As far as I could tell, the "issues" people primarily had with it were that they wanted it to be bigger, but I also really appreciated its scope and how little time they wasted.
I've been deterred for so long because Majora's Mask was perhaps the most violent reaction I had to playing a video game, and Outer Wilds does the Majora's Mask thing.
I haven't played Outer Wilds yet, but I loved The Outer Worlds, so I'm all on board for this. I have my doubts that Microsoft will want Obsidian to launch Avowed and Outer Worlds 2 in the same year though.
To answer the OP, it's an expandalone with flight mechanics and new powers. Regular Elden Ring is also a co-op action adventure game, but more notably in this trailer is that none of the other players are phantoms, meaning that, like they said in a previous interview, the "seamless co-op" mod and its popularity has influenced how they're handling multiplayer going forward.
You control a full party in Metaphor. If you only played the beginning of the prologue, the game waits for a certain story event to happen before giving you control of other characters.
No, I understand where they're coming from. I played the original FF7 for the first time not long ago, and the combat is good, but there's too much of it, and you can feel disoriented returning to the world map, trying to remember what you were doing and where you were going. I love the combat in Larian's games, but there's far too much of it in the first Divinity: Original Sin game relative to the other things you do in that game's loop. It's a problem of pacing. There was a really good article on then-called-Gamasutra breaking down the pacing of the X-Men Origins: Wolverine game versus Batman: Arkham Asylum. Even though people pretty unanimously thought the combat in Wolverine was good, we only really still talk about one of those two games today.
In the past 2 years, you're getting Elden Ring. In the past year, it might not be the most popular, but it's the most acclaimed.
Enemies are visible in Chrono Trigger as well, specifically so you can avoid them. If you're significantly over-leveled, they'll even run away from you, if memory serves. I'm playing through Metaphor: ReFantazio right now, and its solution is to make it so that you can one-shot those enemies outside of battle; and if they'll actually challenge you, you go into the battle mode proper. That's certainly one way to skin that cat. Meanwhile, The Thaumaturge (released this year) has a shocking number of similarities in its battle system to Metaphor (and, presumably, Persona), but its number of combats are fairly scarce, in a good way, never really ending up in that situation where you're super over-leveled, because its leveling system doesn't revolve around a lot of "number go up".
What you're referring to are "trash mobs". They're usually less incentivized in tun-based games that emphasize tactical positioning, like Baldur's Gate 3; you won't find a single encounter that felt like it shouldn't have been there. If the combat encounters are very quick, the designers are incentivized to put in more of them, which is why I don't usually like real time with pause (like old D&D games), though Pillars of Eternity II definitely cleaned up the trash mob problem from its predecessor, even when you play it in real time with pause mode.
You can only put "are turn-based RPGs dying?" in the thumbnail if you just woke up from a 10-year coma.
"Free" wouldn't have saved Concord. They had basically no interest in the game from the time it was revealed, and the open beta player numbers supported that. Putting a price tag on the game was an attempt to bleed out less profusely.
I probably will check it out some day, but that mechanic that's similar is the thing that deters me.