Are open world games a bit boring now?

[Bhazor]

The worst part of the bloat is you don't bother actually looking at the scenary, which is incredible when you force yourself to stop and look, you're just running from ? to ?.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

That's a problem I had with both GTA 5 and Horizon Zero Dawn. In all the many hours I played them, I never really learned the lay of the land. I'd just place a marker and follow the compass. Compare this to the PS2 GTA games, which I know like the back of my hand (I'm not proud of myself).

[mobias]

nah, witcher 3 and skyrim are the best games I've ever played and I've just started witcher 3 again because its so great.

I've completed three play throughs of Witcher 3 and loved it each time. I definitely agree about the criticisms of the convoluted RPG elements and repetitiveness of the contracts and side quests.

Keep the difficulty level low and just soak in the story, characters and marvel at the beauty of the game world is my advice for a fulfilling Witcher 3 experience.

[Consignia]

That's a problem I had with both GTA 5 and Horizon Zero Dawn. In all the many hours I played them, I never really learned the lay of the land. I'd just place a marker and follow the compass. Compare this to the PS2 GTA games, which I know like the back of my hand (I'm not proud of myself).

Totally this. I've been playing Spiderman recently, and it's great fun swinging between all the buildings. But the map is so vast with lots of dots on it. I have literally no idea were everything is relative to anything else. Is Doctor Octopus's lab North or South Manhattan? I have no idea, but I need to be there once every few missions and just follow the icon.

GTA PS2 is the perfect example, not sure about San Andreas, but Liberty City and Vice City were small enough to really let you get to know them.

[colacentral]

I don't get the appeal of pissing about in GTA at all - once you've done it for ten minutes, what else is there to it? I see adults online pissing themselves laughing at themselves blowing things up, but it's something everyone has already seen and done a million times.

The main appeal of open world games to me is just as a virtual walking simulator. In that sense I did enjoy exploring GTA 5 for a bit as it looked stunning and had nice, varied terrain. I also enjoyed BotW for the same reason, particularly as it was designed with verticality in mind, meaning the views are always stunning, and there are always things to find both by getting up high and getting down low.

It's just the idea of finding hilarity in killing NPCs after more than the first time doing it that I find perplexing. The Bethesda games are more satisfying for that because they place limits on your ability to do it - most NPCs stay dead; being seen killing someone will make you at least temporarily wanted, etc. It makes the world feel more real, and by tying consequences to your actions it makes those actions more exciting; as opposed to killing wave after wave of faceless NPCs in GTA, which is completely mindless.

[Consignia]

Breath of the Wild IIRC doesn't fill your map with dots to look at either, and you have to do a fair bit of traversal, even with fast travel. I think that's what makes it better than some of other open world games. It feels rewarding and not overbearing to exist in.

[QDRPHNC]

I don't get the appeal of pissing about in GTA at all - once you've done it for ten minutes, what else is there to it? I see adults online pissing themselves laughing at themselves blowing things up, but it's something everyone has already seen and done a million times.

Back when I had GTA5, I used to enjoy cheating myself a helicopter and cruising around in first person view. It was quite relaxing. And when I got bored of that I would rain hot steel death on innocent people until I got exploded.

[Mister Six]

The GTA games are contradictions to their very core!!!!!!

Ostensibly they're these open-world try-anything total-freedom sandbox games. But the mission design is the very opposite - they're absurdly tightly scripted, and the minute you go beyond a very tight set of parameters, you fail, often without warning.

This latter point is exactly why I'm not going to buy GTA or RDR games first-hand unless I learn they've dramatically rethought their mission design. They're almost exactly the opposite of the far more satisfying Just Cause games, which give you a bunch of tools and some rough mission plans and then more or less let you do it your way.

Every mission that's not a cover shooter or a race (and even the races are scripted, with special events and rubber-banded opponents) is like a tutorial for itself. Press X to do this sotuation-specific thing, press square to trigger the next animation. And nothing you do will ever be revisited anywhere else in the game. They'ree like QTEs without the Q.

[Bhazor]

I will say GTA 4 and 5 might be two of the most over rated games of all time from a design perspective. A baffling obsession with commutes where you don't just start a mission you have to go to one way point to accept the mission then a second waypoint for a cutscene of you saying "lets go do this mission", then go to a third way point where you'll shoot guns for about 3 minutes before having to drive to the final way point. GTA 5 taking it to even more ridiculous levels with its "heist setups" which involves some of the stupidest busywork in gaming. Terrible writing where characters who are supposedly in a story of redemption will just start gunning down hundreds of cops a couple hours later.

I don't get the appeal of pissing about in GTA at all - once you've done it for ten minutes, what else is there to it? I see adults online pissing themselves laughing at themselves blowing things up, but it's something everyone has already seen and done a million times.

I feel the same about Just Cause. A game all about explosions and chaos but a game so piss easy its like a Winamp visualiser. Just swirls of colour while you zone out and think about other things like how good Red Faction: Guerilla is.

[popcorn]

I have raised all of these GTA arguments with my Rockstar employee friend, and he just says "but they made a billion dollars in the first week". He is also a miserable broken-down cog in a giant crunch machine. So there you go.

GTAV is a technical marvel but an abysmal game. Some memorably appalling writing.

[Mister Six]

I feel the same about Just Cause. A game all about explosions and chaos but a game so piss easy its like a Winamp visualiser. Just swirls of colour while you zone out

That's precisely why I like it though. It's like meditation.

[The Lion King]

The GTA games were always great at the very beginning when all the missions were pretty low stakes, go get some drug money off a guy and if he plays up then send him a message with a baseball bat. You might be able to buy a gun, but just a pistol and be careful with your ammo. Gta5 descends into huge gun fights with cops and 1000gang members way too quickly. I agree with the point of the huge maps contributing to losing your sense of place, but I thought San Andreas was good for this. Grove Street really felt like home for a good period of the game and I liked how you usually had to return there after missions.

Fast travel is a necessary feature for games like the witcher but it doesn't help the immersion at all. I managed skyrim with no fast travel but got sick of walking about in the witcher

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Grove Street really felt like home for a good period of the game and I liked how you usually had to return there after missions.

The design of it also helped a lot. A distinctive looking cul de sac with a bunch of easily recognisable landmarks nearby, so as you venture out, you just naturally pick up on the layout of the map. Folk might complain about the linear missions, but I think they also help with getting your bearings. By the time you're about to be exiled from Los Santos, you're already familiar with it and ready to repeat the process with the countryside, then San Fierro and so on.

I feel a San Andreas replay might be in order.

[Bhazor]

San Andreas was great. Probably my favourite GTA sandbox. Getting the balance between size and content where every nook felt designed. Not like in GTA V where they added giant slabs of fuck all or places that only exist for a single mission. Just look at the size of Mount Chiliad.



(warning big ass picture)

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Yeah. The older San Andreas isn't actually all that big when you see it in its entirety, but it seems bigger than it is because it's so intricately designed. It has that in common with Bloodborne.

[biggytitbo]

San Andrea's does have huge swathes of countryside you have to traverse though doesn't it? And no quick travel function.

[Mister Six]

Original flavour San Andreas isn't that big, but uses fogging and perspective tricks (and twisty-turny roads) to make the map seem larger than it is.

I'd disagree that the update is that bad, and I certainly think that the city feels meticulously designed and crafted - loads of unique buildings and lived-in details. But it does suffer from having big swathes of nothing, and too much is concentrated in smaller areas. I'd have loved a second city instead of Chilliad, but I imagine the game would still be being made now if they'd gone for that...

[biggytitbo]

The best thing about San Andreas is you can steal a giant dildo from the police station and beat people to death with it.

[mobias]

I wish Rockstar would ditch the island in the middle of nowhere approach to the map design. I've always found it really immersion breaking. Liberty City was just basically a huge pontoon in the middle of the ocean. Southern San Andreas in GTAV was nothing like Southern California and more more like a bit of New Zealand. The fact that you can fly around kind of makes it a bit of a necessity I guess but I'd much rather they put up hidden walls and just not let you go beyond them. It would look way better and make you feel you were part of a much bigger world.

[Zetetic]

Keep the difficulty level low

Because the levelling mechanics are miserable and pointless.

It's a shame, because the fighting (and the preparation) can feel quite good.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I wish Rockstar would ditch the island in the middle of nowhere approach to the map design. I've always found it really immersion breaking. Liberty City was just basically a huge pontoon in the middle of the ocean. Southern San Andreas in GTAV was nothing like Southern California and more more like a bit of New Zealand. The fact that you can fly around kind of makes it a bit of a necessity I guess but I'd much rather they put up hidden walls and just not let you go beyond them. It would look way better and make you feel you were part of a much bigger world.

After San Andreas, I wanted them to make a GTA USA, combining all the PS2 games' cities and a few new ones, all linked up with countryside.
The moon on a stick would also be nice.

[Brundle-Fly]

As I'm a very casual gamer and completely out of touch with what's out there, I'm having a ball with the open world games. It's like I've just discovered contemporary hip-hop after only enjoying the Sugarhill Gang (the Atari) and Snoop Dogg (Sega)

[Mister Six]

After San Andreas, I wanted them to make a GTA USA, combining all the PS2 games' cities and a few new ones, all linked up with countryside.
The moon on a stick would also be nice.

I quite liked the idea of a map with Vice City, a New Orleans-like city, some swampland and a Disney World parody. Maybe a Kentucky-type mining town in some distant hills too. (And a stick you could drive up to get to the moon.) Since that came from me it's unlikely to happen, but Rockstar is free to have it

A mate of mine who worked for Rockstar Leeds said that at one point they were considering a New Orleans type city - among many other ideas - for a possible original DS "X City Stories" game. But then they ended up being pulled into a port of Bully or something.

[mobias]

The very few rumours I've heard about GTAVI circling around is that its going back to a San Andreas multiple city type map and my guess would be San Fransisco and Las Vegas being two of the locations.

[biggytitbo]

I heard Skegness and Cleethorpes.

[Ferris]

I was working in a shit second-hand games shop when San Andreas came out.

Popcorn - I really enjoyed that read, nice piece. I also spent my youth working in an odd shop buying/selling mad things from slightly mad people though so it's a nostalgia hit for me.

To contribute to the thread - open world has sort of turned milling about and doing nothing into content. It must be profitable, because you could spend hours in Skyrim and never actually achieve anything. If the world is well built, I love 'em. I do crave the odd well-curated storyline (and I think that balance is what Far Cry 5 was trying to do), but it means when a satisfying story beat lands in an open world game, it's my story beat. Gives it more weight.

Maybe, I dunno.

@titbo - you've mentioned Watchdogs 2 a few times. I thought the first one was a bit shit. Is the 2nd one really that good? Should I make the investment? I have an open spot on my games roster at the moment.

[falafel]

I wish Rockstar would ditch the island in the middle of nowhere approach to the map design. I've always found it really immersion breaking. Liberty City was just basically a huge pontoon in the middle of the ocean. Southern San Andreas in GTAV was nothing like Southern California and more more like a bit of New Zealand. The fact that you can fly around kind of makes it a bit of a necessity I guess but I'd much rather they put up hidden walls and just not let you go beyond them. It would look way better and make you feel you were part of a much bigger world.

Or... Some sort of procedural generation outside the main world with an option to warp back to the edge of the main map or something?

[biggytitbo]

@titbo - you've mentioned Watchdogs 2 a few times. I thought the first one was a bit shit. Is the 2nd one really that good? Should I make the investment? I have an open spot on my games roster at the moment.

I didn't mind the first one but yes, 2 is a lot better. It has an almost Nintendo esque playfulness to it, everything is designed to extract the most fun out of the game mechanics, and it gives you so many toys to play with. The story and protagonists are much more likeable too.

[Ferris]

I didn't mind the first one but yes, 2 is a lot better. It has an almost Nintendo esque playfulness to it, everything is designed to extract the most fun out of the game mechanics, and it gives you so many toys to play with. The story and protagonists are much more likeable too.

Noted, and under consideration. Thanks!

[Bazooka]

Even though they fucked up the morality options of Fallout 4, Bethesda has remained the developer of note for open world gaming, will see what comes next.