Open World Games are a meme?

Are Open World games a meme? or can you tell me of any good open world games?

San Andreas

GTA 3

MGSV isn't really an open world game

like it is, but not really

you're not intended to traverse all the way across it, you use the helicopter as your place of operations and the open world just serves as a way of having several angles of attack to different scenarios

I think MGSV is an "open world" game done properly

No. Open world games are inherently bad.
Played it. It's shit
Played it. It's shit.

Gravity Rush

yes

kys

A lot of people complain about MGSV being a bad game, in part because it is open world, but I agree with you.

You're retarded if you try to play it in free-roaming as if it's Just Cause or GTA or something.

I did the whole thing without ever stepping foot into the open world. Just do the missions.

>My opinions are facts :^)

Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption. Fuck it, Final Fantasy XV.

Blood dragon is the single best open world game ever made.

>being an edgy contrarian just for the sake of it

no arguments in your reply, either. grow up.

But the missions are shitty just like all open world games. MGS only works as a story focused linear game . Everything after the prologue is shit.h

>But the missions are shitty
idk there are some clear hits and misses with the missions, some of them are really solid but other ones are clearly just filler

Saints Row 2
AssCreed 2.3

Oblivion with mods

No, open world can be good. Sandbox games are mostly shit, though.

They're generally not as good as the older games but once you get past the driving/riding aspect and arrive at whatever base you're supposed to explode, they're decent enough.

I agree that the older games are better, at least when it comes to missions, but I don't think that MGSV is awful.

Gothic 2: Night of the Raven and The Witcher 3 are very good ones, just make sure to turn PoI off in TW3.

Open worlds always lead to sandbox creeping in, thats why open world games often feel empty.
RPG devs should stick to linear sequence of open levels. Deus Ex got it right 17 years ago and current devs still refuse to learn.

They often feel empty because a lot of them are just poorly designed theme parks with no robust mechanics to compensate.

Nanomachines xD

I feel like the maps in mgsv are just an overworld. They're not meant to compare to gta or anything, just to provide more space to approach objectives, like you said.

>They often feel empty because a lot of them are just poorly designed theme parks
It's practically impossible to create an open world with the level of interactivity as a single level. Continuity becomes a huge issue compared to level based design since the number of choices a player could take (e.g. order of missions, character interactions) goes up exponentially. This leads to most interactions having no narrative consequence in open world games, making them feel isolated and empty.

You cannot name a single open world RPG that feels as cohesive as Deus Ex does.

I believe sandbox games can be good, but given the effort required to make them good they very rarely are. First, for a game to be a good sandbox it needs interactivity with the environment. Things in the world need to not only be scenery but also need to be manipulated by the player. They also need to interact with other elements of the world. This not only helps give the player many different ways to approach a situation, it also makes the world's size and scope useful to the mechanics. Second, the game needs to give the player a reason to explore the world beyond just filling space. Incentivize exploring the massive world by hiding treasure and other points of interest. Provide a medium for interacting with objects by having interesting and varied locales to do things in and enemies to things against. Provide linearity in some aspect to orient the player in a manner that not only makes what would otherwise be overwhelming numbers of means with no discernible end a number means of approaching to a coherent end. Give instanced content that allows for the feeling of progression against the backdrop of an oppressive amount of freedom.

Sadly, most games are lazy and apply procedural generation to put a number of enemies in random, haphazard, locations on a map that is a chaotic mess instead of being craftfully composed, cohesive, area, while allowing for little to no interaction with anything in the world and little to no reason to interact in the first place.

Most open world games I enjoy are good in spite of their open world nature.

Red Dead Redemption is a fantastic game, marred by an open world. Luckily, said world is easily ignorable.

I'm not arguing that open world is better than confined, open-ended level design (it's not, definitely), just saying that the meh to bad ones feel empty because designers are bad at their craft.

I agree with you completely, but there is still a glaring flaw with open world being used for RPGs. You cannot write a cohesive narrative using an open world. To do so would require the writers to account for every possible decision a player could make related to the narrative, which increases exponentially with the size of the game world. Since they can't make it cohesive the narrative in open world RPGs has to become disjointed.

It's frustrating because I know large worlds work as a bullet point to sell your game, so devs will continue to shovel in open worlds where they don't belong.

tl;dr open world is objectively a worse choice for RPGs than open ended levels

Personally, I enjoyed most Rockstar games, Xenoblade Chronicles X and Assassin's Creed 2 and 4

Shenmue

I agree, though there are ways to lessen some of the impact of this. A narrative in which the MC is not the chosen one but instead is witnessing events allows for both choice (how to react to certain stimuli, can make certain binary choices influence the world in smaller ways) and a cohesive story without having to account for multiple decisions made by the MC. It can be done well but usually is just a lazy way to write around the problem you identified and has the disadvantage of limiting player agency and minimizing the influence the mc directly has on the world.

Another similar problem is leveled content. Level scaling is really bad but other experience based systems act as gatekeeping for certain content which introduces a jarring form of linearity, constraining the freedom of the player. Getting around this is even more difficult. One solution could be to not have experience but make the gear what levels but this results in losing one of the key features of an rpg, character growth, and still falls to similar problems.

Overally, I actually agree and have come to realize that no pure RPG is ever more suited towards an open world than what you describe. Action/adventure games and great for open worlds, but even then can fall victim to the same traps I described above

>marred

Get fucked. Red Dead is exactly the kind of game that needs to be open world. And it was VERY well executed.

Rockstar is the only company possible of making good open world games if were just talking enviroment and content. Same with the Elder Scrolls series everything else is shit. asscreed and borderlands good examples.

this
This is a meme

Truly. Rockstar and Bethesda specialised in that shit. Their success is really directly responsible for the 'open world meme' of failed copycats

Prototype was fantastic.

Shenmue
Body Harvest

Ultima. Most of you are too young to remember this series.