I disagree. I prefer the game world to feel organic and realistic. Not as if it was made with you in mind. I need empty traversable landmasses to... traverse. You are not doing "nothing". You actually travel in it. Why do you need every inch of the land to have something to find or interact with? That would feel like a video game land, a theme park or Truman's Show world.
Super Mario Bros would have been so much better with a lot of this in between, right?
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Game design, not only for memory reasons, was imho very different in the still earlier days.
A little bit of scale, for immersion and believability, okay, Stalker, Mafia, even the imho not really good SotC (where the emptiness, had a clear contrasting purpose) did it right, but ever since GTA 3, probably already with Daggerfall or whatever, way too many games went big just to tick the we have a huge map and humongous amount of hours of play time boxes - "value" for your money- and all they did was stretch mostly lacking video game stories even more. Morrowind, Far Cry, AC, RDR could all be awesome games if they would not waste so much of my time for those "epic" empty game worlds.
It would be clever if every game that wants to be big, to design it in a way that the player can toggle the distances between towns, boss areas etc. so players who want to spent half of their game time traversing can do that (and I guesss the majority does, otherwise it would not be so successfull in sales) and those who just want to have the juicy bits can actually enjoy it too with a "dumbed down" Greatest Hits version.
Vast landmasses are usually anyway copy paste deserts, so toggle/crop that crap. AI tools to the rescue!