Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think part of that is that the UI and control system has standardized on a mostly similar set of features with somewhat standardized mechanics. They've iterated over the last twenty years towards what is likely the peak (or at least a local maxima) of what you can do with a mouse/keyboard or controller (and controllers are generally normalizing as well, except for small differentiators). I.e. there's only so much c…
I guess I just feel there is a real lack of creativity in gaming these days- There used to be a rich variety of games- puzzle/adventure games, RTSes, Simulation games, Flight/Space games of all kinds, and now its just kind of condensed down to FPSes, repeated sports franchises, and a few outliers- KSP, Minecraft, to name a few. Interestingly, I won an Occulus Go at a meetup about 9 months ago. I almost gave it away,…
Some titles on the Quest are a bit better in that respect, but you still have to research the game to know. I think that's also a factor of how new the space is. It's much harder to allow users to roam where they want and still have the polish allowing them to interact how they want with the environment, it took quite a few years for that to happen in the traditional game space, both because of the effort required to craft that world, and because the engines were still working on abstractions that made it easy to fill those worlds with things that could be interacted with without too much programmer/artist work.
A good example of this is all the ways people have found for break Half-Life Alyx by working around the game expectations. People have found a way to hoard items, which would normally be hard to do because you have to actually hold them, but throwing them in buckets and bringing the bucket with you (for example, hauling around a bucket with 20 grenades in it, when normally you don't have a way to carry them all). If you put too many items in a bucket and pick it up, the physics system slows to a crawl and can crash the came. They designed the game so there weren't too many interactable objects in any one scene (because that makes sense), but the wholly new paradigm means that people were able to easily do crazy stuff to break it.
I've been meaning to pick up Arizona Sunshine for Quest, and that might be along the lines of what you're looking for (but not for Go). The Walking dead game is supposed to come to Quest eventually to (but again, the Go is unlikely), and the reviews of that looks pretty open for movement and exploration.