As I get older, I notice that the open world formula is tiring! I much prefer a linear game told well than the same game with add-ons.
I was looking forward to Days Gone. I haven’t had it spoiled for me, so I picked it up and when I realized it was open world, it killed my enthusiasm for it.
I just can’t go hours on end forever just because.
For me, open worlds are almost a Nay! I’ve heard great things about Days Gone, and I want to play it, but the amount of time it will take to go through the story, because it’s open world, I don’t know. I get tired just to think about it.
What about you? Do you enjoy open-world games? Do you seek them?
Is the openworld meant for exploring, like pre-Starfield Bethesda game? Yeah i love those.
Is the openworld crafted only for wasting player time, like Ubisoft game? Nah.
Is the openworld crafted as a backstage for the main story but also can be explored, like GTA franchise or dying light? Yeah, those are nice.
Is the openworld only used as a backstage for the main story that doesn’t encourage exploration because it conflict with player urgency, like Metro Exodus? I’d rather not.
In my mid-40s and this is more-or-less what I think as well.
I like the idea of open world games. In practice it depends entirely on the execution, and amount of free time I have. I enjoyed the hell out of Cyberpunk 2077, but have zero desire to play GTA6 or the latest Ubisoft snoozefest.
As long as it’s a bit of a sandbox: hell yeah. But there needs to be stuff happening, things to do. I love games like GTA, Cyberpunk, Just Cause, Stalker, because you can just go around the world and experience random stuff happening. Sometimes I don’t want a goal, but just a sandbox to create my own stories.
Yeah I find that open world games are only as good as their sandbox capabilities.
I tend to agree, open world is becoming just a box to tick off for AAA developers, which means it just gets put in as filler basically. Halo Infinite is the worst example I can think of. However I do think there are 2 ways open world can be justified: if the world is just packed so full of interesting stuff that the game just gets huge, or if the way of traversing that world is fun.
Category 1 would be games like Morrowind, Skyrim , Fallout 4, or even Mass Effect on a smaller scale. There’s just so much to do that it becomes an open world on its own. Category 2 would be games like the Arkham series , Assassins Creed, or Forza Horizon, where getting from point A to point B is fun on its own.
Open world is great when it’s done right, but since when has Ubisoft or EA made a good game in the past 10 years?
it depends on the content. a linear story should absolutely not be open world.
A survival sandbox literally can’t be anything else.
The only “open world” game that’s been a linear story survival sandbox that I’ve seen do it well is Raft. And that only works because of the medium of it being an open sea where the players can wander, then move through the story at their leisure.
If an open world is just there for collectibles/unlocks or just feels otherwise unnecessary to the primary selling feature of the game (like story), then yeah its a hard pass.
Otherwise, if the open world is actually a core part of the game like in most MMO’s such as Old School Runescape, then it can be quite enjoyable.
Open world games don’t hold me, because ironically, they tend to feel too small. When you can walk from one side of the setting to the other in real time, it all feels small.
Mostly nay. I am not against open-world in premise, but most open-world games do it poorly. I think that a lot of studios make their games open world because these types of games are popular, but don’t give a thought to what that means for their specific game. They want their worlds to seem expansive and think this is an easy solution but it isn’t.
If you make an open-world game, it needs at the very least two things: a compelling method of traversal (mechanics of interacting with that open world), and thoughtful, intentional design (not just large stretches of trees and rocks between towns). I think Breath of the Wild is a paragon of good open-world design.
I find the opposite. I love video games, always have, but these days my time is more limited, I might go months without touching them, and I just play to relax. So over the past 10 years or whatever, things like GTAV, Fallout 4, and AC:Odyssey have worked out really well for me. I can pick them up whenever I want and either settle in for some story or just waste time exploring, doing side quests, finding collectibles.
Like what would I rather do in real life? Work toward a single goal day after day, or see what’s on top of that mountain over there just because?
I prefer when the “world” is smaller scale like the Yakuza series for example.
Otherwise, I will immediately get distracted and 100% will never even get close to finishing the main quest.
I’ve never finished Skyrim because of literally this. Started the game six times, got bored every time :D
I love an open world game that is done well - Horizon: Zero Dawn, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. But so often it is just done because thats what they think is the hot thing, and it does not work
It’s a bit awkward, because I liked HZD, I completed it, DLC and all, but I don’t consider it a good open world. I learned after a few hours that exploring is almost never rewarded, and you’d way better follow the few very obvious threads the game is setting up for you.
Going into a hidden path before you’re sent there by a quest is just wasting time, you’re going to struggle a lot, you’ll get nothing at the end and you’ll often even have to go back the way you came. Going outright off-road, even a little, spams you with “turn back now or I reload your save” messages. Which is baffling, I’ve never seen a game trying such a bad way to keep you inside the playing area. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game border that’s such a mess to begin with.
Great story, great characters, fun battle mechanics. But as an open-world game, I don’t think it works.
Nay, but I have a few exceptions:
FFXV really benefits from the open world and never felt copy pasted like most others.
Outer Wilds (if that counts) could obviously only exist with a continuous map.
While I dislike most open world games, I don’t think it’s an issue with the open world itself, but with how shallow the games end up being as they all copy the same formula and they all seem afraid to hide “content” from you, so exploration gets trivialized.
It depends. I like Open World games that feel like there’s a purpose to them being Open World.
Like the Elder Scrolls. The point is for you to feel like you’re living in Tamriel. There’s a point to it being Open World.
Or Far Cry (which I admittedly haven’t played), where you’re supposed to be lost in some place, deep in a place that is hostile to you.
And I might get crucified for this, but I honestly feel like the first Breath of the Wild game had no real reason to be Open World. The second one? Yeah, they figured it out. But the first one feels like it was OW just to be OW.
Tl;Dr, the game has to have a reason to be OW. Otherwise they’re just aiming for quantity of content and poitnlessly hurting the quality.
I play them because I enjoy them. You can normally pick out the main storyline and just follow that.
Personally I just play a long game over the course of a couple of years.
Indeed, I often times will play for a few hours and find all sorts of cool things, but nothing that moves the story along.
Case in point, I have been playing BG3 for months a few hours here and there and I’m only in the beginning parts of Act 3. And before that I dumped probably 400hrs into Elden Ring, and then went back in for many, many more when the DLC came out.
I played BG3, put over 100 hours, it took me 2 years. But I don’t mind, it was an easy game to pick up after a break and continue with, and the quests were rewarding in themselves, you didn’t need to complete the whole game to understand it.
There are definitely games I have started played, then couldn’t remember what I was doing after a break and wasn’t enthused enough to return to it. I can’t remember specific games but I know it happens.
I’ve put around 400 hours into that game. But I’ve only “completed” it once.
I came from divinity where you needed to play the game on tactician to experience all the content. Not sure if bg3 is the same way but I went in with that mindset.
Such a great game and so much to explore. Took me back to when I was a kid trying to 100% mass effect.
So many studios fail to breath life into their worlds and pump them full of tedious bs. (Looking at you starfield. What a let down that was…)
Yeah I’m only playing balanced or whatever the middle/default difficult is. I have 263hrs as of right now and have really been enjoying it. And I’m doing Dark Urge so I’m missing a bunch of content just because of “bad decisions”, and the way I ended up in act 2 I also know I missed a bunch of content. I’m not even close to being done with Act 3 (I don’t think) and I’m already debating if I will do another playthrough afterwards, or play something else from my ever growing backlog. And I’ve never been a 100%'er and usually happy/lucky if I even finish it. 😂
I love them if they’re done right. Bethesda and CDPR do it right every time. I do really enjoy Ubisoft’s open worlds back in the day, such as the old AC games (Rogue and before), Watch Dogs games, etc. Of course, RDR2 is also a masterpiece in this design. You mentioned Days Gone and I enjoy that one too, it’s designed in a way that doesn’t feel exhaustive.
Problem is, because of the scope of the games, it tends to take too much time. If the devs don’t make the exploration and side activities fun and worthwhile, it’s easy to lose steam and get burned out.
I do find some of them great for killing time, though. I’ll sometimes load up Watch Dogs 2 and free roam, do multiplayer activities, hunt down collectibles as I listen to cybersecurity podcasts. Same with RDR2 if I’m listening to podcasts about America or traditionalism.
