why BOTW and ER are so popular but I do prefer Horizon's story driven narrative and I feel more of a connection to Aloy then any of the player characters in the games I just mentioned. And in terms of open worlds Horizon is pretty off hands when it comes to exploration. Both games give you massive open areas to explore with a ton of quests to do and stuff to discover.
However, the biggest problem with the game is how it prevents you from going to other parts of the map unless your at a certain point in the narrative. This is a problem that exists with most open world games and it's best explained by my most recent play through of Horizon Forbidden West.
There's a mission in the game that has us helping out an old friend find her boyfriend but this mission can only be unlocked as we unlock more of the main story. For example, soon after helping track where the boyfriend in question might have went we hit a road block and in order to figure out what happened next we need to finish a main story mission even though we can just climb over the mountain to get to the next plot point. But if you try that you get a message from the game telling you that this area cannot be visited yet until you've unlocked it by progressing the main story.
This doesn't happen often and world is big enough to miss this on a first playthrough but it is annoying when it does happen. There is no reason why I can't just go to the next part of this side quest other then the game telling me I'm not allowed yet. And again, this happens often in open world games, you're blocked from doing exploring by the game telling you that can't go where you want to because shut up.
This is where Burning Shores comes in and it's frankly brilliant work around to this issue by including two things the first of which being the attack towers. As soon as you start the game you're shot out of the sky and are told though both dialogue and visuals that you cannot fly right now as if you do you will be killed and we're also told that while you can go around on a boat the tower will destroy you if you get to close to it.
After destroying the first tower you're allowed to explore around for a little bit and in doing so you'll likely spot a major story location and will likely try to go there only to discover that this also has an attack tower that will, again, destroy you if you get to close.
What's nice about this is that these attacks aren't a case of insta-deaths, you won't last long if you stick around but you have enough time to get to safety. This is brilliant because it gives an actually, in universe, reason why we can't go to certain places on the map at this time because we don't have a way to work around these towers yet so we need to wait until we have what we need to get past these towers is given to us in the story.
The second way the game works around the player is by requiring Seyka for certain points. For, example the only way to destroy the lock is to hold the Override while Seyka shots the core. You cannot do both so you have to wait to do this mission with your companion to unlock this dungeon and that's the case for pretty much all the major story locations.
This also ties into why we have to wait for the final boss fight as the villain of the DLC, hasn't been pushed into a corner yet and has no reason to unleash the Metal Devil yet. And up until that point in the game he's not aware you're even around yet so it makes sense why he doesn't do anything to try and stop you.
I honestly feel that some of the best games are ones that use both gameplay and cutscenes to tell a story which is done to great effect in Burning Shores as the attack towers, the dungeons and Seyka are are used to to tell the story of the DLC and help to build up to the DLC's climatic boss battle.
I honestly think that Burning Shores should get more credit for taking a problem and turning it into a strength.
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