Why Have Open World Games Become Boring
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- čas přidán 26. 04. 2024
- When I first played skyrim I was amazed by the sheer size of it. Bethesda's Opening was built to amaze the player. You are going through the hills not really paying attention to anything around you. After escaping and being inside of a small town to a cave you end up finding your way out. And there it is. The world of skyrim. When I was younger I couldn’t truly appreciate the way they made the opening but It is actually amazing when you think about it. It's what all great open worlds do. With the witcher 3 you are going around the area of in white orchard and think wow this is a decent size and then you find yourself roaming around the North of the Continent on Roach not knowing how far you’ll go but knowing around every corner you’ll have either an amazing view or an activity to do. In Elden ring you start off running around in this small cave doing the basics then open the doors and see the sheer size of the world. But not only does that look outstanding you’ll be wandering around and be transported to one corner and then another corner of the map and now you look at it and see how that one part you thought looked or felt massive is in fact miniscule in comparison to the rest of the game. What all these games have in common is that they are some of the best open worlds that have been made ever. Period. Now some games that I’ll mention as well as I know people will talk about are Breath of the Wild, Red Dead 2 and Ghost of Tshima. Currently I have two of those to play this year but I know of them and I’ve seen plenty about them.
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Time Stamps
Intro - 00:00-2:35
Reasons Open Worlds Are Boring - 2:36-12:09
How UI Effects An Open World - 12:10-13:53
The Ubisoft Approach: AC Valhalla - 13:54-19:16
The Bethesda Approach: Skyrim - 19:17-29:15
The Rockstar Approach: Red Dead Redemption 2 - 29:16-36:51
The From Software Approach: Elden Ring - 36:52-40:41
My Personal Favourite - 40:42-44:52
Revisiting the Reasons - 44:53-53:23
Are Open Worlds Boring? -53:24-55:00
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Ubisoft has played a huge part in making open world games boring it's the quantity over quality mindset that alot of developers have and it's sad
Honestly I even had this with Elden Ring at times were it felt like they filled the world with bosses but ones that were not always that great. Bloodbourne and Sekrio were great though less is more. Ubisoft worlds are far from Empty but I think emptiness can be a good Thing.
@@John-996 I disagree the open world of elden ring was interesting regardless of the repeating bosses, it's a game you want to explore every nook and cranny where's the examples I gave above it feels like I'm completing a checklist
Not really...some of their well crafted open worlds are really good...assassin creed 2 open world and mission design are still a marvel to this day....assassin creed origins is pretty good...farcry 3 and 4 open worlds are exceptional....it is just that when Ubisoft are good they are really good..but when they fall apart...they really fall apart...
@@remarkableputter6622 Ubisoft has excellent graphically crafted worlds….they just suck all the fun out their games by having an overly cluttered hud and UI that takes away any sense of wonder and exploration.
@@camwad1238 I found Elden Ring World utterly boring to explore. It's what I call a dead World and not a living one. The things I enjoyed most in ER are, things From Soft does best, aka legacy dungeons/locations like Stormhill Castle, Raya Lucaria, Lyndell Capital, etc.
Until Lyndell it was fun. After beating Fire Giant though, the repetition of ex boss characters, reuse of assets, was absolutely tedious and chore to get through. In the end I was happy that game was over... I was NOT satisfied in the end, it felt like relief more than anything.
This is probably the reason I liked Horizon FW more than ER, despite Forbidden West being flawed by Ubisoft quantity of pointless events/markers on map.
The worst part about the bad open worlds is the lack of physical depth. No mountains, valleys, dungeons, secret tombs to explore etc etc. Most of them are just flat plains with enemies wandering around.
The underground areas with lore in games like Morrowind give an air of mystery and make make exploration so much more fun.
I would like to recommend you to try valheim or at least watch any live stream of the game you will enjoy it very much 😉
Rdr2 has a lot of mountains, secret houses, secret caves, it’s really fun to explore. You can hunt all types of animals, it’s good
this.. i hate open world games where it is just flat plains..
Reason why Dragon's Dogma and Dragon's Age are my favorite in terms of exploration.. there is just so much to do..
even if Dragon's Dogma is much smaller, it felt so immersive and aint as boring..
You described the Witcher 3, lol except there are mountains.
To experience the best what RDR2 can offer - turn off the map completely and don't activate it while not in camp/town. You'll be amazed of how it transform you whole experience. I hated this feeling of going from A to B all the time, it ruins the whole concept of open world and exploration. And when you don't have a map you'd be jumping off your chair seeing a familiar tree or rock. Try it and let me know what you thing about it after some hours.
Yes and no, I think the map actually works really well in this game. It doesn’t destroy immersion to the same level as the likes of the Witcher 3
@@Exiled7 for me the gps navigation runs the immersion. You just follow the line to get from a to b instead of learning the road and area.
@@kotokrabsI remember this exactly in Vice City, you actually had to learn the city, there was no GPS and I don't think the map screen showed where you were even.
I agree if you’re doing this just to explore, but it is impossible to do it for main story missions, since they give you no clue on what to do and they usually want you to do something so specific without giving you a clue.
I believe you might be conflating open-world games with role-playing games. You seem to rate open-world games negatively if they lack depth and intricate characters, but those qualities are typically associated with role-playing games, not open-world titles. Many of these games aren't striving to be role-playing games, so comparing them on this basis is somewhat unfair.
For instance, Elden Ring isn't a role-playing game; it's an action-adventure open-world game. It's important to note that "open world" refers to a map type, not an independent game genre. Open-world games often fall into subgenres like open-world RPGs or MMORPGs. Similarly, "action open world" is a subgenre. You rarely find games solely labeled as "open world" unless they have an empty map. This means you're comparing games from entirely different genres due to a shared subgenre.
Think of it as calling a game just "linear." No game is purely linear; they typically fall under categories like story-driven linear games. This analogy applies to open-world games. While your intention was understood, "open world" can't stand alone as a genre; it requires an accompanying genre to define the gameplay. Open world is essentially a map type, akin to labeling a game an FPS or a TPS or an FTP game-it tells you a portion of the game's nature.
For instance, Skyrim is an open-world first-person single-player RPG (even though it has a third-person view, that's not its primary mode). On the other hand, Elden Ring is an optional online third-person action-adventure open-world game. Red Dead Redemption 2's single-player mode falls under the category of a story-driven single-player open-world adventure game.
I realize simplifying games as "open world" makes things easier, but it doesn't fit neatly into categories. Ubisoft's games are commonly criticized as generic, but they can be described as action-adventure single-player open-world games with a narrative focus that isn't strong enough to be classified as "story-driven." This is my perspective on the matter.@@Exiled7
What I’ve always liked about GOOD open world games is two fold:
1. Things going on around you and WITHOUT you e.g. passing by two people having a conversation or a battle going on in the distance
2. Non-horizontal or non-map-driven exploration - we’re so used to exploring horizontally across a map that things like vertical exploration can be really exciting, or just generally exploring something we wouldn’t expect (say the inside of a mountain that has a secret dungeon, or secret tunnels throughout the land, or even climbing trees lol)
These two things are always what keep me engaged. Give me an active world that I can choose to observe, and give me REAL exploration - secrets and things a map can’t really tell you.
While we’re at it, make the rewards actually rewarding 😂
I feel like this is incredibly accurate. There's a distinct lack of interior exploration, and vertical exploration.
also, most rewards feel boring and generic.
I played Skyrim almost 7 years ago and I still remember, there is a lighthouse where you discover the story of a sailor whose name I believe was Habd and his family through journals who were killed by those large insect creatures, and Habd gets eaten by one of them as you can find his skull in one of the insects. One of the journal says that Habd wanted his body to be burned in the fire of the lighthouse as he wanted to watch the ocean. If you burn his remains in the lighthouse you'll get an active effect.
Interestingly i remember reading a lot of notes and environmental story telinng in skyrim but usually skip a lot of the consoles in fallout games (Vaults are an exception). I wonder if its because i dont have the patience anymore or that skyrim did something special.
I remember being creeped tf out by that quest
@@illliiiiillliii6265 fallout terminals are also jammed packed with words written from the perspective of a bored person cooped up in a room they can't leave or they'll probably die, its not like you're gonna read an entry about a dude who's a wizard and that can he inherently boring
@@MeIshKittie I don't remember correctly, but I think it's not a quest. It's something you see while exploring.
Unfortunately, in Skyrim, this is probably the only quest like this, where your exploration and understanding of your surroundings make you progress on the quest. Every other quest in the game hand holds you all the way with them quest markers.
As a Dungeons and Dragons player, I always felt that open world's true potential lies in huge scale cities and enormous monuments and statues.....Lots of buildings you can actually enter, lots of lore you can uncover...
But in reality - most open worlds I've come across only offer big empty fields with side activities....
Honestly very true, I haven't really played a game that made me get so deep into the lore and story than Skyrim and the rest of the Elder Scrolls franchise, I tried RDR2 but didn't really felt drawn to it, Elden Ring I only touched it once and never played it since, AC Odyssey and Valhalla feel too huge for me and despite being a long time AC fan the whole RPG mechanics made me not interested in them, so far Cyberpunk 2077 has gave me a similar feeling like Skyrim did but not as deep as me trying to learn the entire lore even to it's smallest details like Skyrim
@@signoreyashin One of my favorite games is World of Warcraft, because it's world is huge in scale, has dozens of unique cultural inspirations and archetecture styles, and monumemts that, if you know the lore behind them, will make you gasp in excitement, because each land carries so much story and depth behind them.
@@almas4663yikes you play retail still?
I'd love to see a game where the world is confined to just a city, I feel it would prevent that sense of just exploring big empty fields because ultimately the developers do have a confined space to work with and they have the opportunity to develop areas that are largely unused.
I think Halo ODST was on to a good idea, granted that game does use linear encounter-to-encounter mission design for its flashback sequences but its opened hub world in the Mombasa streets does leave a lot of room for further development. Obviously open-world is largely used in RPGs and the like but imagine an FPS where you're fighting for control over a city, its not exactly a small task conquering a city and it does give plenty of room for a mixture of story missions where you progress your actual take-over while allowing for side missions such as rescuing, defence, targeting enemy supplies, etc.
@@arcticdream4905 Of course. Even when the story isn't best - Blizzard still make my jaw drop with each of their new zones and continents.
SL was terrible, sure, but visiting Bastion and seeing it's grace for the first time was just something else
The issue with open worlds right now I feel is that they dont treat the world as a place with a history and a point. Their worlds are just there to be big. The world should be a character just as much as the people around you. Its why lots of people like The Pizza Plex from Security Breach. Open worlds need personality and give the player a joy in exploration.
That's one of the reasons I liked Ghost of Tsushima so much
Well said exactly
I never consciously thought of it in those words before but i agree 100%
Make "open worlding" great again!!
Literally ToTK
Ghost of Tsushima?
an open world should be as big as the quantity of quality content that you are giving it, ... not larger.
To a child, a bouncing ball is fascinating because the child is surprised by the ball bouncing back up. After a while the child begins to expect the ball to bounce back up in a predictable way and begins to lose interest. You can change the color of the ball or even the size but it doesn't make the action any more interesting.
As a kid these games are satisfying a desire to explore and scope out the world. That original experience is difficult to replicate, and then holding that for 100 hours can't help but become a massive exercise in repetition.
Both of these comments kinda hit the nail on the head. Open world rpgs was my favorite genre growing up. I remember playing Oblivion for the first time, it was the most magical and fascinating experience since it was my first open world rpg. Then Skyrim, and I got a similar experience. With age, I have completely lost interest in these kind of games now, it's no longer fascinating to experience the worlds, its just not that interesting anymore.
Instead I prefer linear games, or RTS game where you can quickly boot up the game and have a good time, unlike big open world games which can be really boring at times. Also, returning to an open world game after not playing for long takes all the motivation out of you, you have no desire to continue playing so you also need to constantly play these games to stay engaged.
But its the same with everything in life, if you do something too much and too often, it becomes boring. Thats what AAA gaming is these days, just the same stuff with different skins.
Woo pig Sooie
@Skumtomten1 Legit how I feel about it. When I was in high school I was on a constant rotations of Oblivion and fallout 3/new vegas and in 2011 when skyrim came out I just through that into the constant rotation of those games mixed in with a few other random games from time to time. While I'm glad I had a lot of good times on all of those games, it really takes me a lot to even get past the first part of any of them anymore. I enjoy the heck out of em but I've already done basically everything there is to do dozens of times and the only stuff I haven't done is the really random small stuff like whe everyone found out you could use a spoon and fork as a weapon in skyrim.
@@DudiestPriest Yea, all those games you mentioned are amazing. Sometimes I get a burst of desire to start a new playthrough on one of those games. I get very excited thinking about a build and how to play them, then I play for a couple of hours and just stare at my clock feeling like I want to do something else. Then I never touch them again.
It's kinda sad when you think about it. That magical feeling you got as a kid playing these games will probably never ever happen again.
There is one game I still really enjoy, it's Dragon Age Origins. I know not everyone likes that kind of game and it's combat, but I love it. I use alot of mods as well, and even after playing through the game like 5 times, I can still get hooked by that game again, it's my favorite game of all time.
There's just too many open world games. I replayed the first three Uncharted games and it was honestly refreshing to play linear games with a well told story and good characters.
Yes.
@Weyland Punani It's also just a matter of personal preference. I never really liked Skyrim for example. Witcher 3 or Yakuza are open world games done fairly well, Yakuza more so than Witcher. A dense, content-filled open-world that you can actually "completely" explore is better than stuff like GTA (any iteration) which has made "bigger" its only appeal for the last decade or so.
What's the point of having a big, empty open world? BOTW has the same issue. It has a cool physics engine but getting from one "interesting thing" to the next takes way too long because there is this slog of bland landscapes and nothing else to pad the playtime. If I want to press an autorun button as I make my way to wherever I need to go in your open world game, that's not good game design.
I know exploration is the whole appeal of these open world games but if there is one tiny little thing surrounded by ten minutes worth of walking/riding a horse or whatever, getting there will take you ten minutes and going back will take ten .. and then getting to the next interesting thing will also take at least ten and suddenly you have spent 1 hour in the game and seen two interesting things after having spent 45 minutes walking.
Compare that to stuff like Uncharted 2 which is 90% action packed setpieces. It's a generational shift, I think. People don't enjoy "wasting" time like that anymore. It's much more engaging if the moment to moment gameplay is interesting. You're not "playing" the open world game a lot of the time. You're playing a walking/driving/riding simulator.
I agree. Now I am playing Plague Tale: Innocemce and it is so refreshing how simple the mechanics are, yet the story is very engaging.
I've been feeling the same about linear games over the last year. Open world games get boring for me now
Love uncharted...wish i had a PS for thst reason
Got to say, Skyrims music deserves a shout out. Exploring the open world with those original themes playing give some real atmosphere.
100% the music a game gives you or the general sounds you are hearing when you are exploring is really important for making people love a world.
The music and atmosphere is one of the main reasons I still play Skyrim
Skyrim is S teer q
Skyrim is a prime example of this crap. Imagine a game without that issue but the same or better music…
I have always theorized that video game OSTs make or break a game, especially for open world games. Think about it, i can still hear the Witcher 3 and Skyrim atmospheric music
My favorite open world is Fallout. There is always something there wherever you go and it's almost always something intriguing and sometimes bizarre (in a good way).
Fallout 4 and skyrim have the best open worlds of any games
I’ve always wondered how much smaller a game like gta would have to be in ~25-50 percent of the buildings were enterable and had crazy little things going on inside, maybe you walk into a floor of telemarketers and they have you make calls and choose dialogue, and you earn a commission or something, the biggest bummer with open world games is like you said, it almost feels like the Truman show in most of them, everyone is waiting for you
You don't enter every building in real life. GTA needs only 40% of enterable buildings like every store and stuff but npcs buildings must be locked
KENSHI is the only open world game where you aren't the star, but just another guy.
@@juzoone Yeah, but games are not real life, real life is not necessarily fun, game are supposed to be. A gamelike GTA may justify the idea that the character is a thief and can break into any house and building. That would be believable as doors, windows, etc, become part of the game as things you can interact with, and they are not just walls. I know I wouldn't do that in real life, I'm not a criminal, but in a game like GTA, I may be playing as a criminal.
Then Elden Ring comes along and could give less of af about the player
@@fsk5744 criminal not a robber. The missions never revolve around house robbery so there's no need for interiors here. Yes I want hotels to have full interiors but only player room should be open but opening every interior wouldn't make sense at all
Red Dead 2 is the last true world I've fully explored and the world was the bonus, the story was the headliner. Everything in the world developed the story or your character. The story was so good it made you explore to develop the characters and to add to their lore. A beautiful interactive world.
Great open worlds are dominated by their stories and the world is built around it. When the story or direction lacks, so does the world.
Rdr2 is a shit game
Horse riding simulator and repetitive simulator is more accurate name for it😊
Well put, Rockstar for all of its faults have set the bar very high. Their world building and story telling has brought lots of dollars along with it and then you get companies such as Ubi that see open world and $$$$ and think that's all it takes is a big world 100+hrs of game play and they will get money, oh and micro transactions! Can't forget those! They completely skip over the story telling part which is the part that takes the most amount of time and work which both cost the most amount of money for the company therefore the reasoning behind them skipping that step. They just hold B through that step of game development hoping that is what 98% of the gamer base will also do.
Because you are a normie who only plays the most mainstream games. RDR2 world is very rich compared to games like ubisoft ones but it is not as well done as some lesser known games such as KCD
@@BOO-ii3ni you're dumb rdr2 is probably the best openworld game period
@BOO KCD isn't mainstream? Come on, played KCD when it came out. Its a decent game but the story never gripped me as hard.
RDR2 is so alive and beautiful I literally just explored by riding my horse around the map. It was so relaxing. This is easily a top 10 game of all time
Easily top 3
@@tekakiuluy3221top 2*
Top game? No. Top horse riding simulator? Definitely
@@aceyboy oh shut up
@@aceyboy Still one of the best games of all time, even if you chalk it up to a "horse riding simulator"
I appreciate that you clearly credit the footage to the creators playing the games. It should be considered the bare minimum, but not everyone does it, so I'm glad you're helping change the CZcams culture and etiquette
I am currently playing Vahalla, going into it knowing that it was way longer than necessary, and so I play it in small chunks paced apart so it at least feels somewhat fresh when I come back to it. The only reason I am playing it is because I learned one of the side characters will be the focus of the next (shorter) game. Also, the Bethesda games have their AI characters interact randomly with each other, which makes the games feel so much more alive. You can run into bandits fighting guards fighting a bear fighting a dragon and all of it is happening even though you're not there. You're not prompting activities in the game outside of quests, you're stumbling upon them. It happens in the latter Fallout games, too. Thanks for this video essay. It was good.
I'm currently playing Oddysey and I like that aspect. Bandits and guards beefing, bears attacking passer bys, and several times me failing a small quest because a wolf started attacking the quest giver and they died when I tried to save them lmao. It's a tiny bit of a drag sometimes, but it feels alive and like it exists without me.
We used to get excited by Open Worlds because it meant go anywhere, and do anything. Today when we see an open world we think, "groan... More icons to collect"
Cuz production time of such games like Skyrim is massive
"we used to get excited..." - you have the answer and can't even see it.
It really depends on oepn world game.
You have games like Cyberpunk,RDR2, Witcher etc.
And on the other hand you have ubi games......
@@Janzer_ Some people see conflict where is none
@@Janzer_ Thank you. These echo chamber gamer nerds conflate the legitimate criticisms
For me personally the worlds just feel so hollow and empty lately. Yeah it’s cool to have a big ass map to explore but when large stretches are just running place to place with not much life in between it can become a bit of a drag
Halo CE had better open world modded maps. Empty servers and RP maps were the best. Modern games can't match it for whatever reason.
@Ralph Reilly try the south park game(the first one). idk, it’s really good imo tho
@@doublewhopper67Mass effect 2 you got hub worlds and you can pick any mission in order. So it's got a lot of replayability actually in that type of sense
@@doublewhopper67 Open world games have always been the same shit, people just get enough of them these days to realize their opinion of open world games doesn't match their actual experience of them.
The issue is transporting your character.
We all want to see the cool parts, but we don't want to spend time moving a character. It provides 0 Value. Maybe its necessary, but I wouldn't mind having smaller worlds. Bigger is worse. Crazy to say that.
Your perspective on open world games has been very interesting.
It did make me realize why I felt some games were great, and some got tedious , and I "pulled the plug".
For open world or even long linear games, I want a game that is going to present something different as I go along. Most get VERY redundant. The characters and scenes may look different at times, but I'm still doing the same game play I've been doing all along. Make me change up. My approach, weapons, skills etc. that I've been using don't work anymore, or at least in the current scenario/mission. I can't just find one approach, and never change it.
What open world game(s) you feel give unique experiences and is not redundant? Or which ones are masterpieces?
I'm newer to gaming, and I started with Skyrim and you've just made me want play it again. Wonderful video!
Play ghosts
what's Ghosts? @@danielson5182
If u missed playing Witcher 3 I highly recommend it!
@@ayasolaris4971as much as I've heard of the witchers and want to play it so much, sadly it's gender-locked as male protagonist..
I think you're better off playing Morrowind. Best elder scrolls game to this day, and with OpenMW you can have tons of tweaks and graphics overhauls
The Yakuza games are a great example of how bigger doesn't necessarily mean better. RGG have taken the approach of building open worlds that are small but dense with lots of things to do and it works really well because every location feels alive.
My favorite parts of exploring the games is that I don't have to overly rely on the minimap as much. It gives me a better connection to the world because I'm exploring the world, not the minimap.
Yep, that's why it's one of my favorite games series
Great points all around. I've played every Yakuza title and I know Kamurocho like the back of my hand - every street, shop location, etc., and it makes it even more fun to know the layout of the city and notice how things change over the course of the series.
Bro... Wtf... Yakuza is perfect
@samuraiblindado6439 no one said it isn't
This is why I like what the Yakuza series does. It's not a complete open world, but the open city kind of gameplay keeps you within the boundaries of a place that seems pretty small, but has so much to do.
I've played quite a bit of Judgement which is a spin off of Yakuza and even that games small densely populated map is a thousand times more interesting than any Ubisoft map from the past decade.
and even though its the same city each game, for the most part, it changes and grows with time, filled with new things, but also giving a familiarity for veteran players. watching kamurocho grow through the series was amazing, and was fun to go back to the places i knew from playing previous games
One of the reasons why I love yakuza
@@trevise684 like life, most of the beauty lies in moments and the encounters that happen within places.
compact and concise like AC Unity.
My favorite open world that I have explored was that of Subnautica, always trying to get deeper and coming across strange new biomes and creatures and plants as you do.
Pretty boring imo
@@dirt_xo meh to each their own, I found it fun, first time I played a game where the underwater section (in this case pretty much the whole game) wasn't dreadful, the underwater controls were actually really good, however the parts where you have to go on land were pretty meh, the controls were passable but you could tell all effort went into the underwater aspect.
I agree, I think Subnautica is great because all of the areas require you to play in a different way. you bring a different load out depending on the threats, and most vehicles are only optimal to a certain depth
Subnautica below zero tho 🤢
What if the larger and more open and immersive a game becomes the more it mirrors real life which is often just mundane?
Depends whether or not the game makes it boring. Some open world settings are boring because their gameplay and mechanics aren't suited for the setting they made.
@@matthewbenjiemensavilla4016 So does real life become boring because the mechanics of it aren't well suited for our environment?
@@r.rodriguez4991 real life is different from games. The mechanics of real life is absolute freedom while games have limited mechanics which require creativity from the developer. And also, it depends on how you perceive life whether it's boring or not.
@@r.rodriguez4991 not to mention every game has a different setting, and it's up to the developer how they would fit the gameplay with the setting.
@@matthewbenjiemensavilla4016 And yet with absolute freedom people still get bored. And in fact, just as you say it depends upon how you perceive real life, the same can be said of a given video game. I don't think you're making the point you think you are.
Watching this video while playing Red Dead and I think there's one major thing that you didn't mention that makes the world feel alive. It's the visible progress in the world, such as some guys near Valentine slowly building a house, or people at a lumber camp cutting down trees and being able to watch the trees actually fall down.
Yeah n its cool how you steal wood for them from that lumber camp. And you can watch people at the railroad track hammer a nail n the nail actually slowly get hammered. It’s easy to miss tons of details in that game. The only downside to rdr2 is how slow paced it is cuz it’s painfully slow sometimes
@@ajausbajdhqj Yeah, those are cool details as well. Personally I enjoy the pace. But to each their own.
would you say rdr2, is your favorite open world game?
@@Kaue.-dh6nx I think so, yeah. Although there's a bit of recency bias since I'm currently playing it. Still, most detailed open world by far.
To be fair, that house never gets built and I think it's the suspense wondering if it will ever be built that makes Red Dead 2 so gripping.
You’ve vocalised what I have been feeling for a few months. I don’t want a big open world full of shallow encounters and collectibles. Give me story depth, give me an experience, take me on a journey
Would highly recommend giving something like divinity os2, or nier automata a try if you haven’t. Would consider both to be semi open worlds. damn they both take you on a journey, although for completely different reasons
Yeah the problem is really obvious. Bad open worlds are boring to explore because there's nothing to explore. In Skyrim I explore every inch of the map because there might be a hidden quest or hidden weapon on the top of that mountain. In contrast, when I see a mountain in Assassin's Creed and there's no map marker on it, I know there's nothing there so there's no point going there.
Have you heard of a cool little game called outer wilds
@@paulbla5575 nah mate, never heard of it.
@@Adamfandango Its a really cool game open worldish game in a solarsystem with really cool Puzzles, amazing Exploration and a really cool Story.
Its also quite unique because everything is basically unlocked through knowledfe you gaun while exploring.
Its one of the best games i have ever Played and just throught id recommend it because the vibe is similar to the Kind of game you mentioned in your comment.
Funnily enough I actually really liked the Horizon series. Finding a new type of Machine always felt really great, espacially if its a big one you really have to engage tactically. Espacially forbidden west really gave me a rewarding feeling when aquiring new unique armor or weapons
The first one was good. The second was just repetitive and boring.
Mount and Blade games have such great open worlds because they literally would function without you-because the games are essentially a simulation of a medieval world. In fact, things would be more or less the same without player input. Wars would be waged, economies would grow and shrink, policies would change. And now, in the newest game, people will die, marry, be born, etc. Those games are just amazing.
There are actually CZcams channels that run Bannerlord without a player to see how the factions are naturally balanced and then they show charts of the changes the last patch made and how that affected the faction balance
M&B series are not openworld games. Theyre strategy/rpg games. And bannerlord is a very bad sequel to Warband in that aspect.
My thought is that open world games tend to be just too damn big. They expect you to spend 80+ hours at least in the game. But you end up burning out. Even if you are enjoying the game, there's little stakes and it takes too long for major story progression. So you end up with little reason to go back to the game. And when you do return, you forgot what you were doing.
I agree, like I like open world games, but their always so time consuming. I just need a good story, good gameplay, and great graphics. Tomb raider is a game that I just love! Especially Shadow of the tomb raider.
mate, if you're not into spending 80 hours into a game, just don't do it, find games that are smaller. there are lots of people that are looking for massive games, why such games should not exist? just because you and a few others want all the games to be the size of your...
@@jonsnow7092belly
You can't save your game? I agree if it's MMO, yeah - you are "expected" to play it like a full time job. But Single player you just stop playing and then when you get the feeling to play again after even a year or more, you just load up a saved game. I've been doing this with Bethesda games Skyrim and Oblivion for years now.
@@jonsnow7092Right. Imagine complaining about too much gameplay.
One of my favorite open world games is Kingdom Come and I think it's massively underrated. It has by far the most immersive open world and good writing and mechanics urge you to explore
I enjoy kingdom come but less for its open world but more for its mechanics and combat system
Another cool thing about the game is how closely the world building matches the look and feel of medieval villages in Central Europe.
This one was actually disappointing for me. The world looks and feels amazing but the combat mechanics just really trough me off.
Especially if you played it on hardcore mode... with no compass, no hud, no map marker. You have to remember every place, every point of interest, looking for wind directions yourself until you remember the whole map, and still today I remember most of the roads to the big cities without opening the map... but still got lost in the forest.
Too bad the quest design is super repetitive and after 20hrs it suffers the same destiny as most the open world games.
I think that you made a great point about elden ring not giving enough information to keep a lot of players engaged. I think the reason this isnt a very large talking point is because if you are the kind of person that turns off your minimap when you start an open world game, this game REALLY delivers, and so people like me who enjoyed it end up drowning out the players that got bored quick and moved on because it wasnt right for them. But because i love the game so much im glad youre talking about things like this because once it becomes a talking point, it can be taken into account for devs of future open world games and improve the genre as a whole
thats why i generally prefer pseudo open worlds. they give you that feeling of exploration while also making it more digestsble. elden ring is life though
Linear games like prince of persia series (including the DOS ones) and soul series always trigger my curiosity and made me want to explore more than those open world games do.
prince of persia warrior within did the whole interconnected open world first and let's you replay that game so many times cause of it, most have crossed the 20th mark cause of it.
I would agree with dark souls, haven't played enough PoP to say one way or another.
Zelda before botw and totk also was very intriguing to explore due to loads of interesting side characters, and rewarding puzzles. You need to be creative with how to reel in players to explore, nowadays they just bomb the map with markers to make it feel like the game is bigger than it is, when in reality its all so boring
@@damiradoncic I was going to say the same, I have drop thousands of open world games but I really loved my time with both botw and totk because of how they distribute their content around areas, while botw almost invented this style Elden Ring and Totk made this style run, I am really tired of point A to point B open worlds in all honesty, I really want to see more open worlds that push the player by curiosity, exploration and self-driven discovery.
@@LuisPerez-129 yeah i think they have raised the bar for open worlds immensley. Especially totk for me is absolutely breathtaking. How many times i mark a shrine or a tower or a poi, and end up on an entirely different place on the map, is literally everytime because there is so much that catches your attention and you want to see what lies there. I think other open worlds really need to step ut theyre game after we have had these brilliant open worlds
RDR2 and Witcher 3 were the best open worlds I played. RDR2 for the insane amounts of secrets and misteries you find in the world and Witcher 3 for all the hidden quests and dungeons. I remember visiting this one village in W3 were everybody were turned into pigs and I had to solve the mistery. Amazing quest and totally missable if you don't explore the area as the quest is not marked on your map or anything.
Fools gold quest.. One of my Absolutely favourite misson in the game. Sad new cyberpunk didn't had that much depth
@@terokmaximus6841 For how rushed it was Cyberpunk has some cool stuff hidden in the world but yeah, it doesn't come close to W3. W3 is just pure madness when it comes to hidden quests.
witcher 1-3 choices affect the whole story 😀
even witcher 1 have hidden quests
and I feel like rdr 2 deserves goty than god of war, I can’t name a game prequel masterpiece than rdr 2
Great video and probably the best comments section I’ve scrolled through on CZcams ever. Some fascinating insights guys; respect due.
And now I’m going to track down that lighthouse in Skyrim that has eluded me until now.
Great video, well put and articulate, great job dude keep it up.
On a side note: so glad I'm not the only feeling like "why cant I find a game like Skyrim anymore?" Ive been feeling this every once in a while for the past 8 years, and its crazy like how that level of awesomeness and amazingness in a game just hasnt been recreated in another game.
(For the R2D2 and Witcher 3 fans I'm not saying those games are bad but personally I really love games where I can make my own character rather than playing some premade character...)
And yea the search continues... thank you for helping me realise I'm not crazy
Have an awesome day my dude
if you want a customizable character with a massive explorable world and great story, try Cyberpunk 2077! It might be what youre looking for :)
Even Botw/Totk?
Same. When people wonder why we still keep playing (and buying) Skyrim, it's because there's no alternative. I'd be happy to move on to the next game that could do what Skyrim does.
I’m still blown away when I play Red Dead Redemption 2. You can set aside the story and it’s the kind of world you want to just interact with.
But all of that stuff is shit tho ngl no offense but why do people have to leave a story just due to the fact that it's not good for everyone and then have to focus on exploring the open world and getting a "feeling" of the open world. It doesn't make any sense...
@@Extreme2SwaggerHD except there's no point when you have to leave the story to explore, the exploration is 100% optional. If all you want is the story, which is totally fair because it's a good story, just hit the yellow dots on the map as they pop up and most of the map will be unveiled by the end anyway. But for me running down legendary animals and hunting for food and all that is a nice diversion for when I just want a sandbox to play in.
If you don't like it you don't like it, and you don't have to. But to me this is among the best open worlds to just wander around in that you can find in any video game.
casual overrated game, 100% scripted NPC behaviour for all stages of campaing completion. I couldn't play any longer when i finished the campaing, the world just becames so annoying. 1 great thing in RDR2 is riding your hourse in auto mode, and looking at it with cinematic camera, when its sunrising or raining, looks really nice.
@@betraid it’s not overrated, you just don’t like it, which is fine. It isn’t necessary that you like something for it to be great.
@@michaelw6277nah he has good points ... everything is 100% scripted and you know it's coming from a mile or a way or it don't happen at all
When I was a kid, the idea of a big ass game with a million things to do what enticing because I had limited funds and a lot of free time. But as we get older, I think there's something so appealing and great about a solid 20 hours or less game. That means the developers were able to find tune the experience, and not stuff it full of junk. Chrono Trigger is always the example.
I know. I got red dead 4 years ago. Still haven't completed it. Lol
For me what ruins open world are quest markers that constantly reminds me that i haven't picked up 5 herbs or something for some npc not letting me completely immersed in the world. That's why game with little to no quest markers are great to explore like elden ring and botw
This is an amazing video man, I just started wondering if I was the only one, and like algorithmic magic, your video shows up, I don’t think I’ve disagreed yet and I’m 25 minutes in, thank you for this man 👏
I'd argue the first instance where I ever felt the euphoria of being put into a "massive" open world was FF7, right after you get out of Midgar. There was even the change of theme from compact, congested, dark, and hostile to open, airy, bright, and optimistic. Not sure if it was ever mentioned, but it's one of the great moments I've had in gaming.
The only time I had another moment just as good as that one was when I played Oblivion for the first time and escaped the jail cell
@@floridianman I had the same feeling when I first stepped out of vault in Fallout 3
Finally playing as Sora once more and leaving Twilight Town in Kingdom Hearts II.
@KC Yessss!!
That's an overworld/world map rather than an open world though. It still pisses me off that they killed the overworld after IX claiming it was no longer possible to make work even though Lost Odyssey pulled it off along with the Tales series and Ni No Kuni.
For me nr1 is rdr2... I ended up crying like a baby while watching the end credits, nothing beats that for me. When the game came to an end I truly missed it, the world with its towns, cities and train rides, sadie, John, Arthur.
Best open worl in my opinion....everything feels alive. And can go in most buildings each different. Get drawn into exploring without any interaction and all NPC’s are different and have a dialogue
RDR2 implemented something that most game devs don't grasp.... that both human and animal populated areas in the real and game world, need certain level of activity and resources to sustain life..... people need towns, towns need shops and shops need surrounding wildlife/resources to fill their stocks.
@@MeggaMann_theBlueLion GTA IV is fs a contender tho
Especially Arthur.
@@thatONEmachine his talk with that nurse on the trainstation...
Gothic 1 and 2 are one of the first and still to this day best open world 3d games. Graphics and tank controls may be antiquated by today's standards but the wold design and quests are still top qualiy, they never get boring. The world is relatively small compared to newer games but it is packed with unique places, encounters and items (not some randomly generated garbage) that make it feel so alive and fun to explore. Even after playing them several times I still go back to them from time to time. Also there is a large modding community that keeps these games alive.
Exactly, to this day there isnt other game that can even be compared to them. Every quest feels good, because you are actually doing it, npcs will give you helpful directions, in a world that is handcrafted with easy to distiguish places you can easily orient in, not just following markers on stupid minimap in huge generic world. In all the modern games that are so much praised today, like witcher 3, rdr2, skyrim, you just look at minimap 90% of the time, then you have some combat and cutscenes, nothing more. I tried to find the fun and enjoy the beautiful world of rdr2 but just couldnt, because i didnt need to look at it, i always had to stare at minimap. Honorable mention from newer games would be far cry 2, there you had to physically look at the map during the game, or gps on your cars dashboard.
The problem with Elden ring is that once I discovered every single matte marker I didn’t know where to go and basically stop playing but in dark souls it’s a totally different thing and I love that game
the saddest thing about big open world games is knowing they take so long to beat that you cant play them all unless you just play them all only for a bit and then give up, because losing interest half way in and coming back to the game months later makes you so confused you feel like starting over, so you really want to play them one at a time but doing so takes an entire summer, and you realize there's like 10 others you wanted to play like this as well (assassins creed, far cry, mafia, witcher, fallout, watch dogs, the division, gta, rdr2, horizon zero dawn) but wait, that's like 10 summers? this is a realization that hits you like a truck when you leave your 20s and enter your 30s...
This is so true. RDR2 is stunning. I loved it got about half way through then my little boy came along and time to play it reduced. When I did pick it up again I wasn’t engrossed in it so started again but have never finished it!
Realised this at 19
@@danielwalls1675omg please take the time to finish it if you can. I stopped playing the game pretty fast just because I had other games and forgot about it but I remembered it and tried it out again and the story is so beautiful and I wished I finished it sooner.
I think open world is an antidote to being an adult trapped in a child's body in the suburbs, stuck in your parents house unable to go anywhere. Once you hit your 20s and 30s you have adventure in the real "open world" go anywhere, get jobs, buy motorcycles, keep going, new cities, new people, new adventures
I felt this halfway through the hogwarts game. It’s so boring I really regret buying it. $70 down the toilet but oh well, the first 10 hours were cool I guess.
I am playing RDR 2 right now and honestly, there's just so much content, it's actually overwhelming. Even if that content is good, in RDR2's case often outstanding, the sheer amount of it can wear you down. Even the "casual completionist run" of that game is probably 50-60 hours. I dread to think what I will feel when playing of the likes of Odyssey or Valhalla.
Don't play Odyssey, not worth it at all
Points of unique interest to travel to are crucial too, like in the incredible Fallout 3, something to move towards in the far distance. Less buildings that are just blocks, but can be entered and explore or climbed make open worlds more fun.
I always preferred segmented open areas, like in the Witcher 2. Still feels open enough, but it is much more densely packed with worthwhile content, and less useless space that is there only for the sake of making things feel bigger.
I prefer smaller world spaces but more densely pack. But no map markers. Emergent quests that you can stumble upon. Hidden chests, hidden quests, hidden loot, hidden areas this rewards exploration. The ability to affect the game world. Like in Gothic 3 you could decide which side to support Orcs or Humans and overthrow towns. Have the ability to create your own player home and family via gathering in game resources. Regenaterion ingame overtime so it feels like a living breathing world.
Metro: Exodus did a pretty good job with segmented open world areas.
skyrim did it best
Red dead Redemption 2 had the greatest open world of all time and now every games world pales in comparison
Probably why I finished The Witcher 2 twice! I lost interest in The Witcher 3 by like hour 120. It was just too long for me.
This was truly the open world of video essays, at around 12mins I realized how long it was going to take to finish lol
Lmao srsly. Watching this whole video would be like having to play all of an open world assassins creed game
I understand where people are coming from to an extent, but do we really need 50 videos about how the open world formula is bad or how "modem gaming" isn't fun anymore.
No doubt with people in the comments saying how games used to be better years and years ago, cherry picking evidence to support their bias argument.
These are topics beaten to death so hard that there isn't even a corpse anymore.
2x speed is your friend.
@@ShonenJump121who’s forcing anyone to watch?
@@ShonenJump121 Yeah, games were always crap largely. I like less modern ones to old ones though, but both old and new there's just trash all round. Of course people are biased, they have preferences like you do.
The moment you click "pause" in Elden Ring, all nearby enemies make a b-line for you and gank you into next week.
did you miss the giant glowing golden tree that's visible from almost every place on the overworld to show you where to go
or the gold line that points to the next grace
Love open world single player games. I prefer these types of games vs massive online games but that’s just me I’m more of an old school solo play type of person
I don’t play any online multiplayer games. Been loving hogwarts legacy. I play games to explore and relax, not into the competitive and stressful nature of online multiplayer games.
@@adrianc6534 so is hogwarts actually worth the money? I wanted to get it but I heard it gets pretty repetitive relatively quickly
@@masdavis236 I want to know too. I've been hearing positive reviews but I learned early that I don't like lots of stuff that people consider "good"... I like the wizarding world but I don't want to play HL if it's using the same formula as most open world games because I got bored QUICK, and seeing snippets of the gameplay I get the vibe that it is unfortunately.
@Adrian C. I'd advise you get it if your a fan of the series or have read at least one book. The game is better understood and enjoyed by fans. That's the hard truth.
The problem with a lot of open works games is the formulaic checklists where it’s always the same thing and there’s no sense of mystery or exploration it’s just you know it’s an enemy camp or something with this collectible. Now for example open worlds like fallout, Skyrim or Elden ring are excellent examples of great open worlds because you see something in the distance and there is actually something to find more often than not, whether it be a sweet piece of gear, an intriguing side quest or a tough boss.
Or something that is very imaginative
On the topic of fallout, one of the things I like about it’s open world is that it tries to tell a story. The best example is the many terminal entires in the vaults which document the twisted experiments but there’s also smaller things like corpse placement and prewar posters
I have more than 4000 hours (yes, I meant to type the numeral zero three times. I meant to say four thousand hours) of Fallout 4 playtime. I still find instances I've missed altogether, never before encountered in the Commonwealth
Go ahead and lie to me about the random unpredictability you've found in The Last of Us.
Elden Ring’s world is probably one of the worst offenders. Vast, empty, and destroys the pace of gameplay for the sake of size. Couple that with FromSoft’s D-tier side quest system and you’ve got yourself a bad open world that’s not fun to traverse, explore, or spend time looking at.
Your "Leave a like" is so well timed. I clicked the like button 2 secondes before it shows up in your video @ 16:32. I had to go back to make sure it was "in" the video.
One of my favourite ways a game inspired exploration was in the Xenoblade 3 story DLC Future Redeemed. It had a system that tied everything from killing monsters, to exploring locations, to talking to NPCs into character progression.
While it's not an open world in the way most games in this video are, I feel as though designers could learn something from it.
Do i need to play Xenoblade 2 to understand 3?
@@apoplexiamusic for the base game not really, but you do for the dlc
Morrowind is one of my favourites as far as open worlds are concerned, it's got diverse environments, distinct looking towns, lots of caves and dungeons, and it doesn't hold your hand so exploring feels fun. Also the music is fantastic.
not just nostalgia, game is one of the best ever
As a Morrowind player I would apply his criticism of Ubisoft and AC to Skyrim. The world is nice for one playthrough but it has no sustainability of content without mods. Most of it is just walking from A to B and killing stuff.
The main difference with Morriwind and Oblivion? QUESTS. Real, interesting quests. Narratives by great writing staff, and focused quest design and one off scripting. No generic, repeatable, empty radiant events.
You hated cliff racers? How about a game with massive cliff racers that have 100x the health, take 5 minutes to kill, and are essential to the game's entire plot.
@@ApathyBM I agree. I modded it 2 years ago and had another play through and you can get it looking really nice these days. When Oblivion came out it was like they changed their approach to making games to make them less complex to appeal to a larger audience. What was there in Morrowind that wasn't in Oblivion was the (slightly hinted at right from the start) ability to break the game with crazy enchantments and spells, items that were certainly not standard and randomly hidden all over the place. You knew they were special when you found them because of where you found them and the fact they were 100 times more valuable than anything else that was similar, and the writing that went into even the smallest quests. I think one of the worst things they did was add that objective marker to the compass. In Morrowind you might discover something from taking the time to read some random book and slowly piecing clues together and when you figure a puzzle like that out you find a new sword or something and it's enjoyable, because you worked it out on your own. That is a much more rewarding experience than the "follow this marker to this location, kill this thing, repeat" approach we have now.
I struggled through Oblivion but did finish the main quest. I've never had any desire to go back to it since. I tried to get into Skyrim twice, I literally forced myself to play it for a while thinking it must get good at some point because so many people were raving about how fantastic it was. It didn't get any better, I consider it a boring game. New Vegas is a 100 times better game than Skyrim and Morrowind is 10 times better than New Vegas IMO. It's a shame the large game studios have gone this way, it's led to this "Grind" idea, like you have to do fundamentally boring shit that you don't really enjoy to level up in a game or to get some item. It never used to be like that. I'm not wasting my free time doing that shit.
I still find really good newer games coming out, but the majority of what I enjoy now are coming from smaller developers, and I enjoy them because when I play them I get a feeling of the dedication and creativity that went into making them, the same way I do with Morrowind. And some of these developers are challenging the idea of what a genre can be and approaching game design in a different light to the norm. Big studios don't normally do that, it would be too risky. But that's where all our truly brilliant games have come from in the past. Rimworld, Factorio and Stardew Valley are examples of what I consider to be high quality newer games. I won't be rushing out to buy Starfield because I can't see how it won't just be Skyrim in space.
Dragon's dogma has all that and it's still ass so what does that make mid Morrowind 😑
@@ApathyBM Yeah while I really enjoyed my first playthrough with Skyrim, my second one was mostly boring and I aborted the third one after a few hours. It's just so repetitive, even the voice actors sound bored most of the time. And I couldn't agree more with the dragons, I've played Morrowind after Skyrim and while the cliffracers where getting annoying pretty quickly, at least after a while they only took one hit. Fighting a dragon in Skyrim went from "wow this is amazing" to "oh no this crap again" when hearing a dragon in the distance pretty quickly. What stood out to me with Morrowind was you had to think for yourself, Oblivion doesn't really have that anymore and Skyrim went down the same path.
I remember just trotting along through Velen in the rain, listening to the mournful violin theme. Passing through battlefields strewn with bodies, hearing the cries of refugees & wounded soldiers. The different regions of the Witcher 3 each had their own unique atmosphere.
The first time getting to Skellige and hearing The Fields of Ard Skellig OST for the first time was a magical experience.
@@honkykong610it felt like heaven after what we had been through
Loved the video just synthesized hella thoughts i couldnt put my finger on. Its so crazy the tricks game devs use like that small trickle of discovering the world like in breath of the wild without being forcibly restricting with invis barriers nd stuff
I think what determines a good open world is whether I fast travel to the next objective, or actually travel there myself.
The fact that Lego Island, probably one of the oldest and tiniest open world games, has more interesting things than some modern triple-A open worlds really tells you something about the state of modern gaming, where visuals and quantity are chosen over storytelling and quality.
I feel like almost every Lego game feel like a true game no matter if it open world or not.
It feel like a living world to me, I remember playing Lego games had a kid and feeling like I could be anything in the world of Lego.
I miss the lego games before lego star wars made the entire franchise a collect-athon
FF7 (1997) was the first game to ever give me that open world feeling. After spending many hours in the dank confined slums of Midgar, you climb over the wall and realize there's an entire world outside the city to explore. Midgar felt so massive I thought the entire game would take place there.
Still prolly my favorite game of all time, for sure in my top 5, that and Zelda Ocarina of Time, they are what made me fall in love with games when I was younger.
@@grimreaper15 they also made me fall in love with gaming. We were truly spoiled back then lol
disc 2 is my favorite part of any final fantasy game. even if it’s depressing asf😭
It’s crazy how short those games really are when you play them today
I think what's funny is how old this method is. The ancient Might and Magic games do it with their typical 'start you on an open world island' before opening that up to the actual 'real world', the 'open world' Ultimas did it. The oldest Elder Scrolls did it. Heck, even betrayal at Krondor (1993), a (at one time widely considered one of the greatest RPGs) starts out, while not in a 'you're in a small space and can't see how big the world is' keeps you staring at a mountain wall with two forked paths. Each one possibly leading towards your goal, and then each branching out farther as you know you really just have to 'head south' and the characters (rare for the time) inform you of 'planning your route' and 'give worried advice about routting through its heavily storybook laden dialogue. (The game is like playing an open world novel... its...unique. I hated it because as a kid playing it in like 1999 I got poisoned and died repeatedly.)
Another thing that makes Skyrim’s world so unique is it tricks you. The player stumbles into some of the best quests on accident.
Like the Dark Brotherhood quest, the player has probably slept in a bed dozens of times but if you do it after the black sacrament quest, surprise! You wake up tied up in an entirely new place.
Skyrim lulls you into a false sense of repetition. You can raid 5 dwarven ruins that all seem the same then sudden you come across a portal to Blackreach. Now you’re excited to spend hours trying to open it.
Skyrim encourages complacency then hits you with something new out of nowhere.
So much of the most fun, amazing experiences I've had in the game happened from stumbling across them on the road. I'm so grateful I decided to play without fast travel from the start.
i've been dreaming of very dynamic open world games that never repeat itself for decades. but as a software developer i know how complicated that would be. but now with AI there might be other possibilities...
With a.i the games could have endless versatility, like Skyrim has but ten fold
The problem is that the price of endless content is that none of it is meaningful.... which take something thats already a problem with open world games and amplifies it tenfold
I have not played to many open worlds. But the ones I really enjoyed like RDR2, GTA V and The witcher 3 have never given me the reason to fast travel. Even if it means running across the map as in RDR2 it always felt like I would find something new.
Honestly, I think the trick to enjoying open world games is to realize they're huge time sinks and just pick one or two a year that really interest you.
I adore Horizon, for instance, and I think that its a pretty solid open world game, but I'd probably have had a lot less patience for it if I'd binged every Assassins creed right before playing it.
The problem is, today, it's no longer 'special' for a game to be an open world, it's just . . . expected. Saying your game is 'open world' is about the same from a player's perspective as saying that it is 'A Videogame'.
And I think it's possible to still make really good open world games, but it's a type that should be reserved for when the creators really think they've got on idea that will mesh well with it.
When I play open worlds I avoid doing things randomly just for the sake of 100%. In RDR2 I make a list of things to do as I go along. Helps especially with RDR2 because it’s fun to roleplay
RDR2 did never give you a reason to fast travel.... never... okay.
I completed RDR 2 & Witcher 3 before GTA 5, so got open world fatigue & left GTA 5 midway. World of gta5 is great but I felt it lacked good side quests & run n gun missions made it quite mundane. Also I think RdR2 & Witcher 3 were way too cinematic as compared to GTA5, but it’s my opinion.
GTA V was the game that spawned the current garbage open world design... travel for 80-90% of the time, from one side of the map to the other and back, for 10-20% gameplay + cutscenes, with no Level Design, just World design(environment)... boring as hell...
My personal favorite was Fallout 3. Being enclosed within Vault 101 for the first few hours and getting that Capital Wasteland reveal was exhilarating.
factss
i feel u. I just played it after like 7 years. I also made some gameplay videos of it. Its an absolute lovely game and my favorite game off all time. It was my very first xbox 360 game and i absolutely played the shit out of it together with my best friend when we were young. It totally blew my mind how big the map was and how much possibilitys for decisions u had. It was just beyond epic.
2nd favorite is Resident Evil 4 (a totally different game)
New Vegas was even better ;)
@@timjkoala7556 not for me, i like Fallout 3 the most.
gaming has been a lifelong hobby but not my main one, and I've given up on a lot of open world games for this reason, I only have time to play maybe two hours a day depending, I need to get the most out of that time since this is the only game I'm gonna play for weeks
Skyrim is SUCH a masterpiece. There's a reason I still play it today.
Every location you discover has some sort of story. I still remember discovering that the random house near Lakeview manor actually has a secret entrance to a bandit camp in the basement. Or the old lady that lives alone in the woods is secretly a cold blooded killer. They use so much environmental storytelling that it makes every single character and location a completely unique and interesting thing to explore.
The new AC games are the exact opposite. There's no exploration and there's no depth. You're just checking off boxes on a list. It doesn't drag you in the way that Skyrim does.
It really is. People complain about the quests, but the world is where Skyrim shines. There's nothing quite like it.
My biggest takeway from playing a fair few open world games is that the means of traversal also impact the game a lot.
True, the biggest reason a Spiderman open world game works so great as a concept is the idea of web swinging as a traversal mechanic, I've spent a lot of hours just swinging around and stopping the occasional crime without doing any missions in the insomniac Spiderman game, and the kinda janky but satisfyingly physics based swinging in the ps2 movie tie in made traversing the city challenging and single handedly carried a game that could've easily been mid movie game trash, the map can be as big as you want because as long as you have a good system and map design it will never get boring to go from point A to B, in fact it can be the best part.
its why hogwarts legacy map felt so small and obstacles felt less challenging. broom + revelio is op.
@@teaja211 the flying also felt like ass and there's a fast travel point every two steps all over the map, which has the Ubisoft approach of showing you where every mission is so actually traversing and exploring the world is completely optimised out by the efficency of fast travel and waypoints.
@@ginogatash4030 This is why I love Dragon’s Dogma. You have to earn fast travel and it’s still limited even once you’ve obtained every portcrystal. The game isn’t too vast either so trekking around on foot doesn’t feel like a drag very often. I hope the sequel lives up to it.
@@kvltizt I kind of hated that since you'd have those awful escort quests located at other parts of the map that were trivialized by good port crystals but a pita without them. You'd also do quests across the map and arrive back in the capital just to get another quest back where you came from
For me I much prefer open world or survival games that incorporate a strong rpg element. Havning npc's going about their business, interacting with them, quests, factions, those elements are what keep me playing. A big beautiful, open world is great at the beginning but feels too empty for me after a couple dozen hours.
Gothic could do it right, it's sad that games 2 decades later can't.
Did you played Kingdom Come: Deliverance? If you havent I think you would love that game. It fallows the Bethesda method but the rpg elements are stronger.
Yep
You could try wildlander
those couple dozen hours should be the whole experience , not a bunch of chore simulators and a bunch of running around on the same token horse rides and cars.
Personally few open world games I liked had one thing in common, that being locking you out of certain places. When you have that cool looking place right in front of you but there's a guard in front of it who let you in. You have whole world to explore but goddamn it I want go to that specific place.
Gothic 3 for example Game barely starts and there's a city with a castle behind a magic barrier and an Ork army surrounding it. I like being teased with these locations, making you more eager to explore to see if theres a way in.
When in Skyrim can basically go everywhere I want anytime I want and it gets boring after some time
Aww GTA4 ❤ My first Open World Game. What a ride! I explored every inch of that game, so much so that it wasn’t just a game anymore: It was my city. I lived there and I loved it.
It may sound silly, but I loved to hail a cab and use the backseat view, watching NPC pedestrians through the window (toss coffee cups, drop umbrellas, run from the rain, sometimes get into fights) and listen to the hilarious radio shows. The level of detail in that game was absolutely astounding. 10/10.
Elden ring does give you plenty of information. Almost all of the explorable areas like caves, evergaoles and catacombs are drawn on the map. Just because the game doesn't bombard you with icons for these doesn't mean it doesn't present information.
Yeah and a lot of the content kinda sucks after you do a few of them, every single catacomb feels very similar and so do the caves.
@@Enoo_ then just skip them bruh
@@Enoo_ have you ever palyed bloodborne??? if you have then you know they have chalice dungeons which i find to be boring, but guess what i skip them every time i play the game.(btw bloodborne is my 2nd favorite oat)
A lot of dialogue around Elden Ring gets misinterpreted. When ppl say there is no story, its them not paying attention, feeling like story is solely cutscenes, and being conditioned by all Sony's interactive movie games to think story is just, a playable movie. When ppl say ER lacks information or direction for the player, its again them not paying attention. The traces point to where you need to go, there are markers on the maps for NPCs, you have waypoints you can place, etc. Again this thought that there isn't information is people conditioned to having all the answers on their screen like in a Ubisoft game.
@@Enoo_ I guess I'm still quite early in the game but so far I have found all of them feel different, it's like shrines from BOTW and apart from having to fight the erdtree burial watchdog over and over they are fun. And apart from the watchdog I think the bosses are really fun, reskin or not.
Kingdom come deliverance did pretty good considering it wasn’t the same size dev as these. I had so much fun exploring, creeping around houses robbing people, the story all though poorly finished wasn’t bad, and it was cool with the unique combat system. They did the whole Skyrim thing without magic pretty good.
Yeah thats true. I think this is something many people forget when it comes to releases is just the size of the teams. Take Bethesda, you have a lot of people complaining about skyrim especially now but it was made with around 100 people. It's not the same as let's say cyberpunk with 500+ or even RDR2 with over 1500 devs.
I think they did a really good job with the map on Kingdom Come, I was really impressed with how unique they managed to make certain parts of the map considering its all the same biome. I’d be riding around and recognise a certain tree or a fork in the road, that level of detail is really impressive
@@Space_Ghost91they used real locations many of the monasteries and castles are around and used as the model to recreate them. That blew me away when I learned that. It kept the countryside to an actual scale of real people. Some of these other game make castles as tall as the empire state building. Looks good on the outside but have fun filling the inside with content.
Awesome video, you have gotten my sub. And I just love Skyrim.
fellow skyrim lovers will always find there way to each other.
I couldn't agree with more with your explanation of AC Valhalla. I played about 70 hours and was absolutely bored out of my mind. I'm normally a completionist with games but just had no motivation to carry on with it at all. I never really understood why I got bored of it but you've summed it up perfectly here. I always wondered if I'd maybe played on too easy of a difficulty and levelled up too quickly so it all just felt pointlessly easy, but I think that's the experience most people have.
For what it's worth, I did exactly the same with Ghost of Tsushima. Got terribly bored and gave up after a similar amount of time.
I loved Ghost of Tsushima but to be fair I love Kurosawa's Samurai movies so I relished the ability to, somewhat, play through one myself. (especially with all the cinematic options and playing on the highest difficulty where you die if you mess up)
I'd prefer a smaller world just more condensed. When I saw the map size for valhalla my heart sank
I remember when you first hit England and you’re set free. First thing I did was open the map and feel overwhelmed 😂
@@tomevans5976 still went on to play the game though, bailed despite buying dlc it's just too much.
@@garypasquill2355 oh for sure. Still finished the base game but I was so relieved when I did.
I thought raiding wouldve been way more important. But that add on for it just made it boring. Was just for another piece of gear I didn’t need.
Just imagine what great stuff you could do with a AAA budget and a map of a size you can walk across in a few minutes... Every NPC could be unique and could've dialogue. You could make the game world adapt to player choices and progression of the story. You could make the game less linear and have a complex branching story. I really love the feeling of being at home in a game world when I get very familiar with it, new games don't provide that. I havent played Gothic 2 in propably 5 years, but I could draw you a Map of the city of Khorinis from memory with every important NPC on it.
I'm currently playing the Witcher 3, I couldn't tell you the location of anything in Novigrad. I really don't see the appeal of it. Sure, it looks nice.
@@shadow4040 steer clear of elden ring because it's massive, forspoken is huge too
I think the question is why does almost every new game need to be open world, what happened to level games
Indies cover you.
It’s more profitable to make an open world game and all the marketing stuff than making a voos level game.The empty exploration combined with good graphics =hours playing these huge games
There is level based games. Dishonored, quantum break, control, that new Star Wars survivor game, isn’t that new atomic heart game level based? Lol
God of War
this. i got burned out of AAA games because of this reason, ialso blame people that have this absurd expectation where you pay for a game and you MUST get the most hrs/played possible no matter what
You said that Red Dead 2 doesn't have fast travel or auto-drive (or I guess auto-ride). It actually has both. For fast-travel you can use a stage-coach or set up camp anywhere in the wild and fast-travel if you have the upgrade unlocked at the group's campsite. For auto-ride you can just hold down V, which enters you into cinematic camera and rides the horse automatically to your waypoint. I didn't know this till I was over 70 hours into the game at which point I saw a random reddit post.
I didn't say it doesn't. I said it doesn't encourage fast travel and auto ride is only a feature in stage coaches and in cinematic mode which are both two things most people aren't using 99% of the time.
A well structured presentation and I think your conclusions are correct. Good job.
Open world games have always had a weird place for me. The ones I enjoy the most actually technically have the least in them. Having a good scenery with diverse environments helps and having locations to explore and encounters are nice but I found the times where exploring was the most fun for me were Skyrim (modded) and Red Dead letting me wander around, find a scenic spot and fish/hunt. Set up a tent and craft etc. Not to say that having secrets and locations to find like Elden Ring aren't fun but that I feel like the small and not mandatory side stuff really helps make wandering more fun. Not every town needs a quest or cave. Sometimes, to me, just finding it is interesting.
It depends, some worlds can be really immersive without alot of content. Others are just bland and generic and you feel like exploration is pointless. No man's sky has endless open world but I can't bring myself to care in the least because both gameplay and discovery are bland and boring and in most cases pointless.
@@RedceLL1978 the reason is precisely that it is infinite. worlds are procedurally generated and have nothing truly unique about them
old open worlds built different, even in yakuza 1 on ps2 each side content had a cutscene just like main story and since it was in engine means the time of day changed the mood of each cutscene.
@@tj-co9go No the reason is that procedurally generating good design is absurdly hard and I don't think anyone has actually gotten there. At best we've gotten procedural design that isn't bad but that requires a lot of developer oversight on how things can be placed which limits meaningful variation of options.
As I see it all bad level desing is similar in how it feels to the player but good level design feels distinct.
Simple. Open world games used to be filled with interesting and fun content that actually made the size of said game worth it. Now, open world is a label that companies think sells on its own, and that all they have to do is make sure the game isnt on rails to qualify for that label. They dont have to fill the world they create with life. They just have to have the world there.
I like how skyrim is mentioned when talking about "the world functioning without you" when everything that happens there needs you no matter how stupid it is, every guild is incompetent without your hand and somehow you are always the center of attention
They may be incompetent in making themselves great again, but they would still exist without the dragonborn, be it in decay, be it in success. The dragonborn changed their fates (depending if you really choose to be part of and help them), but it don't mean that they would not have a fate if you didn't appear, although, of course, this fate doesn't come mid-game
that is intentional. those guilds are meant to be so much more with you as a player. not because they couldn't make them so.
@fernandoavendanha8279 except no, Skyrim’s factions are just incredibly poorly written, the Thieves apparently never checked their loot vault in the 20 years since the former guild leader was killed, the Astrid has already sold out the Brotherhood before you even join if the quest to destroy them is anything to go by, the Mages never hold even a single lesson without the player present and never hold any lessons again after the first one, and the companions are mostly just a radiant quest dispenser.
They still continue existing and doing their thing without you. Sometimes arguably better off. Just because you *can* stick your nose into every issue in Skyrim doesn't mean you have to, or that you should.
Let me tell you, I absolutely loved Far Cry 5 as an open world game.
It had this formula of helping good people that you can partner with, killing evil cultists, finding cool easter eggs and thematic locations, hunt and scavenge, and more. The entire game's purpose was to complete random tasks cause that's literally how you progressed the story. Absolutely genius. In other games, side quests felt tedious cause it would halt the main story.
To each their own I guess but to me that sounds like the exact reason I avoid open world games 😂 everything feels like too random and not enough story
With regards to elden ring, I think you underestimated how much information they give you. If you open the map you can see many points of interests actually DRAWN on the map rather than just having a marker, Mainly catacombs and evergaols. Additionally, the guidance of grace (the beam of light from graces) point towards the nearest big boss.
True and npcs actively tell you where to go
@@kirbenzi5878 They do, but without a big marker on the map, which is a plus imo.
it's annoying when someone is telling me where to go and im tryna focus and not forget only to be surprised that they slapped the marker on it.
Catacombs aren't drawn on the map, evergaols and caves are
@@ksar98 They are, when you were there before. And there are those statues that point in the direction you need to go (with the blue arrows on the map)
It’s ok for people to kick and punch your favorite games publicly and then laugh at then
The older assassins creeds like black flag and before were mainly story driven but they were insanely good and relatively a lot shorter compared to the new ones. Just wish they could make stories like that again.
I completed Black Flag 4 days ago. Almost every location is either a fishing port or a barren island with a handful of palm trees. There's something like 3 jungle areas and 2 Mayan temples. Other than Havana, Kingston and (to some extent) Nassau the world feels empty. Not to mention other than the Templar Hunt missions, all the bonus stuff is either collectables (sea shanties, animus fragments, mayan stones etc) or just a target to kill e.g Assassin and Naval Contracts. Then 30% of the main story is tailing missions or eavesdropping. It's not as good as you remember.
@@jamesfleming5830yeah that got old, but it was the first Assassins game with that large of an open sailing world and I remember countless nights exploring the islands and aimlessly sailing, it was great… then Oddessy came out and topped it by a ton
Older assassins creeds... Black flag? Lol. Old ACs start with 1 and end with Revelations. 3 to unity is the era they decided to ruin the franchise and Origins onward have practically not a single aspect to do with Assassin's creed.
I liked Black Flag but the open world part of it suffers from many is the same problems as modern Ubisoft games (though probably on a smaller scale than some of them).
I think what set it apart was the gameplay was enough to carry the game (though 2 will always be my favorite) and the open world bits were just things I could do on the way to missions. I think at some point the open world took precedence and the gameplay took a back seat which is why later games suffer.
@@FUCKukraine69, and those games that had the same fkn tailing missions over and over again...
this video made me appreciate how good nakeyjakey and dunkey are as content creators
Between working full time, producing electronic music, playing guitar (which has taken a backseat this year for me) and learning German, it's to really hard get invested in a game. The only games i've reallt gotten invested in over the past few years have been Tears Of The Kingdom, Dragon Quest 8 on 3DS, Chrono Trigger on DS and Final Fantasy 8 (about 110 hours back in 2002). I got a Switch last Christmas and i've bought a whole bunch of games, usually when they go on sale, but i mostly play TOTK, I've played DQ 11 for about 13 hours and Saint's Row The Third for about 30 (mostly meesing around for fun), I'm almost afraid to play all these games i bought which are hailed as amazing, but are pretty big time investments.
The biggest problem of open world design is lack of density compared to more confined and linear structure. As much as I enjoyed Elden Ring, I missed Dark Soul's more intricate and inter-connected map rather than large sprawling field.
Lack of density or structure isn't necessarily a problem. Kenshi's a fantastic example of an open world that most people who've played it really like, but that is actually VERY sparse in terms of actual unique content in each area and it actually has absolutely no main story. But what is good about it is it has both a very strong setting(Sci-fi post-apocalyptic desert Japan crossed with a bit of the Crusades, rock people, bug people, and a lot of crazy or depressed thousand year old robots), and the ability to tell stories you might not see in other games, all created by player input+ the "randomness" of the AI and it's actions.
For instance, you might start as a Shek(A rock man basically), go to a bar, pick up a buddy named Hobbs, and then travel north into holy nation territory, only to get caught stealing from the Holy Nation, get attacked by a guard, permanently lose an arm, and then you and your buddy get enslaved. But then you escape, and while escaping free a couple of prisoners. One of them decides to become a new party member (named her Noi when it let me), and the three of you run off into the foggy canyons to the northwest... only to discover it's full of bugmen who chase you down in a swarm, knocking you and Hobbs out, but Noi escapes. They then carry you to a nearby camp where they tie you and Hobbs to poles, and their princes start eating you alive, starting with your main character. You can't save your main, not with almost half a dozen princes chewing on him with nearly three times that many lesser fogmen praying to them, but you are able to sneak in with Noi, have her untie Hobbs, and as your main character screams while being eaten alive, Hobbs and Noi sneak away. As they traveled north, dodging more random hordes of thirty or more fogment, Hobbs and Noi end up passing through the densest part of the fog into a frozen lake with robotic arms the size of skyscrapers sticking out, into a dead swamp full of robotic spiders and crashed spaceship parts, and finally cross over into a forested area near the sea, with a friendly village of ninjas where you're able to finally find your first safe spot to hole up and start actually trying to improve your skills and money instead of just mastering your running skill.
All of that was completely unscripted content generated by a combination of luck, player choice, setting, and travelling through a world where the game is allowed to have enough randomness to allow for stories to be built by the engine instead of by the writer. Now compare that to most open worlds: here is enemy camp, they're not gonna be outside that camp too often in numbers you should worry about so they can't really influence what you're going to do in any way. Oh you're being approached? Well don't worry, you're absolutely capable of fighting the VAST majority of things in this world alone right from the start, so no worries. Oh no you died! Only thing to do is reload, no possibility of being enslaved and needing to escape, no losing a limb and need to find a replacement, no being pinned down as that awful giraffe/turtle thing eats your guts while you pray something distracts it, etc. Most open world games don't allow their world to affect your story, which means the ONLY story is really the main narrative.
By the way, later on in that playthrough I snuck into the holy nation's capital, kidnapped the Phoenix(AKA, it's king), stripped his armor and weapons, carried him into the foggy area I mentioned, and tied him to one of those poles and let the Fogmen eat him. :D I could have just stormed the city and slain him there, brought him to one of the other neighboring nations, dropped him in front of a carnivorous beast or some more human-styled cannibals, thrown him in a lake of acid, sold him to slavers, thrown him into a machine that's specifically designed to peel skin off of people, or simply dropped him in the path of a giant solar death laser the size of a city if I wanted, all of which would be my choice in how to deal with the character who I chose to have as my main villian. And in another playthrough, I could have worked for him, and helped him exterminate all non-humans and those who don't believe in his god, or maybe worked for one of the other major factions. Or just do my own thing, work for nobody, destroy all civilizations and revel in a chaotic world where I am the only remaining order.
The point of all this is that the problem with a lot of open world games isn't that they don't have enough density in things to do, it's that they give you a lot of openness in where you can go, but not in what you can do or the ways in which your doing can go horribly wrong, so the freedom that should be the cornerstone of an open world game is kind of.... not really there. And no amount of towers to climb, feathers to collect, or bandit camps to clear can make up for that.
Hit the nail on the head for me here. As much as the world is beautiful, I wish it was denser. My favourite parts of Elden ring were exploring non-mountable areas like the castles. I found it much more exciting exploring the interconnected smaller world, nothing like realising where you are after a shortcut path. And when using a horse and sprinting around spamming R1 is the best method to fight open-world mobs, it's hard to get invested in that area. Might just be a boomer take from a dark souls enjoyer though.
Yes, nothing worse to me than when you go to a new beautifully designed region to find out you can complete 100% of what there is to do there in less than a couple hours and then barely ever any reason to visit there again.
@@Zach-cc4ftYeah you definitely didn’t find everything in the game😭
I think the issue is that people craved a big and semi-detailed open world back in the late 00s and early 10s. It was tbh a big gap in games, and was largely prevented due to tech limitations and budget.
But I think the trope has become saturated and inevitably if something has been done enough over and over you’ll get some not great ones.
Whatever the next big trend in games will be, will eventually get stale because lackluster games or lackluster devs have waded into those trendy waters as well
Agreed, they were cool technical achievements at the time, which were utilized well in specific cases, and not so well in many others. At this point, I feel it's more of a value proposition which people have bought into, seeing meticulously polished, 15hr, linear narratives as a waste of time. Leading to the evolutionary pinnacle of videogames (hard sarcasm), the 3rd person action RPG with craftable vehicles, and minimal story elements, so you don't have to constantly mute the audio of your secondary media source while mindlessly slogging to maintain a consistent, endogenous dopamine drip.
Maybe. I think it’s because certain genres of games aren’t easily “imitated”. Some devs get the wrong or incomplete impression of what entices players towards a game.
Multiple genres like RTS, MOBA, Open world, “soulslike” or Battle Royale have seen an influx of “other devs that notice a trend and try to recreate it”.
Except 90% of the time, the imitations are never as good as the original. RTS: StarCraft and Warcraft took over. MOBA: DotA and LoL took over. Souslike: Dark Souls is still king and Hollow Knight is a worthy contender but then what?
TL;DR: some devs just try to ride “trends” but fail because they’re not able to recreate or acknowledge every factor that led to a game’s success. They only see one part of the picture, “the genre part”.
Skyrim took two of my teenage years and maybe one of the reason I'm still broke. But being Dovah-Kiin is totally worth it!
WOW! 1.7 million views, but only 28.5k subscribers. I just subscribed. Thank you for sharing! A+
Playing Skyrim was just one of the best experiences I've ever had, only Elden Ring and Zelda Breath of the Wild made me feel like I was playing Skyrim
Skyrim is just perfect in it's exploration, there is just beautiful landscapes and every place you look at could be a painting or a photo, it all just looks amazing, and everywhere you go there's missions and things to do in the world, sometimes things you don't even expect to be there
I still spend hours and hours on Skyrim once a year, it always makes me addicted again, the game is just too good
Beutiful open world with tons to do in every corner is technically true for 99% of open worlds, so something else about "tons to do" is the reason some are better than others. Maybe about the way the vibe of the world is crafted, some settings lack consice direction or are just a bit overdone at this point. Also believable characters make the world itself more alive, as if they do exist even if you're not there. Plus, if you can see through the game and notice spawning formulas it's gonna get stale fast. Some variaty of the encounters, too, not everything you come across should be a fight.
You can do everything in Skyrim? The main interaction with the world is killing. Each guilds missions are go there and slaughter your way until you teach or get X. Skyrim magic last 4 hours, then the onlything of value is to go see the sights of the world.
agree but too bad that is dumbed down in every way from the predecessors
Morrowind was much better but the pacing does not hold up today and you missed the best game in the elders scrolls series.
Skyrim is a watered down repetitive game imo
Kingdom Come Deliverance is another great open-world game. It has a great main quest, the best side quests in a game I've ever seen, and a believable world, that feels alive.
So I recommend you to play this if you're wondering what to play next.
on the list!
@@Exiled7 Its a slow burner, but it grows on you SO much if you just keep playing it. Amazing game.
shyte combat and gameplay though
@@MilkShaikh No it gets so much better as it would if you tried to learn it in real life, with time. You need to level up and understand how it works imo.
Yeah, I actually had a good time playing that game for a bit, while everybody was crapping on it. I kinda wanna go back and finish it. Was charming in a way lol
Loved the video and great work and Im currently playing Skyrim. But I love Horizon and it is an amazing world.
This is absolutely true. I am 31 and have been married for almost 10 years. I also work 6 days a week at around 70 hours. I really only get 30 minutes or an hour and a 1/2 of game time for the whole week on most occasions. Usually if I play. It's with my friends so I can have some bro time and catch up with them. Starfield is a perfect example of losing my interest immediately and then me realizing. Why am I playing when I have other things to do?
Nooooo, dude, you are wrong! The game gotta be 250h to complete and you need to finish it 10 times to understand something! Shame on you!
There is another approach a bit forgotten I have to say, but still amazing, The Pirahna Bytes approach, Gothic 1 and 2 games were masterpieces of open worlds, but their approach is way different. There was a time when power-creep was a means to explore the world further. The Isle of Khorinis in Gothic was a place fraught with danger, "Don't stray into the woods" was not a taunt, but a real warning. Because Gothic was a game from before enemy scaling, every part of the world was designed for it's specific time in the story. There's places inhabited by things that can1-shot you just by giving you a stare, and it's not like they're in some far away place, this was an open world pot-marked with these areas, and this creates fear, it creates a real sense that some places ain't a joke. As you progressed power-creep gave you the replay value through re-exploration of the world and a lot of satisfaction by being able to see what was once denied to you, not by some invisible wall, not some plot hook, locked door, or developer decision, but by your sheer fear and reservation from entering there.
Yes, Gothic 1&2 had a very fun and well designed world. It gave player the possibility to explore the map while running away from monsters who can 1hit you, getting loot, or just go there when you are higher level. Map wasn't too big but dense with content and had some changes every chapter. There was always the sense of being in safety when in the city, and danger when outside, since even simple enemies could hit you pretty hard for the most of the game. Exploration was also quite fun and rewarding. Very well designed overall, considered it came out early 2000s. The game shows that less can be more.
@@rng_stuffIt was often compared with Morrowind, I preferred gothic 2 over Morrowind tbh.
Afterwards, gothic series went downhill with the bugged gothic 3. It had no chance against Oblivion or Witcher 1.
Risen on the other hand, it was a good game
I can agree I never got into Gothic. But I did enjoy the first Risen game
Gothic and Gothic II are to this day one of the best rpgs ever made. The characters, the german original voice acting, the world, the immersion, just great. And also the community added so much.
For me the main reason why a lot of open worlds feel boring, is the busy work.
Man, you are so right in every word you say here! Hands up to your analysis!
I have some bits to add too. On Elden Ring, I think what is genuinely amazing is how the devs don't force you to visit every area. It's perfectly viable that you can beat the game, whilst missing some of the underground and ground level areas. This is insane as some of the areas which could get missed have some awesome content, such as the consecrated snow field, the Haligtree and Moghwyn Palace to name a few but there are others.
In the Ubisoft model everything is sign posted, so whilst they don't force you to go there, you know the areas are there and that throughout the game, there will be quests which will take you there. This isn't a complaint just an interesting observations.
Now on Skyrim, I think the writing for the quests has to be mentioned. Some of the Daedric Prince questlines for example are just mental but easily missed. If you explore, you will be rewarded with something crazy. It's the same for Elden Ring, it could be a weapon, a cool boss or something else.
I liked the Witcher 3 for example but I found the questions marks on the map annoying, and I went to see what they were mainly to just complete them. Sometimes it just wasn't worth it to do so.
Back to the Skyrim method, I remember playing Falliut 3 and having some similar experiences where going off the beaten path was well worth it. The Alien Blaster, the MIRV Nuke Launcher and many other quests, especially the vault ones.
I find with open world games these days, that investing the time to explore isn't worth it. The recent Tears of the Kingdom has done a good job of putting interesting activities and varied things into the open world, far more successfully than BoTW in my opinion.
One last point on Elden Ring, the Souls games have always been known to have a decent online community to help fill in the blanks for the more obscure quests and things, I think Elden Ring continued to lean into that. For some people I can see how that would be frustrating though. For me, it works well and brings a multiplayer element to an open world ARPG which I liked.
Kingdom Come Deliverance
Super underrated game. Henry was a great underdog character to play.
@@richardb8104 It's a great game but deffo not underrated. In fact, given how niche it is compared to major releases, it was actually massively successful with how many copies it sold.
@@luk395311i agree. I still have to start a run in the highest difficulty with permadeath one day.
@@luk395311 why you think it is niche compared to major releases?