Should BioWare drop the concept of open world?

I think we've seen a trend with Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda. Both games contain a 15-20 hour main story spread out across 100 hours of mostly rather meaningless side missions spread out across huge, mostly empty maps.

In both games, there are interesting side activities, but they can be easy to miss when they're lumped in with what largely amounts to just MMORPG-like busy work. In Andromeda in particular, there's so much to do outside of the main story that given the nature of BioWare games you often don't know what you should do or when because you're afraid doing or not doing something is going to have an effect on the main story.

I think I prefer the smaller, quasi-open world nature of older BioWare titles like KOTOR, the first two Dragon Age games, and the Mass Effect trilogy. It just seemed like those games had much tighter stories and the side missions were better integrated into the main game.

That said, it's not impossible to make an open world title with a focus on story. Witcher 3 does this very well. Most every side mission is interesting and many of them tie in and enhance the main story as well. You still have simple fetch quests and typical open world fare in Witcher 3, but those activities are easier to identify and largely easy to ignore.