I played for about 4 hours last night and pretty much agree with everything here.
One of the first complaints before have said is that the open world wouldn't add anything to the DW formula, and I politely disagree having tried it. In the first chapter (there are 13 total), you get a lot of 'mini' (sub) missions on the way to your overall goal. Of course you 'could' go and rush and kill the boss, but I found that it didn't really work for me as I was always underleveled. It really helps to raise the morale meter just as you would in past DW games before tackling the boss. To do that you have to do the other submissions to increase your level and level up your character. That's where the beauty of the open world formula comes in and rather than having a small map in past DW games, you get a variety of submissions spread out in the open world. Doing these missions, and killing the enemies will allow you to capture the bases and increase troop morale as your front lines increases.
Doing every mission on each chapter could easily take 6 or 7 hours.
I do regret getting this on PS4 though, it looks and runs bad. Even if they make this run better, it still doesn't help that this game looks bad. I hope that if i put in enough hours Ill just move on to something else and avoid the double dip at full price.
The other thing I have to say though is that I miss having all the extra modes from DW8XL, you get the story mode and that's about it. Kinda bare bones.
