You gave it a 95 despite the flaws. That's not a score you reserve for games that are only/mainly good at realism.
I never said it was only good at realism. it is a great game overall, i even liked how believable it was with its animation despite a lot of people hating how slow it is :P
what I'm saying is, it is not better than every open world game "in every area" like a lot of Rockstar fans claims or something impossible to reach.
i can say the same about BotW despite it being a 10/10 game in my book. i didn't like the weapons durability system at all, but its not enough to take away from all the incredible things the game achieved.
ITT people can't have bad opinion for RDR2 because it has high metacritic score.
Maybe i shouldn't say this, but Metacritic scores are... i don't know.
they have "weight", the more famous you are, the more weight your score have.
lets say Gamespot gave a game 9/10
and 5 other unknown websites rated the game 7/10
the overall score will still be closer to the score assigned by Gamespot (for example)
is this really good? no. reviews in my humble opinion should be treated more equally. it is not a collection of reviews in its current state as much as it is a collection of scores given by famous publications.
This is maybe where we don't really understand each others. For me, hidden treasure aren't really apart of what I consider open world design. When I say that BOTW is a bit barren in its world I'm talking about the fields for exemple or the desert. There's things in it, but at the end of the day it's a bit empty save from a couple of shrines for exemple.
We are finding a common ground now though :P
in the end of the day i mentioned those because they are what really fills the world of this game (with other things of course). the philosophy behind the games serves its focus on gameplay and exploration, the design of the world serves this purpose. the world subtly guides you to discover its wonders because this is the experience that those developers wanted to make.
but i understand that not anyone will prefer this direction/philosophy in designing a game.
though this is why i said there is no open world game out there that beat all the others in every area. a lot of great things out there with unique approached and different strengths ^^