Is Open World meme killing gaming industry?

It's often a waste of money and you could achieve the same, if not even more, if you made it simpler on smaller scale locations.
One of the reasons why i liked NieR: Automata was because map was more like older games where you go to certain locations in order and unlock shortcuts to them which made the story way more tight. In an open world game this would be impossible.

>Waste of money
You know nothing of development costs. Don't pretend to.

It's not killing the games industry, but it is very harshly hurting the quality of the games that fall for that meme.

Are you implying that developers save money by making open worlds?

Open World and having 3 shitty maps connected isn't really the same thing.

no because a well done open world is fun to play in

ever played dying light?

Is open world the dark souls of vidya genres?

Not him, but yes.

It's easier to copy paste vast fields of nothing than it is to actually design levels.

Open World is this generation's CoDclone generic cash-grab. They can slap together a map, put in some collectibles and generic fetch quests, give you a paper-route of a main quest and call it done. Without having to actually design levels with a steady sense of progression and good difficulty curve, it frees up time and budget to focus on shit like muh realistic graphics

>They can slap together a map, put in some collectibles and generic fetch quests, give you a paper-route of a main quest and call it done. Without having to actually design levels with a steady sense of progression and good difficulty curve
My exact thoughts on Nier Automata
God that game was tedious garbage, 99% of the levels are barren fucking nothingness that only bloats the game instead of acting as actual content

I don't think it's killing the industry, and I don't think it's been a bad thing overall. I do hope the trend dials back a bit, though. The core idea of giving the player some agency in how things are done is great, but sometimes it feels like it's used as an excuse to produce glorified sandbox environments. I enjoy games more when I feel like I'm playing *through* a game, rather than just doing random stuff *in* a game to tick boxes.

I-Is this bait?

it is but it's hard to defend the level design in Nier:A

It's a gorgeous game to look at, but the actual geometry and amount of backtracking through the same areas over and over were really detrimental to the experience.
The desert was especially bad, even though the sand was neat.

>no money to make new areas
>fuck it just replay the same area with a different story over and over again
why are you praising this, this is at best a clever way to conserve money by Taro, it doesnt improve the experience

NieR map is still better than generic open world with shitty markers all over the place.

Oh, yeah, fuck that. I was thinking Metroidvania-style mazelike and preferably interconnected levels. Reusing the same levels and trying to justify it with a convoluted story is retarded

and are both describing Nier:A in opposite ways.

So the game is which one, actually?

Nier Automata is open world though. A small one, but still an open world

How is it an open world if it isn't even open? You can't go to the desert until the main story takes you there and opens it up. Same with the amusement park and the forest kingdom. The only place you can go before the story asks you to is the flooded city, and only barely. These places open up as the story progresses like most 3D Zelda games, but nobody ever called Ocarina of Time open world. City Ruins is Hyrule Field if you replaces holes underneath rocks and bushes with chests on top of roofs.

Nier Automata is anything but fucking focused in its story pacing, theres massive breaks where you're just running from A to B and literally every zone in the game is incredibly boring except the amusement park which is over in 5 minutes.

The game had no business having an open world with such a half assed execution

did you honestly expected a game that takes place after humanity has gone extinct to be lively?
level scaling is the reason desert, amusement park and forest kindom are blocked off.

>did you honestly expected a game that takes place after humanity has gone extinct to be lively?
No, but I did expect the open world to have an actual fucking purpose
Maybe its just 2deep4me and its some brilliant meta narrative by muh Yoko Taro but I don't fucking care, the open world was completely pointless and the quest design was the cherry on top of the shit sundae.

>Is Open World meme killing gaming industry?
for the most part, yes
Personally I think open world is the best when you have cool movement abilities or there are cool traversal mechanics that require more space and let you experiment with the mechanics (see Spiderman 2, Gravity Rush, Just Cause 2)
But nowadays open world is only done JUST BECAUSE it is popular vidya trend and other devs want to capitalize on it

fuck you
go back to cod and player unknows

Sorry linear games, I was wrong about you.

How pedantic. They're closed off because you have no reason to go there for the story. The enemy levels are higher because it's normal that a later area in an RPG would have higher level enemies. The desert, for example, is essentially the first place you go to after touching down on the planet and the enemy level reflects that, but you still have to meet the resistance and follow the story to actually get in. You don't walk up to the entrance to the forest kingdom and listen to 2B say "this place is too tough, I can't go here yet". An "open world" game blocking areas off and not permitting you to enter because they're too hard for you means it isn't open world.

Automata's world is trash though

Automata was fucking garbage user
I bet your argument will be "muh Taro"

bump

That's why GTA-clones are the best open-world games.

open world's problem is too much time and effort being spent on graphics, and not gameplay or AI.

along with a general lack of vision due to ladder-climbing middle managers.

The new Metro game looks okay

Game dev here.

If the content is highly procedural (minecraft, no mans sky etc) you are correct.

If the open world is hand crafted (skyrim, witcher, fallout, MGSV etc) then smaller scale environments would be easier to construct.

Open world is just a design trend, christ calm down alarmist. Once the hype for open-world starts dying down we're going to get new game design trends.

> GTA 3 is not open world because the other islands are not unlocked in the begining

Zelda Ocarina of time is an open world game. Sup Forums doesn't call it that because Sup Forums is non-functionally retarded when it comes to vidya.

Small Open World games are the best desu. Big enough for exploration and small enough to properly develop a tight cohesive enviorenment filled with secrets. Open world games with the map size of Bully, Batman Arkham City or the Yakuza games are perfect examples of open world games done right.

Smaller scaled maps filled with a ton of shit, variability and secrets are the way to go

he is right though.

GTA 3 isn't a open world game.

You sure are late to the party