I don’t get why people liked the Hogwarts game (I’m assuming that’s the one you’re talking about). Exploring Hogwarts was cool, but after that they were just wasting your time with the same few activities spread across the open world to make it not be empty. It was so boring. Then the lockpicking game that didn’t need to exist made things worse, and no one caring about you breaking into their homes or walking around Hogwarts after curfew… It all felt so lifeless after the first hour or so.
Hogwarts itself they made feel alive fairly well until night time, which you’re not supposed to be allowed to walk around during. (The groundskeeper literally tells you to though which makes it all even worse.) Hogwarts and Hogsmead are where it stops being even slightly interesting to me though. The flight mechanics were really boring. They were so bad they couldn’t make quiditch work and just gave a lame excuse about it being closed.
Idk, it just felt like the epitome of an over-managed game where some manager wanted all the bad parts of modern open world games from eight years ago (many of which have been ditched by modern open world game makers) without any thought of how it works in their game. This is all without the Rowling issues and the use of goblins.