This is why I wish linear/act structures games would make a comeback
They care more about putting a dumb whatever the heck on some random ass mountain with nothing else on it and boring exploration so you can claim your game is “an open world xxx% bigger than Skyrim/red dead redemption/etc”
Red dead is one of the only games I think does open world well because the story was still linear and had acts. You could have just released the prologue and the valentine area as early access and people would have tested everything out and have fun with it. Similar with bg3 and act 1.
The other one is genshin impact actually, but that game is live service and released the world in parts. So each part of the world feels like it has meaningful exploration since there’s more than just a korok on this random ass mountain. There will be at least 5 puzzles, the zones have their own stories, quests, and plot lines, and doing that let’s you explore a good majority of the zone. If you were to speed rush the msq on a lot of these open world games you would only really explore 10% of the world.
The older I get the more I hate these open world games. They feel directionless. In terms of world building the newest (open world) pokemon game was easily the worst. The gym leaders and rival gangs had no agency wnd very little personality and impact because you could “defeat them in any order*” (*not really)
When I saw the Witcher 1 remake was not going to be linear anymore I pretty much lost all interest in it.
Yeah, there are tons of games that are open world that probably shouldn’t be. I don’t know that I would champion RDR2 though. For as many systems as they put into the game for the open world, the meat that I was there for was the story, where they forbid me from getting creative with any of those systems at all, so it really took the wind out of my sails.
This is why I wish linear/act structures games would make a comeback
They care more about putting a dumb whatever the heck on some random ass mountain with nothing else on it and boring exploration so you can claim your game is “an open world xxx% bigger than Skyrim/red dead redemption/etc”
Red dead is one of the only games I think does open world well because the story was still linear and had acts. You could have just released the prologue and the valentine area as early access and people would have tested everything out and have fun with it. Similar with bg3 and act 1.
The other one is genshin impact actually, but that game is live service and released the world in parts. So each part of the world feels like it has meaningful exploration since there’s more than just a korok on this random ass mountain. There will be at least 5 puzzles, the zones have their own stories, quests, and plot lines, and doing that let’s you explore a good majority of the zone. If you were to speed rush the msq on a lot of these open world games you would only really explore 10% of the world.
The older I get the more I hate these open world games. They feel directionless. In terms of world building the newest (open world) pokemon game was easily the worst. The gym leaders and rival gangs had no agency wnd very little personality and impact because you could “defeat them in any order*” (*not really)
When I saw the Witcher 1 remake was not going to be linear anymore I pretty much lost all interest in it.
Yeah, there are tons of games that are open world that probably shouldn’t be. I don’t know that I would champion RDR2 though. For as many systems as they put into the game for the open world, the meat that I was there for was the story, where they forbid me from getting creative with any of those systems at all, so it really took the wind out of my sails.