The Biggest Problem with Triple-A, Open-World Games: "They're Boring as Hell"

brentsg said:
Horizon Zero Dawn is my favorite game in years so not sure I totally buy in.
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What? That is the most boring open world RPG I have played! Every merchant in every new city I talked to sold the very same stuff.
Lazy ass console design.
 
Open world games are hit and miss for me. Witcher 3 was definitely a hit for me, I could play that game in small chunks (ie: treasure hunt, exploration) and never felt myself tiring in the world. It's probably the only open world game where I was disappointed I made it to the end - other games, by the end of it, I'm just trying to get through the remaining content as quickly as possible.

One open world game that felt repetitious to me was Spider-man - felt like most of the side content (Black Cat statues, weather stations, etc) were very stale and boring. Story missions were good, but the other stuff was stale.
 
Erm I loved the whole open world exploration and settlement building part of Fallout 4. I spent maybe 5 hours on the storyline missions and 850 on the rest.

More chores please.
 
I enjoyed FO3 and FO:NV. IMO it's really only games that force you to craft to have anything good that I despise.

Crafting is mostly just busywork to inflate the play time. You can gather resources and craft in FO:NV, but outside of stuff to make repair kits I don't, and once you complete one of the DLC, you get unlimited repair kits so you can stop...

FO:NV is my most recent play and a great game IMO.
 
I think repetition kills any game. It doesn't matter if it's open world or linear, single or multiplayer. I haven't been able to go back and play any of the dead space games or Alien Isolation because of that and I loved both but by the end I was glad it was the end.
 
Mostly agree with the article.
There are some exceptions - I liked pretty much all Bethesda games, NV and even FC5 somewhat, although that's mostly down to a lack of games last year.
Horizon was the most boring slog I've played in a few years, dropped it about 10 hours in - it's literally a Ubisoft game in all but name.
 
Sounds like ADD to me. most games are built from the ground up for kids with ADD... constant action, icons all over the fricken place, power-ups, instant gratification.... good example... GTAV online... nothing but a bunch of Trevors running around... you have this amazing map/city that could have been great...instead of everyone driving around killing each other. That's what sells today... instant gratification/action. Yep I'm getting old....
 
I honestly hate when linear story is injected into open world. I am fine and have fun with a giant sandbox, I don't need a "you are the worlds only hope" storyline. I do hate when I am playing a game where I have choices, then my character just does their own thing for a sequence and puts themself in a dangerous spot (like opening a door without looking or checking the room out, or confirming a kill and the bad guy gets away etc) doing something completely opposite from what I would do.

But that said, that is what I like, others like different things. I wish we could move past this phase where we always feel we have to all hate or love the same thing as a group, and you are stupid if you don't agree kind crap. Zelda was open world, had shit for story and is touted as the best thing ever lol.
 
Snowdog said:
Crafting is mostly just busywork to inflate the play time.
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It also ruins your chances of getting any interesting loot.
I still remember the Infinity engine games - when you killed a dragon/lich/whatever after careful preparation you got some unique badass weapons and amor with it's own backstory or a piece of dragon scale you could turn into a unique suit.
Crafting was present in BG2, but it was done well - you traded in an already powerful artifact + some special ingredient for an upgraded version.
Contrast this with PoE where you constantly find the usual twigs + duct tape + monkey droppings = halberd + 7. Even the bloody dragon scales only serve to +1 your existing gear.
 
stashix said:
It also ruins your chances of getting any interesting loot.
I still remember the Infinity engine games - when you killed a dragon/lich/whatever after careful preparation you got some unique badass weapons and amor with it's own backstory or a piece of dragon scale you could turn into a unique suit.
Crafting was present in BG2, but it was done well - you traded in an already powerful artifact + some special ingredient for an upgraded version.
Contrast this with PoE where you constantly find the usual twigs + duct tape + monkey droppings = halberd + 7. Even the bloody dragon scales only serve to +1 your existing gear.
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Exactly. Crafting one unique item, from scales from a unique powerful dragon is a fantastic idea.

Gathering hundreds of plants, essences, and tree bark etc, is just pointless busy work...

As much as I love FO:NV it had some pretty bad quests. There was one where you had to gather 100! pieces of scrap metal... I would like to give swift kick in the nutsack to the guy who wrote that quest.
 
It'd be interesting to hear the author's opinion on The Witcher 3 which is a very popular and huge open world game. Nothing about the game in my eyes was boring. Neither are Red Redemption 2 or the old classic: The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim.
 
Snowdog said:
Exactly. Crafting one unique item, from scales from a unique powerful dragon is a fantastic idea.

Gathering hundreds of plants, essences, and tree bark etc, is just pointless busy work...

As much as I love FO:NV it had some pretty bad quests. There was one where you had to gather 100! pieces of scrap metal... I would like to give swift kick in the nutsack to the guy who wrote that quest.
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I really hate the idea that I am the savior of the world but yet I am making junk weapons just to smash into pieces to use the pieces to make more junk weapons so I can get skilled enough to make a good weapon. Only to then find something better in a trashcan.
 
ReaperX22 said:
I haven't played the Fallout series/Anthem, but I have played a bit of WoW and many years of another (likely even worse/more repetitive MMO Aion) and definitely can agree.
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WoW was good up until WOTLK, which is an unpopular opinion I have. WOTLK wasn't the worst but it definitely lacked content with the recycling of Naxx and the Crusader Coliseum which was just a room where bosses spawned. WOTLK was probably about when Activision bought Blizzard and started to pull back on content. Which is probably why a lot of raids that were planned for WOTLK were cancelled like the Troll raid and Azjol-Nerub. The lack of content started with WOTLK and people didn't notice until Cata and beyond.
After playing Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4, I was extremely excited after a new switch purchase to get into Breath of the Wild. However this particular game is literally what the OP's article is talking about. I just could not get into this game! It was raved about sooo much, but I just find gaps between spaces huge, mostly no-story, and just.. Boring!? Don't even get me started on items you can't repair... >.<

I enjoyed my time with Skyrim, though.
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I played Breath of the Wild on PC from start to finish and there's a lot of things that left a bad taste in my mouth. Weapons break often which is the result of random loot mechanics. Instead of making dungeons with unique weapons you have this. Speaking of which, no dungeons. This is odd since the NES, SNES, as well as N64 versions of the Zelda games all had dungeons and here we have a huge open world with nothing. Lots of busy work and copy and paste quests but no dungeons. Then there's the Master Sword which is junk unless you enter the castle which then magically doubles in damage. Luckily I had the DLC which does offer a quest to double the weapons damage all the time, but that should have been in there from the start not a $20 DLC, which I didn't pay cause pirate. The rest of the DLC is nothing but more busy work for armor that's terrible cause you can't upgrade it. Also lots of farming as I found myself running around the game wasting time to get max upgrades. Why can't I just go fight a hard boss and be done like in Dark Souls?

Game developers need to understand that this method of open world design isn't going to cut it. Don't support them by giving them money. Fuck the Shrines and Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild. It was clear they were going to put more content in like a hook shot cause in some parts of the game you can see "X" marks left over for when you do acquire it. So there were dungeons planned and you could avoid slowly climbing mountains with it, which probably benefits the time played in the game as you do spend a lot of time climbing in the game. Same idea in World of Warcraft where the world seems smaller when you can traverse it quicker with a flying mount, or in this case a hook shot. It does make the world seem bigger but it also wastes a lot of your time doing nothing enjoyable.
 
“I don’t wanna do my video game chores”
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While I can absolutely understand his view point, the fact is other people do, look at the whole Sims franchise that game has some building aspects to it but the rest is about chores and it sold how many copies? with how many different expansions? Bottom line this is another "I don't like this, so no one else should" type of guy, when instead maybe just say "well maybe that's not the game for me". I'm picky with my games for the reason, I don't rush to play AAA games just because it's a AAA game, it has to be something I want to do, and that includes everything. Yeah RDR2 isn't for you, so don't play it instead of feeling like you need to because it's such a popular game.

For me there's a handful of 4x space games I've played over the years (Stellaris) that have had mechanics that I absolutely dislike, i.e. energy requirements for buildings that scale up at the same rate as the output product which to me doesn't seem like much of an improvement on output and more an improvement on available tile space, but the great thing about these games I like, they're super easy to mod, and finding the plain text that deals with buildings, a few number changes later, and now I have a game where the mechanics are something I can get behind, now my level 2 farm makes 50% more food just like before, except instead of taking 50% more energy it only takes 25% more energy or whatever.
 
Uh...menial tasks have been in video games for some time now. Why else would you have quests and side quests that require you to travel back and forth across the map so many times? I guess this is a new level of tedium?
 
cptnjarhead said:
Sounds like ADD to me. most games are built from the ground up for kids with ADD... constant action, icons all over the fricken place, power-ups, instant gratification.... good example... GTAV online... nothing but a bunch of Trevors running around... you have this amazing map/city that could have been great...instead of everyone driving around killing each other. That's what sells today... instant gratification/action. Yep I'm getting old....
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That's not what ADD is. The "instant gratification" idea is due to the way everything has changed. There are a shit load more games to play now then there ever has been, meaning we have nearly unlimited options. Plus the gaming audience has gotten a lot older and there are a lot more people playing. By and large the gaming audience are adults, with jobs, families, things that need to be done outside of spending hours at a time gaming. People just want to relax and play something fun. If they're not hooked quickly they move on to something else. Why spend 5-10 hours trying to get to the "good" part of a game when there are so many other options to get what a person wants? You think games like Doom, Quake, Duke, etc were popular for any reason beyond them being damn good shooters that hooked the player nearly instantly? If the Doom shareware levels had been an hour-long slog before the fast shooting started it never would have taken off.
 
Open world games suck after a while. That's a fact.

I agree with the POV of the main article. I miss real head turning single player campaigns. They don't exist anymore. Titanfall 2 sp campaign was beautifully amazing however short as an example. Crysis was excellent as well. Halo... list goes on.
 
The big problem is that these companies all tout how BIG the open world is, not how much CONTENT is in that open world.

There is nothing inherently wrong with open-world games, but if you just make it big for the sake of being big and don't fill it with anything, it's boring. And no, pointless collectibles do not count as "content".
 
The shitty open world games are being conflated with good ones by particularly blinkered pundits who, surprise surprise, conclude that all open world games suck. Ubisoft in particular has distilled a single core formula which it just reskins once or twice a year as a vehicle for additional microtransactions and DLC. I was going to pass on Far Cry 5, but people were insisting it was particularly good so I tried it and... it was just another Far Cry, just like every other since 3. Even AC: Odyssey, another critical darling, was just the same formula with an ancient Greece paint job and a few other bells and whistles.

But it can be done well, and has been by games like the GTAs, RDR (presumably, when there's a PC version I'll definitely try it), Breath of the Wild, and The WItcher 3.
Being open world in and of itself doesn't make a game good or bad. It turns out that boring, mindless open world games suck. Just like boring, mindless corridor shooters or boring, mindless linear RPGs. Who'd have thought?
 
I think as others have mentioned it is about the quality of the overall experience. In recent years "somewhat open world" games have become pretty easy to churn out to the point it isn't a cohesive experience, where reliance on the open world and sprinkling the volume of stuff to do is meant to carry the game. Its something of a "fast food" equivalent - its filling an meets some base needs, but it isn't nutritious nor is it particularly delicious if you have tastes outside a very narrow range.

There are tons of good and great open world games as discussed here. From the Elder Scrolls Morrowwind/Oblivion/Skyrim triad to The Witcher 3, GTA V, Metal Gear Solid V Assassin's Creed Origins and Odyssey, and Zelda Breath of the Wild, well designed open world games bring something to the audience. Kingdom Come: Deliverance and many other indies provide a unique take on this gamestyle. Now of course there will be variation in opinion on what "well designed" games might be. For instance, many seem to like The Division and Ghost Recon Wildlands in their design, but the Far Cry series is more split and Watch Dogs is generally less appreciated among "Ubi open world" titles; Hell, some even objected to certain designs in Breath of the Wild while others considered them great.

In any event, it comes down to the care of the craft. If a player is just looking for the baseline "open world activities box checking" playstyle then many of these games will hit that spot to greater or lesser or lesser extents. Sometime that's really what someone wants - go in for awhile, clear out a bit of the map taking over some fortresses, looting, and executing those in your way. However, it can all blur together without really putting into the artistic aspects of the game. Assassin's Creed Origins and especially Odyssey both keep the heritage of "open world Ubisoft games" but add so much to do and do it so well on every level that many who would otherwise object laud it as one of the best games of the last year. No matter if its your type of game, clearly a lot of love went into the development and continual post-launch content has been flowing in along the way, both visible.

Much like the industry needs to learn in general, making a boring paint by numbers game without any real vision will always be mediocre, but you can take even a supposedly "worn out" genre and make something great if all the pieces come together.
 
Derangel said:
That's not what ADD is. The "instant gratification" idea is due to the way everything has changed. There are a shit load more games to play now then there ever has been, meaning we have nearly unlimited options. Plus the gaming audience has gotten a lot older and there are a lot more people playing. By and large the gaming audience are adults, with jobs, families, things that need to be done outside of spending hours at a time gaming. People just want to relax and play something fun. If they're not hooked quickly they move on to something else. Why spend 5-10 hours trying to get to the "good" part of a game when there are so many other options to get what a person wants? You think games like Doom, Quake, Duke, etc were popular for any reason beyond them being damn good shooters that hooked the player nearly instantly? If the Doom shareware levels had been an hour-long slog before the fast shooting started it never would have taken off.
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Tried reading your reply... but i got board and distracted.
 
Actually, I stopped playing Skyrim because it's not an open-world game like it's predecessor.

That's because you have zero freedom. As soon as you start the main quest, you get random fucking encounters from dragons.

Skyrim feels more like a tunnel shooter than it's predecessor, where you could go about as you please and only be affected by the quests you've currently taken on. Instead of being randomly interrupted dy Dragon-A-Sarus, a gigantic flying killing machine.

The problem is that companies like Bethesda keep thinking they need to add massive amounts of shit to their already successful games (like The Sims: Fallout Wastelands Edition (TM), and the dumbing-down of conversation trees), and it's these additions that make me want to throw down the controls in frustration.

I played Oblivion and Fallout 3 for three times as long as I played their sequels, because they were better games.
 
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defaultluser said:
Actually, I stopped playing Skyrim because it's not an open-world game like it's predecessor.

That's because you have zero freedom. As soon as you start the main quest, you get random fucking encounters from dragons.

Skyrim feels more like a tunnel shooter than it's predecessor, where you could go about as you please and only be affected by the quests you've currently taken on. Instead of being randomly interrupted dy Dragon-A-Sarus, a gigantic killing machine.

The problem is that companies like Bethesda keep thinking they need to add massive amounts of shit to their already successful games (like The Sims: Fallout Wastelands Edition (TM)), and it's these additions that make me want to throw down the controls in frustration.
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Like walking around in a final fantasy game, take two steps and screen swirls and you get attacked.
 
Darunion said:
Like walking around in a final fantasy game, take two steps and screen swirls and you get attacked.
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Right, that was a good compromise on "open world" before we had the resources to render it all, but nowadays it's a stupid combat system.

And even with that old system, the boss battles were NEVER RANDOM ENCOUNTERS. You always traveled to the boss, and prepared. With Skyrim, you have to be constantly prepared, so it just whittes down to "how do I fucking BS my way out of this bad-ass, so I can continue this story I just got distracted from for hours?"

Because it does take you an hour or more (and dozens of save reloads) to figure out how to beat these harder fuckers. That's no random encounter.
 
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Nebell said:
What? That is the most boring open world RPG I have played! Every merchant in every new city I talked to sold the very same stuff.
Lazy ass console design.
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Wait, so you judged a game about being a primitive human that crafts their own weapons to fight robot dinosaurs on the merchants in the hubs???

I guess you really like the Animal Crossing type of games then!
 
PenGunn said:
This is where Bethesda stepped up and gave us Fallout 76. Everyone shit on it because it was not like the old ones. After 500 hours and 160 levels across 3 chars the game is opening up and I play every day for a few hours. Its not at all boring. All open world events run themselves and the howls of rage when 3 Scorchbeasts jump you is very funny. "The game should not do that man". That is a gift for me. ;)
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This is not true at all.

People shit on it because it is full of stupidity.

I can buy, craft, and sell ammo but I can't scrap it.

People several levels higher than me spawn mobs that kick my ass all the time. I mean WTF, the same area I have quests to complete, are also farming zones for players who make the area unplayable for me.

I can play solo, but I can't succeed solo.

There is nothing fun about getting your ass kicked and burning through all your meds and ammo fighting shit too tough for you to beat, specially with no meds and no ammo.

You may be proof that I am going about the game the wrong way. But I say that the game you are playing isn't the game I enjoy.

Therefore, I shit on the game.
 
dangerouseddy said:
i like exploring in open world games esp in theres lots of easter eggs/lore and nice quests to keep me interested.
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So do I. As many hours as I have in Fallout 4 and Skyrim and I still find places I've never been before which is a really nice feeling when it happens.

But while I love just wandering and exploring, I also loved repetitious item farming in Diablo2. I played countless hours of the same areas over and over again with my Bow-Zon. I could kill or clear anything, even the red portal in the cow level when it was completely overrun with cows, didn't matter, I could clear it.

My favorite was looking for six and seven player games where the "team" was doing Boss Runs or Cow Levels. I would go to out of the way places like the Flayer Jungle, and farm hundreds of pygmies looking for good loot, game after game, long into the night. I would kill the smaller bosses while the house was full getting to highest odds on the drops. To me, the repetition wasn't boring, there was always the risk of some lightning enchanted bad ass giving you a surprise. I found it therapeutic.
 
Sounds like the author prefers Wii Sports.

Single player open world gaming has been around since the dawn of computer games (they even got their start as text-based...see Infocom for more details).

When implemented correctly, they are the perfect type of game, imo...you can't get any more immersed than that.
 
It sounds like everyone has different tastes. Go figure.

Right now my favoritest game of forever is Fallout 4, and I happily did hours (and hours) of running around in that world (2800 hours so far). It took quite a few mods to get settlement building the way I liked it (I have modded the shit out of all of my Fallout installations) but I like it so much that now I'm scared they won't include it in the next Fallout game. And the 'settlement / camp' system they included in Fallout '76 won't do it for me, that was weak sauce and wasn't inspiring at all.

Everyone has different preferences video games. This author doesn't represent my experiences.
 
Wolf-R1 said:
Uh...menial tasks have been in video games for some time now. Why else would you have quests and side quests that require you to travel back and forth across the map so many times? I guess this is a new level of tedium?
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Good game design doesn't revolve around fetch quests and collect quests. Look at the Dark Souls series where every inch of the game is well crafted, including the placement of the enemies. Enemies aren't just spread out to keep you busy while moving from A to B. Dark Souls isn't technically an open world game, but it's an example of game design without menial tasks. Your objective is to kill more bosses and that's it. There's no level requirement like in Assassin's Creed Odyssey and in fact leveling is sometimes something you don't wanna do for PVP reasons.

Plenty of games have menial tasks but plenty of games suck.
 
Skylinestar said:
You can finally share your virtual chores with your wife.
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My wife doesn't do real chores, why would she do virtual ones?

I agree for the most part. RDR2 may ooze with quality and effort... but you're still going to brush that damned horse, aren't ya. I have given up on open world anything unless there is a STRONG narrative or motivation to do anything. *SIGHS and fires up Destiny 2 to grind for an hour because I have nothing else to play at this moment (he said staring at a 1000 game backlog)

seanreisk said:
Right now my favoritest game of forever is Fallout 4, and I happily did hours (and hours) of running around in that world (2800 hours so far). It took quite a few mods to get settlement building the way I liked it (I have modded the shit out of all of my Fallout installations) but I like it so much that now I'm scared they won't include it in the next Fallout game.
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See there you go. Everyone likes different parts of different games. I hated the settlement parts of FO4. So much so that if I ever fire it up again, I'm going to find a hacked savegame or something so I can skip all that.

Oh I forgot the finale. Screw the Far Cry games, they haven't been good since the first one.
 
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Disco_Stu_04 said:
It's not boring when it's CO-OP.
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I'm waiting for a game that can do counter-op like in Perfect Dark 64, such an innovative idea. Two players, one is the hero, the other is a counter-op that is spawnable as one the hundreds of low-health, low-damaging enemies.
 
Aireoth said:
Wait, so you judged a game about being a primitive human that crafts their own weapons to fight robot dinosaurs on the merchants in the hubs???

I guess you really like the Animal Crossing type of games then!
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Like that didn't happen in the past.

Come on, prove me wrong ;)
 
Burticus said:
See there you go. Everyone likes different parts of different games. I hated the settlement parts of FO4. So much so that if I ever fire it up again, I'm going to find a hacked savegame or something so I can skip all that.
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That was something everyone hated about FO4 so much that it became a meme. And it was a mechanic meant to make you feel like the world of Fallout 4 was larger than it really was, by having you do an infinite amount of helping settlements. I doubt Bethesda paid attention to the memes to see why they should never do that again.

 
I'm tired of MOBA/MMO/Multiplayer games. They seem to lack story but have tons of griefers & 12 year olds who only know 4 letter words. I even get griefed kicked for not having a mic &/or participating in voice chat (I'm hard of hearing)

I'll take Open World any day of the week. Love getting to choose whatever I want to do, as long as there is a main story with it.

I put about 30-40 hours into Mad Max, I think 60 hours into Shadow of Mordor (98% completion) and 48 hours into Shadow of War (56% completion).

Multiplayer died when I no longer had any idea who I was playing with & could no longer run my own server.
 
DukenukemX said:
Good game design doesn't revolve around fetch quests and collect quests. Look at the Dark Souls series where every inch of the game is well crafted, including the placement of the enemies. Enemies aren't just spread out to keep you busy while moving from A to B. Dark Souls isn't technically an open world game, but it's an example of game design without menial tasks. Your objective is to kill more bosses and that's it. There's no level requirement like in Assassin's Creed Odyssey and in fact leveling is sometimes something you don't wanna do for PVP reasons.

Plenty of games have menial tasks but plenty of games suck.
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Not greatly disagreeing but I would add to this, or put some things into a different perspective.

First is to bring up that although I haven't played Dark Souls, I do recognize that it's not a subscription based MMO if I have that right. What you call "fetch" or "collect"quests are in fact understood as Time Sinks. They are a mechanism used to take up a player's time, to keep him playing longer so he'll keep subscribing in order to reach goals.

Second, I would bring up that, many games that use Time Sinks offer several special activities like Castle Sieges or other Clan/Faction activities that occur only at special times. The frequency could be as often as once a month so players need other things to do to occupy their time.

Third, Time Sinks are not only accomplished through fetching and finding or collecting things. Having to suspend game play for mana regeneration or health regeneration are both time sinks. Crafting ammo is no different, they are activities that consume resources and game time which players must involve themselves in to play and be successful.

Take the original Planetside game which was a tremendously ground breaking game. First, it was the first MMO-FPS title that I know of. The server populations were so large that every day was a giant server crushing experience. Each continent was a play area with up to 600 players running around simultaneously engaging in all forms of combat and combat support activities. These activities had an impact on adjacent continents, and impacted the ebb and flow of a three-faction struggle that was perpetual, never ending, (as long as the servers were up), and the scope of these battles weren't the only ground breaking features of the game.

Imagine an MMO where you level by earning XP, your character has a class that is determined by his skills, which can be respected, adjusted, mixed and matched into multiple combinations. And then it can be scrapped and redone all over again at no great cost at all. You can be a lightly armored pilot flying aircraft and be technically a hacker this week, and next week a heavy infantryman spec'ed for heavy weapons, healing, and Armored Exo-Suit use. One week your clan is a Heavy Armored unit, the next, an Airborne attack force, the week after that you are filling a spec-ops role. The point of the game was, surprise, playing the game.

Of course all good MMOs get ruined by egotistical devs and Planetside was no different. The devs invested themselves in this idea that they would add giant robots to the game and no matter how much the player base protested, they did it anyway and just trashed something that was close to perfection. They also had some fundamental balance issues between the factions that could have been fixed if they would have recognized the problems and corrected them instead of inanely ignoring them.

But in the end, the point I would make is that you can stack two completely different MMO type games together and if the game-play goals are not set up well, you'll get time sinks and money sinks and wasted time. But if they are set up properly, you get non-stop action and both can support subscription models, just one does it better and will usually generate a larger player base, which means more server operating costs.

You can't escape the bottom line.
 
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