Nobody who loves ME1 uncharted worlds doesn't recognise them as empty, vapid game spaces made up of bad collect-a-thons across haphazardly generated heightmaps in an engine that was, at the time, struggling at best to handle large open spaces let alone fill them with and stream in interesting details.
But conveying ideas and emotionally resonating with audiences in interactive spaces isn't that simple, and sometimes potency can be achieved with simple, rudimentary things or well executed singular ideas. Can be how you interact with an item, a particular audio cue, the very specific presentation of a menu, the animation or feel of a vehicle in particular motion, or just a specific kind of vista or moment. Dishonored forces you to manually pick up coins instead of auto-looting because doing so forces the player to be attentive to their game worlds and their micro details, as well as enabling players to live "in the moment" where actions are deliberate and calculated. Busywork as simple as "you have to pick up coins manually" feeds into the gameplay loop in such a way that benefits the immersion rather than detracts from it.
ME1's uncharted worlds succeeded not because of their faults, but because they were slow, meditative moments of simplicity that evoked a grand sense of scale and wonder of large, beautifully rendered celestial bodies in the sky, in a scifi game that emphasised scale in all forms in themes and tones, while also slowing the game's pacing down between the moments of excitement and intrigue otherwise spent on missions and in hubs. Writers and directors talk about this all the time; how slower moments are necessary to accentuate the highs, and how good pacing will value both full and empty space of what is being created. ME1's uncharted worlds were the game slowing down and ridding the player of back-to-back explosions and actions, as well as NPC exposition and talky talk, and instead just let them look at big pretty skies for awhile and ponder the vastness of the universe they're immersing themselves in.
These posts talking about them like they were specifically designed to conjure up some ethereal experience read like the level design version of
Everyone is Jesus in Purgatory.
Whether it was BioWare's deliberate intent or not is perfectly questionable, but the truth of people resonating with these moments is undeniable and absolute, and that is the thing to be assessed and understood. Designers often unintentionally do things that result in unexpected responses from players, which often influences future work as they learn how their audience resonated with the creative direction. That is different from the TV trope implication of over analysis and projected subtext on content that has none.
