what..? no! if they go the Ubi route and put completely meaningless fetch quests and literally hundreds of chests everywhere, it will completely ruin the feel of the game world, RDR was just fine the way it was (well actually i found the desert areas to be way too tiny).
i realize there is a middle ground though, heh. but i want it to look and feel so huge you'll get lost sometimes in an empty desert if you stray too far.. and not finding immersion-breaking pointless chests/items every 2 minutes.
hmm i think i just came up with a pretty interesting solution! hear me out GAF: imagine that the actual map was fairly packed with sidequests etc, but if you ventured out of the map's borders you'd get almost endless procedurally generated deserts (or actually designed, if they have the time), prairie, dense forests.. areas where it could be possible to actually get lost, but also find some really rare random events, easter eggs etc, so it would be worth it to try and go explore. so those who want to explore vast "emptyness" could have their fix, and those who just want to get on with their missions and story etc could easily stay on the main map area.
in short: OPTIONAL vast areas of almost emptyness. wouldn't that be a win/win and reasonably easy for Rockstar to implement? what say you open-world fans of GAF? also Rockstar employees if you're reading feel completely free to steal my idea