Excessive Appeal: Pros and Cons' of Open World

In hindsight, should have titled this thread, "Linear vs Open-World". Que sera.

I get slightly annoyed whenever I hear or read, "Oh my god, this game is going to be open world, that's so awesome!"

I've played a few. Hulk Ultimate Destruction, Prototype, inFAMOUS, superhero games (Spider-Man 2 and 3, Superman Returns), at least five Grand Theft Autos (III, Vice City, San Andreas, IV, and V), Assassin's Creeds' 1-3, Saints Rows 1-4, Red Dead Redemption, Dead Rising, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, etc. Overlord and Dishonored, if you count those. They're sort of "halfway" between open-world and linear - a series of worlds to be traversed freely, with missions to complete at random, but with a designated path, a goal post.

Are there any more significant, open-world titles I'm missing?

I'm no game developer, so forgive me if I'm ignoring the technical challenges uptaken or accomplishments attained by open-world games and their developers. I've simply become increasingly unhappy with open-world style gameplay and its promotion, and with Arkham Knight and the new Legend of Zelda coming out, I see more and more comments like the one I made above. Now here's my rant about what I've disliked about the ones I've played. Skip to the bolded text for the actual point of this thread/Q&A.

Immersion

With the last few open-world games I played, that genre works for games like Grand Theft Auto where you a certified psychopath destined to wreak havoc and horror in your wake, Gameplay and Story Integration at its finest. Sure, you can fly a plane, parachute out, land on a skyscraper, snipe from afar, spawn tanks - you still feel like a part of the city, and not just some superhuman cockroach bricking through the streets and pounding on the unruly. I can buy having the ability to walk around and murder people and fight cops and drive cars. And superhero games, like Ultimate Destruction and Prototype, where your character is either morally ambigous or destructive by nature, and big epic battles happen all the time with plenty of collateral.

But games focused on more heroic characters.... no, not just them, it takes a special breed of character to fit an open-world game. When I'm playing as Alex Mercer, killing people is not a problem. When I'm playing as Batman or Superman, it is. The city must then, automatically, become less "alive" and "flowing" in order to compensate for the collateral damage of my superheroics. There's rarely a "supervillain" game where you can raise hell and not feel totally out-of-character. There's inFAMOUS, which locks you into superheroics once you go down that path, and Prototype, which hits the mark.

There's the matter of quests. It sounds great, "you can do any mission at any time". But sometimes I like to think my Dragonborn would finish helping the Thieve's Guild before he ran with the Brotherhood, or maybe he would, I don't know, stop the dragons from bringing Ragnarok before dealing with the petulant matter of Grelod the Wise, or bothering with some bandit camp along the way. Sometimes, GTA V especially, I don't want to do a quest. GTA has recently given your mission hub a "sleep mode" to turn off missions. Sometimes I want a specific "narrative" to my actions in the game, and I'll jump into a mission that I think will progres naturally from the last. But instead, I've gone from dealing with the mob to being part of some phony cult that my character apparently now believes in. It's a side quest that's just there because it's there. Quests, in an open-world, aren't always organized to flow with the narrative - they're just there to do whenever. If I miss them, I miss them.

You're playing in a gigantic world. Gigantic worlds take time to build. I'm always a little disturbed when I have this excellent execution move that I can use outside, or a counter move QTE pops up, and right in the middle of it, because of the animation, my enemy and I sail through a moving car, a fence, the ground itself, or some other object tears through us - because QTE in a constant, moving environment with generic, civilian AI just doesn't work. You have games like Prototype 2, Hulk, and Saints Row that want you have to these badass moves out in public - but you're stuck with either watching them phase through the environment, or not having them at all. But that's more of an issue of an individual game's design rather than the genre itself. Still, I see this problem frequently in games where QTE is pushed into a huge, open-world gameplay engine.

World Map & Collecting Stuff/Exploration

Often in an open-world game, because you can go "anywhere", you'll have to collect 100 silver pieces to unlock the "silver bandit outfit" which makes your already perpetual notoriety meter, that doesn't decrease unless you actively decrease it, remain at maximum notoriety, or you'll have to go and hunt the mutated super-flies to finish a job in the worst part of town, or maybe you'll have six or seven repetitive dungeons to parkour through. I. Fucking. Hate That. Open-worlds like Assassin's Creed love giving you historical shopping lists.

Whether its "Files" to read up on people, or "Dead Drops", or "data transmissions", or "Blast Shards", or "Riddler Trophies" - I hate exploring open worlds. It doesn't take long, usually after the first 20, to make me realize I'm playing a video game and that the world is autonomous, not reacting when I knock over a fence to collect this or climb all the way up here, blow something up to get to this. My character might not react to a game-changing personal record I find in the game world. They'll react on missions, sure, but out-of-the-storyline, The Reveal that I'm a test tube baby created to throw off government spies goes totally unmentioned.

And then there's the absurdity of collecting stuff in most open worlds, going out of one's way to pick up five or six different animal furs. Here, find this Magic Marker we placed on a moving bus for you to find, and now, collect 100 more of them, scattered in places that only your character would be able to physically reach. You can fly? Well that just means you have to try even harder to collect more things we scattered around the damn city.

Have you ever lost a penny in a New York subway? Ever tried finding it again? No? Congratulations, you're sane. But open-worlds typically want you to find a feather abandoned on a windowcil in the middle of Rome or pick up a radioactive fragment in the middle of a nuclear zone, or find an alembic in a goddamn' wizards tower, or make you locate little superman emblems in Metropolis when gameplay typically involve flying around at mach speed, or make you backtrack through an empty insane asylum to locate little green trophies a criminal mastermind left for you in a vent somewhere.

Boss Battles and Mobility

There's the issue of boss battles. Ultimate Destruction usually had Hulk and his foe quarantined off. It "worked", because I was 12 years old. Prototype 2 was the first open-world I'd ever played where I could fight a boss and not feel claustrophobic, because while my character had super powers that allowed for instant locomotion, wall-crawling etc, the boss had similar powers, and would literally chase me from one end of Manhattan to the next. Saints Row is close, too, but because its like GTA, in that the earlier iterations were fairly down-to-earth. Even Saints Row had bosses that forced you into a room to fight them.

You're given this huge world to play in, but the difficulty you inevitably face is when the game decides to lock you and someone who really doesn't like your face in a room and toss a pair of chainsaws in. That's always bothered me. I don't want to have all these cool locomotion powers only to be confined inside of a bank vault fighting The Shocker or stuck on a pier fighting The Beast, where only my "blow shit up" power is effective. Elder Scrolls and Fallout, as far as I've gotten in either, usually avert this by giving you plenty of "over world" Boss in Mook Clothing to deal with - at least, excusing the caverns, Draugr tombs, and Super Mutant hideouts you have to excavate - and usually allow you to retreat.

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Boss fights, character decisions, world maps, alleged "exploration" and the rewards that come with it - its all rubbed me the wrong way, from Hulk Ultimate Destruction to GTA V. I like "linear" gameplay. Not quite "Final Fantasy XIII" linear, in certain settings, I like "start in Riverwood, then go off to become a mage in Winterhold". That works since Bethesda usually makes you part of some prophecy, or an important, generic figure in history. Other times, when your character has an audible identity or specifically-crafted birth sign or allegiance, not so much.

The fun I get out of open worlds is struggling to maintain coherency. I don't feel the urge to be a taxi driver one moment, and a serial killer the next. I don't want to pancake cop cars with the Batmobile, or help a trapped survivor before getting cut off by a group of inmates joy-riding in a jeep with a machine gun mount and having that survivor die because of crap luck.

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So what are the pros and cons of an open world game, or a series going to "open-world" gameplay?

Pros:

• Exploration
• Large, in-game map
• Unique forms of transportation depending on game
• Plenty to do

Cons:

• Can break immersion
• Mission structure and boss encounters not always the most profound
• Random, generic, or time-based challenges scattered around world
• Inherent graphical issues

edited 9th Jul '14 6:53:56 AM by FOFD

It really does take special circumstances to make an open world work. When I play open world ones, I tend to favor sandboxes where you fully create the character. Take Mountand Blade, for instance. Right from the start you choose your back-story, create the character, and enter the world. You can choose to be good or evil, and there's plenty of targets of opportunity for either side of that coin.

One thing I will say: once you reach mid-game it can be confusing picking what to do next. If it's a sandbox, you're not held down to a storyline or goals. You're free to do what you want, when you want, and you don't necessarily need to conquer the world to have fun.

hmmm....

ive been playing sleeping dogs recently and ive noticed thats a pretty huge dissonance between the gameplay and the story.

story wei is...not really gelling up with how excessively violent he is during gameplay (im pretty sure the majority of those environmental takedowns mutilate the victim for life, if not outright kill them (like sticking their head in an incinerator).

it is kind of breaking my immersion, though i cant find myself caring here, because itsfun (although again, the environmental takedowns make me feel incredibly guilty).

i feel like pointing out how in arkham city, batman cant cause havoc the same way a standard sandbox protagonist can. all the people he hurts are invariably criminals- not necessarily criminals doing something to deserve it mind you- but batmans had a bad day and is kind of slipping down the slippery slope at the time.

When I first played Fallout 3, it was just fucking awesome. I'd never played anything like it before.

I'd always been a big console gamer since I was a little kid, but mostly only Nintendo and Sega. So I missed out on a lot of stuff.

Never really played a game on PC before because I never had one. I finally got my own PC when I heard about Fallout 3.

I still love it, even though New Vegas did it better.

Exactly how does open world "break immersion"? If anything, it helps it along.

This is why I don't get the eastern preference toward linear games. If only they would get out of that trap, maybe eastern games would at least stand equal to western games.

...werent you the guy ranting about how zelda should stick to linear because open world makes those games terrible?

edited 9th Jul '14 8:55:24 AM by Tarsen

The same.

I still don't think Zelda should fully embrace "open world" as typified by Skyrim or Dark Souls, as that would take away development time from the dungeon puzzles.

But I do see the value of open world in games like that, where the overworld takes about 90% priority.

edited 9th Jul '14 9:10:37 AM by WaxingName

Zelda's one franchise that's become defined by its puzzles. It's reasonable to think that in certain circumstances an open world's not necessarily the best thing, but that OVERALL it should be used a lot more.

Though I think the circumstances where Open World's not the best thing are quite common. A game that focuses mainly on the PERSONAL story should remain tight knit and linear. It's when world-building in itself is a big part of the game's point that an open world to explore would be the best.

Hey yeah, the first Legend of Zelda was totally open-world, but back then its "puzzles" were just "Push this one block one space" or "Blast open the center of this one wall."

Open world design just to throw it in there is never a good idea. It bores, and quickly. However, it can be quite engaging with the right amount of attention to detail, or discoveries.

I'm still more partial to more focused design, though.