As many people have said its very much about the game. Huge open worlds can have massive appeal  and help RPGS feel more rewarding and friling to play with a bigger sense of discovery. Equally smaller, unique envrionments with real purpose and attention to detail have their own appeal and can really leave an impression on the player.

I love skyrims overwold, it didn't feel empty to me and I did make a connecion with it. I also love the character poured into games like Zelda Where every NPC is unqiue and the worlds are smaller but filled with character and tone. So I wouldn't push one over another as definitively better, but I do feel like there is a regressive trend of assuming bigger is better and constant braging of how the new game is "x times bigger" then the old one.

Honestly, no offline RPG needs to be bigger then Skyrim unless its an infinite procedurally generated world like No Man's Sky. I'd argue very few games should aim to have overworlds which take more then 5minutes to transverse from one side to another when using the fastest means of manual travel.

You're probably right I was exaggerrating, I meant RPG wise (Excluding Just Cause), but it still might be beaten out.  Just throwing shade at Nintendrones bragging about Xenoblade X's size to overcompensate for its review scores.  

http://www.dualshockers.com/2015/09/01/final-fantasy-xv-map-size-potentially-revealed-its-roughly-an-enormous-780-square-miles/

http://www.newsflow24.com/final-fantasy-xvs-map-size-potentially-revealed-its-roughly-an-enormous-780-square-miles-cn3k

Not sure how much of it is reachable but it should be a big one.  Biggest for console standards at least.  Don't know if any Older WRPGs on PC are bigger

Thanks for backing me up man.  I prefer this formula to randomly generated stuff and reused assets.

I like Persona depsite its randomly generated dungeons, it works to minecraft's advantage as well, but FFXV does look great I'm with you on that.

Not really, the bigger the world usually the less of a content you will get.
The smaller a world is, the more content there is. Sometimes there are games which are in-between.

All that said: I am sick and tired of pointless side-quest's where you are basically a delivery boy or a petty assassin.
Open world games are very overrated but it's nice those times when a good sandbox game arrives and manage to somewhat deliver a good experience

I've never liked huge worlds and maps. Its too overwhelming when you start the game, and so much time gets wasted travelling between locations.

I wish Pokemon has a bigger world. THAT'S a game that'll be extremely fun to play in a big world.

What I hate is that training areas are scarce. Imagine if the world got bigger, felt more like an actual region.

Like everything it's all in the execution. Open world can be done well or it can be done badly.

The thing is that open world games are more unpredictive. When done right it gives you the feeling of freedom, even tho in some games might be an illusion.

Like for example, in a car chase on GTA you could by mistake go trough a stairs and jump on the train track getting faster to the target car, which will give you a feeling that you gamed the game, until you realize the train is coming you way and you explode.
On a linear game, the train possibility would be either scripted or not exist.

Not only that, on a RPG like witcher, while doing a mission you could find someone that see you killing something you shouldn't and the consequences of that could be that the game breaks or gets harder.

Bugs on open world games, also heightens the feeling of freedom, cause your choice of how to do something could create a script bug, that while may be bad game wise, will heighten the feeling of freedom, since was unpredictive and even broke a script.

So a open world game is all about freedom, and that feeling is so powerful that "goat simulator" bets all its gameplay on this feeling alone.

I have always liked the bigger games more then the smaller ones.

I have spent more time on Fallout 4 then Fallout NV or Skyrim.
Far Cry 4> the rest
DA inquisition> DA2
AC2> AC, AC:BF>3

Etc. etc. etc.
I remember back in PS1 era my favorite games Digimon World, Spyro, Darkstone, FFVIII felt much more open and bigger then most games at the time.