THP rants about open worlds

1. They waste your time
Technically all games waste your time, that's what they've always done. But open world games waste the player's time like no other genre has done before. Loading screens to enter buildings, loading screens to enter missions, loading screens for fast travelling, pointless unskippable cutscenes, loading screens FOR cutscenes. And if there ISN'T fast travel, then you just have to walk all 3,000 meters over to your next mission, spending 20 minutes of your life doing so because we made the map so incredibly huge for no reason. Plus, you have to worry about things that might get in your way on the map while you're travelling there. Don't forget to pause the game to open the map and mark all the locations you need to go to. Don't forget to pause the game and go through your "checklist" quest log to choose a mission. Don't forget to pause the game and gather all the items and supplies for your weapon crafting. Oh look there's a thousand pointless collectibles on the map, try to find them all for the achievement! You could have just made your world a level selection screen at that point and saved the player all that time.

2. Unsatisfying
How long are open world games? 20 hours at minimum? 100 at the most? It's a huge time commitment, and for what? A story that you're going to have to refresh your memory on because you forgot most of it by the end of the game. Especially if you took a break from it and decided to go back later. The payoff can be good in the end, but what happens if it isn't?

The progression isn't satisfying either. Most open world games do the same barebones skill tree that you level up with skill points. Skill trees are the ILLUSION of satisfying progression. All they do is lock abilities you would normally have behind progression, and that's not fun. I have to progress your game in order to unlock the abilities that allow me to play it the way you intended? No thanks.

The movement and combat in open worlds are extremely unsatisfying as well. Traversal only consists of walking, running, and driving cars or riding horses if you're lucky. You're mostly holding the joystick forward for 10 minutes straight just to reach a point on the map, and most people abuse the fast travel system because getting around open worlds is just that boring. If you're going to make me move around to get to places in your game, then you have to make moving around fun. Traversal should be a game in and of itself!

3. Repetitive

The games and their missions all play out the exact same way. Clear outposts. Do linear dungeon missions. Go on fetch quests for random people. Follow NPCs at a snail's pace. Climb towers to reveal more of the map. Escort characters to different parts of the map. Fight the same bosses for the umpteenth time. It's all the same copy-paste content that is barfed all over the open world, and it's there to give the illusion that there's a lot to do in the game. Spoilers: there isn't a lot to do.

4. Unimmersive

They make the huge mistake of having the open world revolve around the protagonist rather than the other way around. Often, the protagonist seems to be at the center of the entire world and its problems, therefore the world doesn't move on its own, and nothing happens without your own actions. Characters just stand in one spot for hours or days waiting for you to show up and start their side mission. It makes no sense. Instead of making the world feel responsive and alive, it feels dead and uninteresting. An open world should make the world the central focus of the game, and the protagonist should only be a small part of it. But unfortunately, so many of them do the complete opposite.

Another huge mistake open worlds make is what I call the "clean up" model. The more outposts you conquer, the more territory you've claimed from the opposing side. Once you conquer them all, you've "cleaned up" the whole map. But when you clear outposts or dungeons with enemies, they're permanently gone. Enemies never take back territory you claimed, and they never even try to go on the offensive. It just makes the world feel even more dead and even less responsive when your own enemies don't care that you're taking all their land.

Of all the open world games I've played, Far Cry 2 comes the closest to being perfect. It has almost none of these problems, and it's actually really fun to play when you get all the mechanics down.
Meanwhile Far Cry 3 has ALL of the problems I just mentioned.

Mirror's Edge Catalyst and Sonic Frontiers have a few of the issues I mentioned (particularly immersion) but they're fine open worlds by themselves. They have great traversal, they don't force players to follow NPC's or do stealth, and they offer a decent variety of missions and objectives to do without repeating themselves too much.

I stand by everything I previously said about Elden Ring. It's a great game, but it's not a good open world. It recycles so many bosses, environments, enemies, and structures it's comical. Fast travel with loading screens is outright required to get to several places in the game, and even with Torrent, it takes forever to go across the map manually. This game would have been much better if it wasn't open world and spread so thin.

The Yakuza games are fantastic. All of them. But they're so small that idk if I can even call them "open world" in the same sense as something like Elden Ring. It takes 5 minutes tops to run across the whole map, but it's so dense and full of diverse side activities that there's always something to do and get lost and immersed in.

Nuumber 3 is just assassins creed

And Far Cry (3+)
And Middle-Earth
And Elden Ring
And Horizon

For point 1 that's device issue bro

Ah yes, it’s definitely not the game’s fault for purposefully putting in all these loading screen sections rather than making everything seamless despite hardware being more powerful than it’s ever been. Far Cry 2, a game on the PS3, had zero loading screens. There’s no excuse.

wha tbaout m mind craft

Dont fw minecraft inspired games

Not all open-world games are minecraft

idk i dont play Games

You sure do ship games though.

FUСK YOU!!!!!!!!!!

Also Minecraft didn't invent open worlds

i dont play Games

Would you rather play an open world game or a point and click game?

Depends which games we're talking about here.

But for one example, I'd take The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog any day over Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor.

the two newer Zelda games are Ws tho

Find all 200 koroks for jack shit

nobody cares about koroks, its like a negligible part of the game

Then why is it there

what kinda dumbass logic is that