I agree quest text are very poor these days and they can be improved. However can you navigate a huge open world these days without minimaps etc?
Without a minimap? Depends on the game. I don't like minimaps and I tend to deactivate them when I can. Also, the problem isn't the map size, because I had to use the minimap in games that aren't open world.
In DX HR/MD, I have to look at the minimap, because that's where you get your information about enemies. Yet, the first DX had none of that and I had no issue sneaking around based on visual and auditive cues.
The Elders Scrolls games (Morrowind and later) never had minimaps and I'm not opening my map all the time because there is enough unique landmarks and different biomes to know where I'm at. The roads, city and village also have their own feels, so it's easy to oriented myself. The compass gives general directions but I don't really need it. You can even recognize a lot of the dungeons/ruins just by the entrance in Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim. I would preferred if they kept Morrowind/Oblivion quest description though, Skyrim was rather light in regard to that and basically requires the quest marker.
In TW3, I tried to play without the minimap and there is a lot more peeking at the normal map to see if I'm getting near where I want to go (forgot about quest markets, quest description are more light than Skyrim). Too much environmental copy-pasting, the map/mini-map has to tell you where are the POI because few of them are lead to via the environment and roads and villages all mostly looks the same (and some of them are just there to be there too). Even navigating Novrigrad is a nightmare, it has about 5 unique areas, but getting to them is done through same-looking corridors of city houses, you are never sure if you are in the right one to get where you want to go.
I had less issues in a game like Saint-Rows 3/4 than GTA at not looking at the map/mini-map too. Saint-Rows is more comicbooky, it always has some special looking tall building(s) you can see from everywhere. It also has different looking enemies by areas. But both games suffer of the same design decisions as TW3 (GTA was the first with that design I believe).
Freelancer is arguable bigger than all the other games I mentioned and while it has a "minimap", it's a radar that tells you what is around you and not really used to navigate. The game does a great job at putting the game content nears unique planets/phenomenon so you are never "lost" and it even makes waypoints somewhat useless in some cases.
The way I see it, devs wants to give the impression of realistic density so they copy-paste environments to have more villages/roads and "bigger world", but then they sprinkle quests/POI in the game without altering the environment so they can easily move them during development without having to change the "level design". That leads to having to use UI tools to tell players where to go because the environment nor the quest text was designed to do so.
Maybe its not the size of the world but weather if the world was designed to orient and navigate using unique and distinctive landmarks.
