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.
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?
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.
open world is great if the world is interesting to explore
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.
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.
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 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
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 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 think the term “open world” is mostly meaningless these days. Skyrim, for example, is called an open world game. But… It’s not? At least not by the definition that “open world” originally meant, which literally was just a continuous game world with no loading screens between areas.
Now it just kinda means “game with big outside map.” Unless I can walk into a building without seeing a load screen, I don’t consider it to be truly open world.
Dark Souls is a true open world game, even though it’s not big or has vast open fields, while, again, Skyrim is not because going into a cave, or a house, or even a major city, requires loading a new level, breaking up the world.
I can’t say I’ve ever heard your use of the term open world before. As I’ve known it, it’s always meant a game world where you can practically go anywhere with minimal to no barriers. Such as GTA3 and that bloody bridge.
I’d argue Skyrim etc have an “open world” above ground in addition to many “linear worlds” , i.e. the caves and houses behind loading screens. Open world games let you choose where to go and how to get there, as opposed to linear “corridor” games like Half Life or Halo where you literally follow a single path from A to B as you progress from one level to the next.
Then there’s games like original Fable which blurs the line, because technically you choose where to go and how to get there, but each loading area is so small, it doesn’t feel like an open world at all. And also you can’t go off the path.
Btw if you don’t like loading screens, have you tried Space Engineers? You can literally travel from one full sized planet (~40km diameter) to another full sized without a single loading screen. While flying you can walk around the inside or outside of your spaceship, no loading screens.
I like open world games when the time I spend simply being in them without any explicit objective is enjoyable. If I’m thinking “I’m bored, where’s the next task?” then there’s a problem. If I’m thinking “I wonder if I can make a boat that operates by paddling instead of using a fan…” then we’re good.
(Tears of the Kingdom’s physics don’t work that way, I’m sorry to report. Thing flailed around like it was drowning.)
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.