Open world trend in gaming

[Squall Leonhart Loire]

Do you think it's getting way out of hand or do you enjoy it?

[Del Murder]

I am in no position to say what is or isn't out of hand in terms of gaming trends. I like open world games, and when they're great, they're great (I loved Dragon Age Inquisition and Shadow of Mordor from this gen, and Red Dead Redemption from the last gen). However, they are a big time commitment so I do find myself getting fatigued with them more frequently than with other genres. I do find myself searching for more high quality single-narrative 'on the rails' type experiences like Uncharted and it does seem like there are more high quality open world games than Uncharted-like games being released. I would be happy to learn otherwise!

I currently have Xenoblade Chronicles X and Witcher 3. Never started Witcher and I only played a couple hours of XCX before losing interest. I'm sure Witcher is really good and I'll like it but I'm afraid of jumping into it and having it consume me for months, where I could play 5-6 other games during that time. Then there's Horizon, Zelda, and Mass Effect for this year. I want to play them all but I just don't have time for five 100 hour games. It's also one of the main reasons I passed on FFXV since FF has now gone this route as well.

So I don't know about out of hand, but I do long for the days where mainstream games were 10-20 hours of story and max 60 hours if you wanted to do everything in the game. Seems like 60 is the minimum to get the full experience from these games now.

[Fox]

I'm definitely feeling the fatigue about now. Man, I remember when Far Cry 3 came out (holy trout 2012 was five years ago). It felt so fresh and liberating and awesome!

Now that every game is Far Cry 3... not so much. Also, I have been known, on occasion, to refer to open worlds as 'a plague on game design'. I mostly defend this sentiment - although the vitriolic nature of it was largely in response to the disappointment of FFXV - because I believe there are very, very few games that wouldn't be better if they weren't open world. OK so... GTA. Fine. RDR? No problem (R* have more money than God so they can afford to fill the world with enough unique 'stuff' to make it work) Far Cry? Maybe.

But Final Fantasy, The Witcher, Assassin's Creed, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, XCX, Watch Dogs, basically any other? Better without the open world for sure.

[Formalhaut]

It definitely seems to be a growing field. Whether that's a good thing...?

I don't know. I really like the concept of open-world exploration and questing. I do like Inquisition but it also highlights the main flaw that can crop up: the vapidity of the environments.

In Inquisition, after the initial enjoyment of exploring a new area wears off, what you're left with is jumping from point to point, finding a random note lying in the field before you go to another point in the map and kill something. Quest complete. Not to mention many of those quests were fairly boring (like luring a Druffalo back to farm). The environments pinged back elfroot and other pick-ups, which seemed to fill up the rest of the map. It all seemed surprisingly hollow. And there were too many desert environments. The Hissing Wastes is the dullest area.

If they chopped down some of the areas and focused on the a tighter set, it could've been much more successful, I think.

[Squall Leonhart Loire]

Japanese open world = Single Player MMO

[maybee]

Always hated it- just hated getting lost and not knowing where to go next and just wanted to go straight to the story. A little bit of a open world is okay, like the older Final Fantasy games, but big open worlds ? Not my cuppa tea.

[Squall Leonhart Loire]

I have mental health issues so Open world doesn't work for ne.

[Slothy]

I've really got two things to say regarding my opinion of open world games.

1) when they're done well they're utterly fantastic. In some rare cases maybe even ranking among the best games out there.

2) most of them are either boring or outright trout because creating an open world game that has enough content to not become a repeat of the same few mission types (or dungeons or whatever) within a handful of hours is really damn hard, and takes a lot of time, man power, and money. Sadly I see a lot of games that seem to still think it's good enough to have the same old missions where you drive somewhere really fast, shoot a bunch of enemies, or every other thing that's been done to death since grand theft auto 3. Some still try, and occasionally succeed, at shaking things up but among triple A publishers especially in the last term or so years open world became a box to check on marketing feature checklist in a lot of cases whether it helped the game or not.

Now I think most companies are getting better at dialing that back and making sure it is something that really makes the game better now rather than just including them all of the time, but then again, I may just not be paying much attention. With very few exceptions I don't pay half as much attention to the major publishers as I used to.

[Pumpkin]

I like them but not ALL the time or it's just too much

Atelier Firis went open world but it imposes a time limit for the first half of the game which... is an odd choice

[Formalhaut]

I'm not sure whether Lightning Returns was a good example. I certainly didn't loathe it, so that's a plus, even with the time limit (although that limit is pretty generous).

[Fynn]

Xenoblade Chronicles pulls it off wonderfully.

[Fox]

Xenoblade Chronicles pulls it off wonderfully.

Xenoblade Chronicles is not an open world game. Well, the original isn't, and the less said about X the better.

[Fynn]

X was good. And just because certain maps were separated doesn't mean it didn't have the mechanics of an open world game, because it totally did

[Fox]

X was good. And just because certain maps were separated doesn't mean it didn't have the mechanics of an open world game, because it totally did

X had some good ideas wrapped up in some abysmal design decisions that ruined it. Silent protagonist why. Why. Why.

And although XC certainly had some of the mechanics of open world games, the maps being separate is an important distinction in my view, as one of the criticisms I have of open world games in general is that they give you too large of a space with an inability to fill it. By breaking the environment down into smaller maps and - and this is primarily what makes it not count for me - by gating your progression through those maps in a linear fashion, they both make the game non-open world and solves a problem that open world games have.

My view of Xenoblade is that it is an absolutely perfect example of a game that is measurably better as a direct result of not​ being an open world game.

[Scruffington]

Quite frankly, I'm tired of open world games.

It just feels like such a generic copy-paste format between games that it's beginning to make them seem indistinguishable from each other.

I can't remember the last time an open world game truly blew me away. I enjoyed Witcher 3 a ton when it came out in 2015, but now I can hardly even stomach the thought of going back to that game. Sometimes I just want to enjoy a story or a side quest without having to slog through everything in between.

Prior to Witcher 3...Skyrim in 2011 was the other really standout open world game to me. The GTA series is also pretty good. And for a time, so was Assassin's Creed.

The only open world game this year that I have any hope for is Breath of the Wild. Which I can't wait to play.