Elder Scrolls is usually the go-to example. It's easy to be aimless in those worlds. There are main stories, usually not overly long, and a heaping pile of side content to do. But you get to play how you want. You're not railroaded. Unless you're a hardcore completionist, the games don't make you feel like you're missing anything by not doing every faction, every sidequest, etc. Eventually you just reach a good place to stop, but usually in the process you feel as though your character told a story.

Valhalla was just a chore. There was basically a single path from start to finish and that path took >100 hours to get there. I couldn't make it to the end. The result is that, even though I played over 50 hours, I feel like I never really played the game because it never ended up taking me anywhere. There were some places that I did want to go and explore because they seemed cool, or some quests that I wanted to keep going with, but I'd get walled by sudden level spikes, which just felt crappy. It just turned out to be a waste.