While there was a substantial backlash against MGS V for its story and because people felt it was incomplete, I think its phenomenal gameplay greatly outweighs these problems.

I think that, while it's trendy to knock on MetaCritic, I don't think MetaCritic is a poor indicator of quality. Bloodborne, The Witcher 3, MGS V, and Undertale are the highest rate games (that we care about) and are almost unquestionably the best games of 2015.

I loved the game as well, and it has my favorite gameplay of any game this year. That's not the point.  It wasn't as good as witcher 3 bloodborne as those games were 40 hours and then had great expansions and Konami didn't let Kojoma finish it.
 Had the most fun with tales of zestiria overall, but it definitely has flaws i can't overlook and its not GOTY

My only hope is that we move away from this fetishization of the number of gameplay hours and open world map size that we've been seeing in recent years.

I'm not saying that we should return to the days of 8 hour long on-rail cover shooters, but games shouldn't use gameplay length, amount of content, and map size as selling points. Such things just encourage meaningless chores to be included in games, as opposed to memorable experiences.

Except Persona 5, of course. I don't ever want Persona 5 to end when it comes out. I don't know if my heart will be able to take it.