I'm not a fan of their open world format and it's a tragedy that a lot of other developers have adopted their generic design philosophy with things like waypoints, x-ray vision, radio towers and no punishment for dying. They clearly have a lot of talent for world design and some good engines for grand games yet they can never tell a good story or produce a well-paced and balanced experience. The latest breed of AC games is basically worlds that are too big which then have to be bloated with filler content and to top it off, they level-gait so players either have to do these crappy mundane tasks or pay Ubisoft not to play the game. The fact they don't offer an in-game XP scaling choice just shows their design is dictated by sheer greed. Days Gone just flows and although there are some repetitive aspects, most of the game feels fresh and unpredictable yet many Ubisoft open world games are littered with doing the same task 50 times over.
I am now very hesitant to buy into non-masterpiece open world games because of the direction many of them have taken but it's nice to see Days Gone not fall into those traps and produce something that retains interest. Bigger doesn't mean better and Ubisoft will never understand that whilst they remain in this philosophy and they even said a couple years back that they were moving away from story-based games even with ones that require a story focus!