"In video games there is a weird pattern that a small fraction of players will follow that most developers will never even consider or account for at all. If your game has the capabilities, children will use your game as dolls. They will roleplay a completely different story with the on-screen characters. They will play house. They will find a way to do this."
--Natalie (mew151.net)
I talked about this briefly on my game log: I liked Majora's Mask 64 not because I wanted to play the game, I liked it because I could play in the game. I had this whole parallel story going in my head that no one knew about except me. Who cares if no one else could see Luigi next to that tree? I knew he was there. The whole day, I was thinking about my parallel story; coming up with new threads, deciding which characters were important and which weren't; and then when I was finally able to sit down at the TV and switch on the N64, it was an extension of the story. Majora's Mask wasn't the only game I did this in either. Basically, every game I had for N64 (that I played with any regularity) had some role to play in my story.
This is the thing that AAA developers have stopped thinking about. The only company that still does any semblance of this is Nintendo. By restricting players to a regimented, scripted story progression, omitting all areas that are not directly related to the game's predetermined storyline, and forbidding players from re-entering areas they have already visited, they've made it impossible to play in the game anymore. You play the game, you do what we want you to, you can't do anything else or you fail. That's not good. And people wonder why kids have underdeveloped imaginations these days.
On the other side of it, there's also such a thing as too much freedom. Game worlds that are so huge, it takes 45 realtime minutes at a full sprint to get from point "A" to point "B". I'm not talking about pure sandbox games, like The Sims or Minecraft—I mean stuff like Breath of the Wild, even Twilight Princess to a certain extent; Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto V, that kind of thing. Games that have a story progression but there's too much downtime required for travel. Hyrule Field in Ocarina of Time was the perfect size for imagined stories, because everything is within a few seconds' run or a few minutes' walk. Plus, the main game doesn't take long to get through, so if there's a particular kind of equipment you need for a story, you can get it with relatively little bother.
Of course, AAA developers answer to shareholders and a board of directors, so it's no wonder they've all stopped making this kind of game. Indie developers tend to overestimate the size of their open worlds and make objectives so difficult to find that you give up after spending an hour searching for some reason to play the game ever again. In general, the role-playing game seems to be the best candidate for sandboxing of this kind. In the large part, your player character is customisable; and the game world is large enough to facilitate chance encounters with enemies, without being so large that you can play for half an hour without getting anywhere.
Now, obviously, there are exceptions to every rule. If a player is determined enough (or, like me, autistic enough) they can sandbox just about anything. Also, there's no point in making every single game intentionally capable of sandboxing in this manner; for every Ocarina of Time, there needs to be at least 2 Crash Bandicoots in order to give the game library some variety. But where we are right now is the Video Game Crash of 2020, which has already lasted 3 years longer than the Video Game Crash of 1983. Time and time again, we've proven that big business cannot be trusted to provide quality gaming experiences. In '83, it was E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial; in '23 it was a spate of tired remakes of old games from giant multinational corporations that have forgotten how to make money in any way other than acquiring their competitors.
Of course, Slay the Princess came out in 2023, so I guess it wasn't all bad.