The case against open-world games - Grand Theft Auto set the standard, and video games have been worse off ever since

I've been thinking about this for the last couple of days. Not sure entirely why, it's not like there's anything new in this piece—it's the same argument against open worlds that have been around for years. It's all technically true but that's because it's just an argument of tradeoffs.

I don't gel with the spirit or tone much since it's an argument of tradeoffs, and I remember living through this when the shoe was on the other foot and being linear was somehow inherently worse for reasons of tradeoffs. As someone who loves linear games and feels they result in consistently better experiences, I have to recognize that open world titles can do something similar in ways that linear games can't do it.

Ultimately I think the quality of an open world itself depends on how much a player can and will engage with it. As @babypuncher noted, travel is one of the main components that players engage with the world. The author actually touches upon this in the last paragraph too, there's a key observation in here:

It’s not game devs’ fault that these games are so boring; it’s the design itself that constrains them from focusing the player on the aspects that could really shine. Freedom of movement through a game world is great, in theory, but in practice, players benefit more from clear direction to the core experience rather than having to trudge through 17 identical fetch quests in the hopes that something funny or interesting will finally present itself.

Thinking back to a lot of open world games, especially the Ubisoft ones, this really rings true. The game world is effectively dead outside of prescribed activities. As much as I really enjoyed Far Cry 3 and Assassin's Creed Origins, their followups have lacked the same appeal simply because the novelty is gone and the checklist style of gameplay is felt. I'm replaying Far Cry 3 after not really enjoying 4, 5, or 6 all that much to see if I could recapture what was interesting about it... and I'm finding myself not enjoying it like the rest of them. The problem is that there's nothing really to do on this tropical paradise beyond just shooting enemies that keep showing up as I go from A to B. Sure, there are other activities but they're all the same kind of activities so

I'm basically just picking if I want to do Activity A, B, or C at any given moment based on what I feel like doing, and then travelling to that destination while keeping my eyes more on the minimap for herbs than I am on the road. I'm not driving, I'm just biding time and resource gathering as I travel. What little exploration I can do is really in service of another activity. There's a diamond chest in this small ruin, find the entrance, and get your shinies. Cool.

But at no point do I find myself simply enjoying the world. Every time I try, here's some enemies rolling by to instigate a shootout. There's no sense of discovery since everything is marked and delivered to me already via the map. The most unique experiences really are the story missions, and then the question I have is if it was worth having an open world at all when all the best parts of these games are the linear bits, and my entire playtime is boiling down to searching for linear experiences and minimizing the time spent in the open world.

I'm thinking back to my experiences with the weirdly contentious Witcher 3 and wondering what it is that made me have a great time in it even though many other people find it as rote and dry as another Ubisoft open world. I think it was a combination of things I set before I started, and didn't really put much thought into at the time since I was excited to have a new graphics card that could max out the graphics at a 60 fps average and wanted maximum immersion:

• used mods to disable the HUD and minimap
• set the game to the hardest difficulty
• didn't use fast travel

And I had a great time in Witcher 3's world. On paper, so much of it should have been similar to the AC or FC games but something felt different. Traversing the wilds was fraught because monsters lived in certain areas and biomes, and I didn't know if I would trip into a pack of wolves, or find a bounty well beyond my level. With the heightened combat difficulty, rolling and Quen weren't instant-win mechanics like I've heard they are on lower difficulties, so it required building a familiarity and comfort with the combat mechanics, including potions and oils. Without the minimap, I had to keep my eyes on the road, fields, and trees ahead to see what was lurking in the distance. Tripping over all the small quests in the wilds felt more natural, and the ones that turned out to entire hidden sidequests ended up being extremely memorable gaming experiences. The villagers stayed around town and were mostly not interactable but the regularity with which you could interact with towns smoothed that out: message boards for hunts; merchants, blacksmiths, and vendors in the market areas; bartenders and Gwent gamblers in the pubs. Going into a town in a medieval setting, especially one filled with bandits, monsters, and soldiers, really felt like the reprieve it should have.

Such minor changes, snowballing into what almost feels like a fundamental difference. But it isn't one! It's just a matter of some tweaks in settings and an experience in an open world can be transformed significantly. That said, I'm not sure if it's possible to turn those AC and FC games into an experience like Witcher 3 with the settings I had because there are a few key differences (monster biomes vs. enemies spawning around you, primarily), but from a developmental and critical standpoint, this is effectively what I know to look for when I approach a new open world game.

I've actually been replaying the original 3D GTA titles over the past few months of pandemic living, just to relive the experience of the games but with some modern QoL improvements (shoutout to Abysswalker's "Definitive Edition" mod packs on Steam for these titles, which have proven to be a more true "definitive edition" than the recent official re-release). And they really hold up just fine as open world games. Going through the world in each of these games is still a lot of fun, and there's plenty to explore and find still. What I found held up well from these games is how much they let the worlds just be, despite the player. You can stand on any corner in these games and watch life go by. The city is bustling, there are all kinds of people and cars passing by, and different neighbourhoods bring different vibes, attitudes, and people. In these GTA cities, it's easy to know and understand when you're in a new district or a new neighbourhood of a new and unfamiliar city, similar to how it can be when you visit a new city in real life.

These worlds still feel alive, and don't necessarily feel like they need to revolve around the player. Really, the player is the real interloper in these worlds and GTA is really a power fantasy in this way. Importantly, the feeling I got was that all the carnage and destruction you can cause in these games wouldn't be nearly as impactful and interesting if the world didn't feel so alive. Far too much ink has been spilled about the nature of GTA violence specifically, and I really think it's something that would not make sense if it weren't for the artistry that went into making the world feel alive.

And when I went back and tried Saints Row, I felt this difference pretty heavily. The Saints Rows worlds feel so much more dead than the GTA ones. Even though they have a lot of similar features on paper, I can't stand on a corner and feel like the world is passing me by. They're less dense, nobody is really interacting all that much, and there's no distinct neighbourhoods beyond which gang is found where. Even in terms of exploration, there's somehow less to discover and find than in the GTA cities, which are much more densely detailed (moreso as the games went on). Ultimately, the Saints Row games, though still enjoyable and fun, don't really engage me in the same way as the GTA titles. In terms of the open world, I remember so much of the worlds of the GTA games but almost nothing about the Saints Row cities as a result.

I can understand why GTA3 and VC lit an absolute fire under the games industry and the quest for open world gameplay. It was a world that felt alive for once, and that's what so many open world games don't nail down well at all. An alive world is inherently engaging, and activities and things to do in them are truly secondary. Sometimes even tertiary in notable cases.

I think the best open world video game experience I've had, or at least the one that lives in my head the most, are the STALKER games (Shadow of Chernobyl or Call of Pripyat specifically). The ALife engine for the AI is nothing short of incredible, something Bethesda should have targeted and prioritized ten years ago to really elevate their open world games. Every enemy creature and NPC had its own schedule, goals, motivations, and more, and would live their lives despite you. You could stand still for 10 hours, and the game world would travel around, interact, and change without any intervention required. These games are set in otherwise barren, post-apocalyptic wasteland with sparse life, but had realistic gameplay especially in regards to combat. It's a wonderful confluence of a strange, alien world that's convincingly alive, but grounded in realism so that navigation and survival is innate to the player, and the Breath of the Wild-like systematic approach to gameplay meant that anything and everything you did had the same stakes all the way through. Walking from one town to another on a fetch quest could be just as treacherous as doing it on a story quest.

Since I brought it up, I would be amiss to not mention BotW in regards to open world games that are alive and engaging. And it's also a bit controversial in this way since many find the world barren or empty, with not much to discover—and other people feel the opposite. I find this one to be an interesting test case for my own preferences and biases since BotW is supposed to be empty and barren with nothing to do but combat and puzzle dungeons. They're rote activities. But it's surprisingly engaging because it offers you nothing but freedom to do whatever you like in an otherwise dead and largely empty world, and whatever you like includes some highly complex interactions between items you can use and items in the world. I find it interesting to test my personal preferences because I usually dislike freeform sandbox style games. Minecraft, endless survival games, even just messing around in GTA Online with no objectives—none of this is for me, honestly. I like having structure and form to my video games and BotW lacks a lot of it in traditional senses. And yet I felt rather engaged with the world because there was so much I could do and in it. The BotW GDC talk goes into a lot of detail from many of the devs on the main aspects and designs of the game that go almost entirely unnoticed but very much felt.

BotW is an outlier specifically because its world does not feel alive for the most part, and the appealing part of exploring its world is when you do find life after all. I think this is the interesting triumph of the game: it lets you do whatever because nothing should matter in a dead world, until you discover there is still life surviving. Towns still exist, animals are plentiful, and the forest sprites are gathering again. Link has arrived in a crucial moment where he can put an end to the cancer that has been stifling the world, allowing for life to come back. It's an engaging theme played out only through the feel of the world and nothing else, really, and it's a good substitute for an "alive" world: a purposeful world.

To cap this off, I encourage everyone to think about an open world game you enjoyed and try to figure out what it was about that open world that pulled you in so much. I'm sure everyone has a subset or type of open world that they enjoy. "Open world games" is such a vague and non-descriptive term for so many different sorts of games and experiences. Some people prefer the Ubisoft style approach, other people want the opposite and want no rules or structure. Dismissing the entire concept is a cheat code to lock one's self out of some truly unique experiences.