

Ghost of Tsushima is not quite as big as more recent Ubisoft games, though. Valhalla was just a stupidly large game with not much meaningful content in it. Just big for the sake of being big.
I heard that Shadows was supposed to be a bit smaller, but guessing they still don’t know how to really pare down the scale to match the content.
Yep, the old “optimal” way to play, if you didn’t want to focus so hard on efficient leveling, was to make all of your major skills ones that you never planned to use. That way, for the skills that you do use frequently, you can increase those as much as you want while still sitting at level 1, allowing the player to become considerably stronger while enemies stayed at the same difficulty.
Alternatively, if someone messed up character creation, they could also simply choose to never sleep and never trigger the level up dialog. But there are a couple of quests which require the player to sleep to trigger an event, so folks would have to be smart about how they go about engaging with those.