So what's actually wrong with open-world games?

So what's actually wrong with open-world games?

Open world made up of mostly empty world. Yeah, it's nice that you can walk a hundred miles across the desert, but you're just walking through a fucking desert. Game devs most of the time are too lazy to populate the world with anything interesting.

All the riveting content of Desert Bus with none of the satire

gay vampires, to be specific

They're not focused enough. While trying to open up the world, progression gets thrown out of the window, or limited to dungeons.
So you work down a checklist of map markers, but it doesn't reflect any sort of character growth or achievement, and neither can you tie it into the story, given that it can be done in any order, or not at all.
Also, the inherent problem with "make your own fun": No, I won't. I paid you to hand me fun. If I wanted to make my own fun, I don't need to pay you for that.

Nothing. It gives freedom and like it or not, the genre has shaped and continues to shape gaming. It's certainly been done horribly plenty of times but there are some games that do it well. A handful of posters on Sup Forums are just autistic and sperg out when they aren't told what to do every second of their lives. They probably have to mentally remind themselves to breath so they don't die

Because most "open world" games are their own gimmick. They seem to all have the same Skyrim-Syndrome where they're as vast as an ocean but as deep as a puddle.

Basically, they trick you into thinking they're more than they are. A big open world with lots to do, but nothing actually worth doing.

people have no fantasy and embarrassingly high expectations
that goes for almost all things in life, not just games

Nothing.

But a lot of modern open-world games are built around shit like quest markers and instant fast travel so any sense of exploration or meaningful filler between destinations is diminished.

That you gotta save every goddamn minute, or cross the whole fucking map just to be fuckingn tossed in the air with one hit from giant. Or fucked by guys from dragonborn DLC who came to assassinate you.

encourages dev laziness.
Because there's so much, why not reuse the same five textures?

A concise narrative and game increase unique content while keeping a handle on the budget.

Only do open world when it is absolutely necessary.

Personally like open world but the problem is when they are also linear. Basically you're stuck to the pack of the story or questline they want you to follow, and will go to specific locations in a specified order because of this. Also full of fetch quests with convenient waypoint markers on the objective so you know exactly where it is and to make sure you don't get lost like a dummy.

Most of the time is spent on the landmass and not on the actual characters, quests or gameplay
End result is a big ass map and a lot of repetitive tasks

Devs pour most resources into making 100x100 miles of gigantic world and then they struggle to fill it with worthwhile content.
Often they give up and just copy paste same fetch/kill quest 200 times.

Succinctly put. I'm tired of devs promoting their open world games leading off with shit like "see that mountain over there in the distance? Well guess what, you can actually GO there!"

Maddox, for as much of a faggot as he is, got it right that holding down UP a lot is a pretty shitty way to spend your time in a game.

My biggest problems with them are

>cut and paste design
Many of them don't feel natural, you can tell the devs just made a stock of assesst and copy pasted them everywhere. Bethesda is very guilty of this, every cave/fort/ancient ruin looks way too similar.

>great big world and the only thing to do in it is fetch quests and combat
Another area where Bethesda is shit. Also if combat is going to be such a big part of your game you'd think they'd at least make it good but they don't.

At the risk of being called a nintenbro I think BoTW did a great job avoiding both of these pitfalls. The games physics make it feel more like you are a person in a place, you're not a person in a place in Skyrim you're a camera with a sword attached to it and the world is just there for you to walk around from one shitty combat experience to the next in.

Actually being able to interact with stuff and learn the rules of the world, goes a long way towards making the place feel more real and gives you more fun stuff to do than just fighting things and walking to fights.

The environment also feels much more varied to me, Skyrim feels like it was made by an algorithm copy pasting shit while BoTW feels like someone drew the map by hand. I'll admit I can't articulte why I feel this way very well and maybe it just me being biased but I feel the value of the interactive environment and consistent (I know they're not realistic but they are damn consistent and that's the important part, that's what make it feel like a place with rules you need to learn) physics can't be overstated.

>witcher 3
> skyrim

It's not interesting enough. It looks pretty, its huge, but theres nothing to do. Everything to do with the open world aspect is just killing some generic enemies or fetch quests.

Devs need to find a way to make quests interesting while remembering that things that are fun in real life like camping, are not fun in games.

>Mostly empty
>Almost always copy paste tier quests where 1/10th of them at most are unique and the rest besides the story of them are copy paste in design. Just like your image 90% of quests were Draugar/Bandits

They're just like the buffets of games. Alot of offer but most of it is mediocre and they only get away with it but offering so many different things.

Should also note that when I talk about BoTW's physics I don't just mean how objects move, I'm talking about all the interactions the game has like how fire/ice/electricity behave down to the more weird things like throwing a rusty sword at an octorok makes him spit it back out in perfect condition.

I don't think people who haven't played the game realize how many stupid little interactions there are in this game and it really goes such a long way to making it feel like a real world governed by it's own set of rules.

Other open world games don't feel like this, they don't have a world just a setting.

Terrible gameplay and full of bugs, thanks nintendo for showing how it's done.

The world isn't the main character

Quest Markers.

Not only do these remove your need to navigate, they also limit the ways you can/will complete a quest.

Even IF a dev comes up with multiple ways to resolve a quest, but they include quest markers, this happens:

>Ok, I just got a quest, what do I do next?
>Go to this marker, it's closest

You do not even have to think about what a quest is if you just follow your dots. Then you complete the quest, and you feel nothing, because you accomplished nothing. The entire quest was laid bare for you already. It's like a used Choose Your Own Adventure book where the prior owner highlighted the "correct" path to the end.

open world games are my favourite type of games since I played hunter on the amiga as a child.

Some open world games are just pure bullshit, GTA clones being a buk of them.
Any ass creed before 3 had a tacked on open world that was useless

Literally Padding 101


Look at how successful soulsborne games have been for like 5 games now for example, and they're definitely not open world, almost every thing and location has a purpose and they're easier to run because you're not rendering 5 miles of virtual landscape at any given time

Susceptibility to being as wide as an ocean but deep as a puddle in terms of worldbuilding.

Usually it means little depth and an uneven difficulty curve, if the game is even difficult at all

Not to turn this into a "BoTW is good" thread but this is another thing they did that I like. The map is very sparse and when people ask you to do things there's no marker.

I've been playing with my nephew and we had a great time with this bandit treasure quest we got, this kid has grown up on nothing but instant gratification iphone apps so when we got the quest and I explained we have to figure out where to go from the riddle they gave us he could hardly believe it. He assumed they'd tell us and we'd just go there. By going on nothing but the riddle we found it, it wasn't all that difficult really but you know you actually had to read at least.

I also ran into a person who told me about a strange mountain where animals gather and nothing was even added to the quest log let alone a marker, if you didn't pay attention to what he tells you you'd never find it (aside from randomly stumbling on it of course). I really like this aspect of the game, it really really really doesn't tell you what to do or how to do it beyond getting the paraglider at the start.

Semi-open world games are the best.

Prove me wrong.

P R O T I P :

You can't.

Well Souls is Metroidvania-style progress (Linear with backtracking and side areas), which I think is far more superior overall than Open world

Morrowind did it right I feel.
Open enough to still find new things, small enough where it wasn't a pain in the ass to get around.
I first played it when I was 8 years old, 12 years later i'm actually playing the main quest for the first time, and it's 9000000000 times deeper than any 1st/3rd person RPG i've picked up, it's a pond with the depth of the Mariana Trench

why do mmo's like wow and runescape get a pass for being open world if you have such a problem then?

i am very tempted to buy a switch just for breast of the wild but im going to hold off until black friday

Because devs will forever have the difficulty of maintaining the "correct" tone between serious and fun. If an open world game takes itself too seriously then your ability to make the most of the environment is limited because you won't have any interesting abilities. Think of Skyrim; its fun to explore and fight but you're just riding around on a horse through the world before you can just get the ability to fast travel anywhere. If an open world game takes the opposite approach and jumps the shark, like Saints Row 3, you don't value the ability to do anything because its all so ridiculous.

For an open world game to be truly special you need these things (that I can just think of at the top of head and isn't definite):

-A world full of interesting locations, NPCs, monsters, environments (with mechanics in the environments included - like thirst in desert areas or avoiding lightning strikes in storms)
-Player given abilities that inspire unique creativity options for the player within environment navigation, manipulation, and unique combat opportunities.
-A world that's big enough to feel grand, encompassing, and immersive.

idk i'm tired.

Nothing when its done right

Problem is no one does it right, people still keep creating narrative driven games in 'open worlds' yet keep restricting the paths you can take

If you want to see an open world game done right, play FO1 or 2 without a guide.

nothing inherent, as with all genres it dpends on wether content or gameplay is worth it
for example, say, witcher 3, NV, morrowind or oblivion have awkward combat but certain depth in gameplay mechanichs and good qust systems, plus plenty of rewards for exploration
on the other hand, good gameplay can overcome swallowness, like say Just cause 2, which is wider and swallower than even Skyrim, but its gameplay actually takes advantadge of the verticality and wideness of its open world and thus is lots of fun to play, even if only for th movment system
theres another element we should consider, the sandbox implementation, which alone can make a game worth it, like in Warband and its derivatives, or gta, the classic open world series. On the other hand , failure to properly implement a sandbox can not only detract from the other aspects of the game, but also leave an overall mediocre product like F4

Nothing. You can go from one end of the skyrim map to the next without a loading screen. That's preferable to me. You can pass towns and people and whatever on the way there. It's just a nice way to play so you feel submerged in the world

Nothing, Sup Forums just hopped on a bandwagon after MGSV.
It's an amazing tool for immersion and allowing the player to just do whatever the fuck they want.

Open world games are always shallow non-interactive wax museums with little to no depth. Skyrim is arguably the best open world game ever created because the world looks lived in and the people seem to have lives that don't revolve around the player.

Nothing really, they are just hard to do on shit hardware if you want to have remotely contemporary graphical appeal without ruining performance.

>where they're as vast as an ocean but as deep as a puddle.
Nice meme you cancerous little fucking cocksucker. Are you capable of coming up with your own opinions or is blinding vomiting out buzzwords all you are capable of?

No one has the money or time to make a truly detailed and full large open-world; they're either huge and empty, small and detailed, or small and empty, it's simply impractical to make huge and detailed, no one has that budget. At best you get games that have detailed pockets spread out over a larger world.

>people seem to have lives that don't revolve around the player

Yeah, seem to. Meanwhile in Oblivion they actually do.

>dark elf
>wearing fucking nordic armor
i know it's skyrim but this is hard to believe

if they were going to center the plot around race issues then they should have made the game better fit that idea

I think that the biggest problem with open world games as a whole is that they're too expensive.
You can't get creative and also get a CoD-tier budget so good/groundbreaking stuff isn't made.

Whilst I don't think Skyrim is exactly a great game, I think it gets open world fairly right. I just kinda wish the map was better crafted to let you spot areas without the need of the compass. Places are actually fairly close to each other, despite what people always seem to spout. There's a decent amount of neat little things tucked away in the game. It's not a case of unlocking Ubitowers and outposts, it's more "You're on your way to some town but run into an abandoned lighthouse and uncover a small side story about the grisly murder of a family which leads into a cavern of horrors"

Unfortunately there's also a bunch of slapped down ruins/bandit caves and the neat idea of mountain passes is ruined by the fast travel system.

>Dark Elf

Aren't they normally darker? I think that's a wood elf.

thats a wood elf you fucking nonce, it says so in the thumbnail and you can even tell by the skin tone alone

>GTA
>Gothic
>Warband
>Just Cause2
>STALKER
>Dragons Dogma
>jagged alliance 2
>Most Bethesda gams befor Skyrim and F3
>Most Spiderman games

why do most anons commenting like ritiques of Skyrim applies to the whole open world "genre"?
most of them are good games that tackle differently the "open world" implementation?

1. They are overdone.

2. They don't leave a lot of room for great level design although it could also be because of developer laziness.

3. They tend to have a checklist of quests/mission types that have been done to death thousands of times over.

4. They will often have weaker character development and story since (at least in Skyrim) you create your own character. This doesn't leave a lot of room for good character development and story. It is basically a "your own adventure" kind of game. Sounds good on paper but then the smart people realize it is all just cheap tricks to give the illusion of a game with depth.

5. Seriously though it gets really bad when you even have long established franchises going this route.

All shit games save for mountain blade and dragons dogma and that's because of the gameplay.

>oblivion praise

Oh boy! im starting to like this thread.

>dragons dogma
>gameplay

Lol I love when my special attacks are cut scenes

>GTA is shit
>Gothic is shit
>STALKER is shit

your opinion doesn't mean shit to the consensus that they are good games

Don't get me wrong, I don't think Oblivion is very good, but the detail given to random NPCs and their habits is astounding.

Literally nothing except the execution.

even the tiniest praise makes me happy. most people do nothing but shit on oblivion.

that doesn't explain those several oblivion threads each week

Why are you playing shitty mage classes? Daggers or get out.

Yes, have you never played a good game before? I suggest you start a ps2 emulator and start playing real video games.

What consensus? The small as fuck irrelevant rp"g" players from codex or something? Because nobody cares about shit like gothic here on Sup Forums.

Wasted map space, making it smaller but packed with content is the best way to do it but nobody has yet; as far as I know anyway.

Immersion fags can suck a dick, walking 15 miles to reach a city isn't fun.

the problem is that usually the world isnt alive. everybody is just sitting around waiting for you to show up. in alot of games the environment and people are backdrops. they dont interact with you or each other aside some scripted shit.

Open world games tend to have mechanics and features that make the overworld nothing more than a tedious nuissance to the next fun marker....that is until BoTW blended it all brilliantly.

I'm lookin forward to all the new open world games though, Red Dead 2 & the Shadow of Mordor sequel, just not sure the devs understamd good open world game design.

Don't worry user, relish in the fact that you know that Oblivion is the patrician choice when it comes to TES games.

Morrowind is for autists who like walking enciclopedias and dice rolls, and Skyrim is for uber casuals.

>What consensus? The small as fuck irrelevant rp"g" players from codex or something?
>GTA and Rockstar in general
>Spiderman games
>Bethesda Games
are you retarded user?

you do know the same could be said about fuking warband and DD, right user?

lol were you guys raped by open world devs when you were kids? you wont even touch the damn things but youll protest them till your last breath whats going on

That's the big shame with the Elder Scrolls, they started a good idea in Oblivion and instead of expanding it they basically scrapped it.

I was really excited for story bricks (in Everquest Next) but then they scrapped that too.

this,
this thread is full of retards

>What's wrong with open world games.
You reach the end of the game and you live out a regular life to make it more challenging.

The thing is, overworlds can be shallow as fuck as long as it's entertaining to simply TRAVERSE the world. Think of Spider-Man games with good Web swinging mechanics. Think of GTA5 with solid driving mechanics and a huge variety of vehicles. Anyone remember Crackdown? Crackdown 2 sucked though.

Riding your teleporting horse and exhausting your Stamina bar 87 times to get to a new town is tired and boring. Boring transportation can be propped up temporarily by diverse random encounters if gameplay is solid enough. But it rarely last a single quick playthrough

Doubt.

It's actually the exact opposite. Many of us were taught that open-world games were the end all, be all type of games. But they progressively became more lazy, less creative

Gravity Rush has the only good open world map

nothing at all actually. a lot of devs try to be open world and they lack the sweat and tears required to make the game good which is why people have come to believe there is something inherently wrong with open world. certain games will always come out shit while others will be good.

Because the means of transportation is actually fun. Gravity Rush 2 expanded on the shifting abilities and although they aren't as efficient the Normal style, mixing them together actually let's you stylishly get around

why are you still talking like only bethesda and ubisoft releases count?
theres a new RDR, a new M&B, a nw Spiderman, Cyberpunk and lots of different shit coming out, plus BotW, Bloodborne and Witcher 3 were all pretty good

Is Dwarf Fortress open world?

size of an ocean, depth of a puddle

Adventure mode is.

My reasoning is that each area of the game has a distinct feel, distinct color and distinct landmarks but I guess gravity powers also help

technically, as are warband, jagged alliance and several other older games

>new RD
Not out yet, try harder

>m&b
Huh? Really that lazy to type out a full name

>new spidey
Ugh, the last good open world Spidey was Web of Shadows and I've played all of them. ASM1&2 were trash and bigger trash. Web swinging sucks cock in those games

>bloodborne
Fucking kek, yea I remember when I was able to walk to Old Yharnam, Yahar Ghul, Upper Cathedral Ward, Hemwick, Cainhurst and Bergenweryth after I left the clinic. Fuck off nigger

Honestly why do TES games even bother having stamina bars? I'd argue that they would play a whole lot better removing that shit. Stamina makes sense for a game like Souls. For TES it is casual enough. Even the not so casual games didn't need it though. It is exactly as you said. It only slows you down needlessly.

The gravity powers are everything. The world in GR1 is microscopic (psp game I know) but it has very shallow open world qualities regardless. The gravity shifting saves it though. GR2 improves on the world obviously

Nothing wrong with Skyrim's open world besides they packed in so much content that they had to put all the actual quests in caves and leave little more than tiny easter eggs on the surface.

I mean my problem with open world is that everything is super samey. Gravity Rush fixes that for me but i understand it being shallow in places other than just basic looks

retard

Truthfully, at this point it's an odd paradox of both handholding and lack of guidance to finding certain things in games.
This is a bit difficult to explain, but in the case of Skyrim, you have map markers to guide you from quest to quest, but no way of finding secrets aside from stumbling onto them, word of mouth, walkthroughs, or in the most extream cases, scanning through the map data itself.
While it's usually simple enough to complete a quest, finding all the treasure and secrets is a whole different beast. I'm not saying make treasure locations ultra easy to get, just being able to find a chest or loose treasure via a shout that works like the life sign shout would be nice.

In the case of something like Just Cause 2, you have map markers for areas, quests, and the three factions collectables, but finding all of the material upgrades is a crapshoot for those outside of mapmarker areas, and getting all the destuctable objects is a crapshoot, and outright impossible without modding the game.

Because RPGs, stats and leveling up of course

/s

TES is stuck in their old ways. The only redeeming factor is a large world. The only thing they know how to do well is take an old mechanic from Morrowind, dumb it down so 100% of a fanbase can instantly pick it up and ship a game with marginally better graphics than the next. But as the graphics get better, the dialogue becomes scarce, build creativity dies, and bugs become abundant

They are not San Andreas.

The only retard is you. Bloodborne isn't open world. Even ds1 is a fractured open world at best. OPEN world game don't have 95% of the world CLOSED upon start up.

Lots of things, but when it's done right, open world games are my favorites.

What do people think about Kingdoms of Amalur? An open world RPG with some really interesting story driven side quests but "zones" of the overworld become level locked based on the level you enter the zone. This absolutely drove me mad because it forced you to stay in a zone and do all the shit in there to get the most out of your character

>verything must be inmdiatly acesible for a game to b open world
are you telling me stalker, dragons dogma, rdr, vice city, san andreas, and most open world games are not actually open world?

your character has no actual affect on the world

unless you are playing zelda

Bloodborne is closer to a Metroidvania.

Because it just kills the motivation to do anything. Running around in Skyrim was fun awhile I tested our the different weapons and shit. But once I started to get shit done, and I realized how much was pointless filler...I got bored.

That goes for GTA too. I can't play the games because why the fuck would I do anything? Either you "quest" and follow the story, or you steal cars, run people over, run from the cops, die or get arrested and do it all over again. It lasts all of an hour.

It's why BotW doesn't interest me. You can go and kill Ganon with nothing in the game. A whole games worth of shit to do, for no reason other than to make the game a little easier. But there's no purpose to it. The cool shit to me in Zelda games was being able to explore, and come across an area that I couldn't get to yet. And knowing that once I was able to get there, I'd get another item that would allow me to extent the places available to me. The sense of progression creates motivation.

>M&B
>open world
back to r*ddit and skyrim with you

They forget to add real world elements to their worlds, they have the graphics and sounds but they forgot to add in physics/systems that should exist in in that world

Like
>character is bad at swimming while wearing armor
>wearing full plate armor in desert = bad
>being naked in a cold environment = bad
>character needs to take bathroom breaks

Why even call it an RPG if you don't have good role playing elements.

They forget to make them fun. Im fine with open world as long as actually exploring and running around is fun rather than just slagging along point to point.

that's not technically open world if it's divided into zones

It gets too stale unless the devs go out of their way to try to keep it fresh.