I always go into open world games super excited to explore, but I normally quickly realize that 90% of the map is absolutely empty and exploration was never really the devs priority in the first place...
If the game has a quest marker like most do, they don't care about exploration. Nothing kills exploration like being told exactly where to go all the time.
I personally like the fact that in rdr2, you're just part of the world and that's it, the world doesn't revolve around you, and it makes it feel much livelier and basically revives the era it portrays and for me that is what actually makes it an open world game
The one thing i think that could have been improved would be to have a better integration between the camp and open world activities and the story missions. Instead of them being prerequisites for progressing the story, have the camp morale not only affect the odd dialogue choices, but combat ability of the gang, and maybe some alternative outcomes within the bigger heists (things that go wrong and stuff).
@@galumir that could work but rockstar made it the Dutch way it is making money how ever you can to help the camp "supposedly " and we make side missions to make more money to supposedly help the camp
All that "aiding the camp" is does unfortunately is rise your honor a bit and filling the various needs nets you a higher passive income via the gang (though that is in the 10s of dollars at most over a week, so hardly any use when you get much more via missions anyways).
@@galumir They should have seasons that slowly change to show actual changes and also use more realistic physics like a game called Phsyicus where you actually had to solve some scientific problems which you had access to knowledge if you didn't know how to do like learning the boiling point of water.
My 2¢: The core idea of open world has always been "I want to see what's on the other side of that mountain over there" - but that's not a genre, it's a setting. You can use that setting as the basis of an exploration/"adventure" game (Outer Wilds), an RPG (Skyrim), a platformer (Super Mario Odyssey), or even a puzzle game (The Pathless), but "open world" is not the genre by itself. It may simply be the case that trying to judge all these disparate titles by the same standard is always going to leave us disappointed in one game or another, no matter how you slice it. At the same time, you make a valid point: Why bother setting something in an open world if the average player is just going to ignore it? The choice of setting is still a fundamental part of the design process, and developers would do well to seriously consider how an open world could interact with their core gameplay loop(s), as well as whether it's really worth the substantial time and effort which it takes to create such a huge playable area.
yeah agreed. for me open world is mainly just a game that isn't bound by level walls and a set path. Sometimes playing a non open world game i wonder whats on the other side of that wall or what if i went down the other hallway instead, and an open world just has to be a normal game with the freedom to take a little walk just to scratch that itch. though it does get bonus points for having interesting stuff, im not particularly expecting an immersive world where everything is interactable with our current level of technology.
@NYKevin100 Very good comment! Especially the first part, I couldn't have said better. As for the second part, I'd say that chosing the open world, at least when it comes to triple A titles, has as much of a marketing value, than it has a game design value. And on the past console generation (PS4/One, the Switch being kind of its own thing) that tried to cut the ties with the PS360 era of corridor spectacle shooters, emphasizing the freedom of movement was a logical progression if we talk design trends. As for: "Why bother setting something in an open world if the average player is just going to ignore it?", I'm not sure how much what most players are going to see is supposed to factor in the game design. Not to make a nitpicky argument, but most player don't play games to completion, and devs still put endings to the stories, final bosses etc. Lead devs should encourage thinking globally about how the open-world re-enforce the qualities and mechanics of the game, sure. But thinking ofgame design in terms of just making things you are sure most players will use is very limiting imho.
@@SebLeCaribou a lot of games aren't finished due to the wealth of side content players are playing, often out if a need to grind or fear it won't be there when they come back later, and not due to the core content going unfinished because there's too much of it. You can play through many 500 hour open world games in the time it takes you to finish a linear and fairly short game like Doom 2016 or Eternal if you focus down the main story, often the thing driving you to side content is grinding levels/gear. And I'm not talking experienced playthroughs, I mean first time playthroughs. This has to do with the fact that the core story of both games results in a similar length due to how the stories are written in most cases. Linear non-open world games tend to have a far higher completion rate, unless they are RPGs with grinding mechanics and gear/level checks. There's actually something in game design circles called the 20 hour rule. Most people will finish a 20 hour game if it is linear. It's when you surpass that when it gets to low completion rates. However, that doesn't seem as appealing for marketing reasons and is a bit restrictive. Instead those first 20 hours are designed to be as fun as possible. The question then becomes: is it worth having something over there very few people won't see if that development time can be better allotted to focusing on ensuring the quality of what most people see being higher. That's a very complex question, but the general wisdom is "if it's more important to the experience the game is trying to give, then focus on that over other aspects when it comes to the icing" For me the question to open world or not becomes "if the act of physically traveling from point A to B, in a free and open way, adds something to the intended experience or not, or does it detract from the experience of this particular game, and is really there because it's a trend or a marketing thing?". I like to say, if an open world game loses nothing but scenery and "exploration" by adding fast travel, the open world is not being leveraged to the advantage of the game. Fast travel is an opt out mechanic. You are using it to opt out of the travel. If the majority of people are going to find opting out of an aspect of your game when they are aware of it desirable when they got time to interact with that aspect, then that thing likely isn't worth having in the game. A good use of open world is finding new ways to travel through the same area, of the experience of crossing the world on your chosen path being about the challenges you faced along the way before you ever reached a destination, regardless of how much exploration I did on the way. I like to say Skyrim is two games at odds, and it illustrates a game that does and doesn't benefit from open world. The first is a game about fighting against the return of dragons and the imminent destruction of the world as the chosen one. The second is a game about going on am adventure, joining factions, acting as a mercenary for those with work, and completely quests. The game about dragons doesn't benefit from the open world, instead it's detracted by it. It's a sequence of linear levels with a load screen you hold a walk button through, and if you were to go off and do something else, well we're apparently on a time crunch here, the Dragonborn leaving to complete 5 side faction quest lines, clear dozens of dungeons, build a house, start a family, collect a dozen or so ancient masks, and become the chosen of several daedric princes means that apocalyptic dragon threat seems pretty minor, as it takes the fangs out of that story about imminent destruction. Meanwhile the game about being an adventurer, exploring, and doing all that side stuff does benefit from the open world. A main quest that suited such would be something about leaving home, arriving in a strange land, or just trying to make a name for yourself as you meet various characters and prove yourself to them. Something that's inherently more open ended, perhaps with a vague goal like "somewhere out there is the answer to the question of where did the dragons go and why are they back?" Without any chosen one nonsense or imminent disaster. That second game is what Skyrim is famous for. That first one is... Well Skyrim main quest which people famously brag about not playing because it's so pointless. The main quest detracts from the game, and the game detracts from the main quest. So when does a main quest and open world together serve the betterment of a game? Most Zelda games actually. Even before breath of the wild these games were often open world, just without as much side content in most cases. The open world created an area that made the world feel worth saving. You felt the evil of the big bad, not from his story influence but from the way he made the world more dangerous to travel through. You got to know, learn, and unlock ever faster ways to navigate the terrain. You'd dart around, sometimes seeing the same place dozens of times as you past it to different destinations. The world slowly advances, and while there's minimal side content to do, there's just enough it feels as if you can spare time to do it in passing. It fleshes out the world the main quest has you saving, as you're forced to travel through it. It makes it seem like a world. Having an open world makes the stakes tangible, and having a main quest makes it feel you have a significant part in that world. Open world games a lot of work. They shouldn't be made unless that work is beneficial to the goals of that particular game. Not every world needs to be fully realized. Sometimes a story leaves no time for that, sometimes the story of how you ran through a linear series of events is the right call.
I actually always try to NOT progress the main storyline in these games, and get frustrated when side quests themselves can’t be completed unless you progress the main story.
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 Skyrim didn't have this though. You could spend hours wandering into caves and doing weird side-missions without needing to do the main mission. I get that's it's fashionable to hate on Bethesda now, but let's not lie.
@@torchlight1785right? I've played Skyrim for like, 100h on the last months and I don't remember when was the last time I did a single main story quest lol
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 Bethesda games are actually the only ones which allow you to do anything you want without even starting the main quest (besides tutorial). Still, they do put this sense of urgency which the video talks about... they really handled this well in Morrowind, where there was no urgency at start and you felt like a true nobody
The messed up sense of urgency was the worst for me in Dying Light. The other characters are infected and URGENTLY need the antidote. At best they have maybe a day or two left to before people start dying. This stayed the same throughout most of the story, so I always felt like I didn't have any time to engage in side activities. I had to go from story quest to story quest because if I didn't it felt like time would run out and all my allies would die
Oblivion had the same issue. The emperor died, the fate of the entire world depends on you delivering this amulet to his only surviving heir. Oblivion gates are opening across the world and hey wait why are you joining the thieves guild and hunting deer? Skyrim, omg the fate of the world is in your hands. You MUST tell the people of Riverwood about the dragons! Then go over to the Jarl and alert him OMG the greybeards have called you, burial grounds are opening across the world the entire universe is about to be taken over!!!! No time to get drunk and marry that hagraven wtf get back to the blades headquarters and kill Anduin. Meanwhile in Morrowind. Uhh hey, here's this letter. You should deliver it if you want. I mean its the least you can do for us freeing you from prison and all. Feel free to get distracted nothing is really going on yet. Oh hey adventurer, thanks for giving me this letter immediately now gtfo and go join some guilds and explore or something. I don't really have anything else for you to do yet you should get more experience.
My exact problem with yakuza 0, it's not that bad because it's more that the story is so engaging rather than a artificial urgency like dying light, but I always felt bad for doing the awesome side quests because I knew that I had very important things that I should be doing instead
I felt the biggest "load off" the sense of urgency in Breath of the Wild was not only the shift in objective, but the shift from an _active_ world to a _passive_ one. Usually, if you don't rescue Zelda immediately, that comes with something additional that you're trying to _prevent_ (be it greater harm to Zelda herself, or some apocalyptic event). In Breath of the Wild, that damage is already done. Narratively, the world won't get any worse if you _don't_ immediately stop Ganon, so you're implicitly encouraged to take your time to do things right this time. You can even kind of see the difference within the same game with the cases of the Divine Beasts. If you go to Death Mountain, the Gorons face an active crisis with their Beast and worsening eruptions. Their homes and livelihood are under active threat, and once I entered the area, I didn't want to leave until that was resolved. When you leave Death Mountain again, the world is just... as it is, suffering passively, and it's easy to imagine the land getting no better or worse if you left it alone another hundred years.
Strangely this is why I quit playing the game. I felt no urgency or reward for playing it. I will pick it up every few months for a few hours but I’ve been playing it for years and probably only about 60% through it
as you said "save Zelda" sounds like an immediate objective, that is how i played twilight princess for example, you dont know if saving zelda will take 10 hours or 100 hours, while "defeat Ganon" really sounds like "finish the game" which is obviously not something players will want to do immediately after the start of the game, unless they are speed runners
I'd argue save Zelda sounds like the exact same even if I get your point, sort of. That could easily mean finish the game. For all a player cares this could entail doing everything in the game and that could be the ending cutscene.
@@anecro Saving someone always sounds more urgent than defeating an opponent. Defeating an opponent can be a very long term goal, as even though they can commit horrible atrocities in the time you take to do it, you may not be as concerned as say, if someone you love needs rescuing. The stakes become a lot more personal at that point, and you tend to worry more about what could happen if you don't go soon. It's just an inherent part of our brains to worry about our loved ones I find xD.
I’m reminded of one of my first and favorite truly open world games, Morrowind. Technically you could go after the final boss straight off the boat, though you’d have a hard time without either leveling up or using exploits. There was no sense of urgency in the main quest, and you were actually encouraged to go out and adventure, so it felt natural to do so.
That was my first too. Really wish Skyrim had taken more from that structure. Caius actually sending you to the guilds to become an adventurer before leveraging your growing reputation is brilliant storytelling imo, and makes the side quest lines feel legitimately connected to the main plot. In Skyrim, it really feels like the guilds are nothing more than a distraction from the main quest of saving the world. Wouldn't it be nice if we were supposed to seek allies among one or more guilds and then those allies joined us against Alduin?
Caius straight up tells you "go do some side content and explore a bit" very early in the story. It's not even enforced, you can rush through if you want. He actually does this more than once. It's such a small thing that does so much helping to getting immersed in the world.
I was a 10 year old kid with English as a second language when I first played Morrowind. I wouldn't learn SHIT about the story until like 10 years later after actually putting the time and effort in but I still had a lot of fun messing around back then, I should give it a new try. Morrowind's story is DEEP in TES lore, much unlike Skyrim's main quest. I still had my hundreds of hours with Skyrim, but Morrowind definitely dropped you off the boat without a clue as to what to do if you haven't been paying attention. In Skyrim it's simple, follow the quest markers and eventually kill the evil dragon.
As a geologist the best open world I've played is death stranding, despite the rain heavily affecting the soil degradation , its the only game i've seen that the geologic formation actually makes sense and its not only there as a substitute to invisible walls (sorry english is not my first language)
Honestly the intrigue of open worlds is the world itself, the exploration is key to making it work, if the player has a reason to go over every hill and look under every rock because the world itself is Interesting and fun to explore, you've nailed it. Adversely, if you have a large area with very little to actually experience within the world you may as well be playing a standard linear map game with Interactive loading screens (walking from objective to objective)
This! The world itself should be welcoming for the players, to a point that they want to explore. Both extremes are bad that are 1. Shallow world with so called activity to just make the game an open world, 2. Too much focus on side activity to a point where it becomes necessary almost compulsory in order to finish the game.
I agree with this, my issue is it’s really hard to make an open world feel incredible more than one play through. I LOVED elden ring, I’ve played it twice, I’m about 1/3rd through my 3rd playthrough but I’m hit with this feeling of fatigue just going throughout the world this most recent time. This may sound like I’m being hard on the game because it did give me two great play throughs but all of FromSoft’s other games I’ve played over and over again with no feeling of wanting to stop. DS3, Bloodborne, Demons Souls, DS1, they all feel reasonable to start a new file but something about Elden Ring, because it is open world, I feel the fatigue so much harder.
Yes yes yes! Prime examples: Fallout: New Vegas Fallout 4 FNV is a game that makes you WANT to go over to the giant green dino and actually gives you choices and in a vault somewhere there’s a really powerful gun just hiding in a corner, so you want to look in every corner because there may be a cool gun here. Fallout 4 is railroady. You can’t have dynamic dialogue, you can go everywhere and every enemy scales down so that they’re easy as shit and like…that’s not fun. You can go anywhere sure but there’s no reason to do so, it’s all the same random enemies and the same scaled down objects and stuff in safes.
Yes and no. I am I would say driven by 30% challenge 70% immersion in games. Which means exactly a world itself is the biggest pull for me. Ironically I have really enjoyed very few open world games. The world for me nearly always falls apart. Because these games are designed with 5335 different play styles in mind I find myself drawn in by individual sections and then even more disappointed when the section doesn't interact with the rest of the game or worse makes the games world feel fake because it wants to make smth feel threatening but I over leveled on side missions and gameplay of a threatening story feels trivial.
I’d say the Witcher 3 has quite a good open world. There is a lot of stuff off the beaten track and even though the loot system is not a strong point, there is usually a neat little story behind most random encounters or interesting spots. And it’s quite normal to not being able to find everything even a few times through the story. I wouldn’t say it openly encourages exploration as much as it piques your curiosity enough that you go out anyway. Maybe helped by some of the in-game lonely planet guides. The DLC does the rewards a bit better, and really perfects storytelling. Horizon, great as it may be, does feel a bit empty for me. The Fallout Games have quite strong open worlds, so does Skyrim, even if it does suffer from its age.
Personally this has never been a problem because I'm naturally curious about the open world. In rdr2 for example it never bother me that the details don't contribute to the story because it made the world feel alive like it had nothing to do with me and I was just lucky enough to experience it. But yeah i do get the disconnect you would feel if this is not your approach.
Exactly, what I was thinking. I like the fact that in rdr2, you're just part of the world and that's it, the world doesn't revolve around you, and it makes it feel much more lively and basicaly revives the era it portrays
Yeah these sorta videos are ridiculous. In gaming you just take these sort of stuff for granted and go with it. Also, Assassin's Creed has been utter garbage for many years with shit game design and yet these YTers criticize 3 top games of the genre. It's just nitpicking. You can't simply make an open world game as detailed as RDR2 and include the story freedom that this dude wants
Absolutely agree! I felt like one tiny part of a larger world in RDR2 which is exactly how real life is. I loved that not everything had an effect or tied into the main story. To me, that's one of the biggest draws of that game.
Ghost of Tsushima did side quests right, even the smaller ones. Pretty much all side quests revolved around helping people displaced by war, which is the central theme of the game. And some of the core side quests take it a bit further by revealing how the enemy can sometimes be someone close to you.
@@Jim-Bagel Yeah both. But Zelda's world is interesting to explore regardless of side quests' quality, and GoT + all the other ubisoft format games have an inch deep mile wide world, while rarely adding interesting enough stories to offset that
Although not an open-world game, yooka-laylee and the impossible lair does almost exactly what you recommended ghost of tsushima do, you can tackle the final level of yooka-laylee at any point, but it is so difficult that it is almost impossible to beat it without the extra lives you get from completing levels.
Huge fan of Impossible Lair! Having so many necessary puzzles in the over world also helps break up the platforming and tie the levels together into a greater whole
@@FluffehTheSheep The main point of Metroidvanias is that they're NOT open worlds though? Ability-gated exploration is kind of the main feature of games like that?
For games like The Witcher and RDR2 I always create reasons in my head to explore the open world or do side quests. For example, I might think "oh I'll try and go to the top of that mountain to get a good vantage point of the area". Or maybe "I'll do that side quest so that I can make some extra money to feed my horse". Its an easy way to add immersion and give me a reason to explore even when under time pressure by the story.
yeah I remember doing the same in just cause 3 the world of this game was empty and boring , so I would always use my imagination to enjoy the game like imagining an action scene like car chases and ww3 battles etc. of course that was all in the past ,if I did the same thing nowadays I'm sure I'll delete the game after 2 hours of playing
Well in real life you don't get to go single mindedly go do one important thing. The world exists with or without you. The witcher works fantastically because Geralt has his objective but the world is full of people who have their own problems and need his help.
For once, I want the "fight the last boss at the beginning of the game" trope to have weight on the game. If you beat the boss at the beginning, the games story goes on, and maybe the boss survives it, but it changes how the antagonists view you and the entire course of the story as well as how aggressive they are. Could even function as a NG+ mechanic.
@@madraszewskaPL bad example, nobody gives a shit in the game after you beat the boss. Kinda the only drawback from that game for me. I wanted the story to continue but it just stops there.
Ghost of Tsushima: Save your uncle at the castle Razbuten: Ok, I am here Ghost of Tsushima: Ok, but you are facing overwhelming forces Razbuten: That's the best odds I have in years!
I honestly get overwhelmed at "open world" games due to my completionist mindset. I feel like I have to do everything. If they would change the open world aspect I would have way more motivation to do side quests for story reasons. That would be so much more satisfying rather than feeling like I'm checking off another thing on a laundry list of side quests to do.
Yup. I've done one 100% playthrough of Dragon Age: Inquisition and never touched it again. Dragon Age Origins and 2 on the other hand I've played multiple times.
that is how you are supposed to feel. Collectathon is a dead genre, it got shoved into open world node stompers for the purpose of profit. Every game is a reskinned GTA, where you follow the minimap markers and set waypoints or even fast travel, sometimes to places you haven't even been yet. And doing the side quests is sometimes at a detriment to the game. For example, leveling up in The Witcher 3 means the final boss is just going to be significantly easier, thus less fun, and the game's level scaling does not fix that.
Sometimes I feel like we just have to get past the completionist mentality to enjoy these games. The one thing that made me give up on Pokemon games as a kid was the "gotta catch em all" mindset. I don't like drudgery and I don't like people telling me I'm a fake fan because I didn't check everything off a video game checklist. I play games until they stop being fun. Once I let go of being a completionist, games got more fun. I love open world games because I like having free reign and doing what I feel like doing without feeling like I should be doing something else. I like creating a version of the main character in my head and only doing the things that I think my imagined character would do. When people play Skyrim, we don't try to do everything in one playthrough. We play multiple times and go down different paths. Some open world games try to straddle the middle, but I honestly think that they should just lean into saying "you're not _going_ to complete everything in one playthrough and you just have to deal with that."
@@2GoatsInATrenchCoat Sure. You can try to play it your way to have more fun with it but a mor eimportant thing to accept is that games like this are essentially cable TV. They are not the diamonds in the rough they want you to think they are. Some of them might feel like a special experience because of the writing or the message in the story, or the graphics are amazing and the animations seem very human, or the voice acting is top notch but really what happened was they pumped millions, tens of millions of dollars into this thing to make it feel like that, doesn't mean the gameplay is solid, and rarely will they stack up to a real game. I'm sure I may sound biased, but I just judge every game on the same metric, nothing gets a free pass, these games can't stand up to critique and we have to make excuses to like them.
i`ve always loved how morrowind, as part of its main quest, has a character directly tell you to do a bunch of side quests before you continue with your mission
AC valhalla does this too! Well, most of the time the characters say something along the line of "we'll wait at destination until you are ready" But one time (for as far as I've played yet) the PC was explicitly told to not immediately follow for the main quest line but to do some side stuff first.
I use this same technique in every DnD game I run-telling players to basically “go outside and play” leads to the best and silliest quests in the game.
@@dragonhold4 morrowind's main quest slowly builds up urgency, it doesn't just start with you're the chosen one who will do blah blah blah, now go do side quests instead of your main mission. you hear about a prophecy and aren't even sure (obviously it's a game so we know the character is but the actual in game character doesn't) and as you explore the world and do side quests along with the main quest you learn more and more about the prophecy. Morrowind doesn't have level scaling in the same ways the newer elder scrolls games did so you can't just only do the main quest and expect to be powerful enough to progress.
I liked how Enderal handled this by giving you periods where other characters were taking over the Main Quest and told you to do other things in the meantime. Its a simple thing but it gives the player the feeling of "this urgent matter is being handled, but I can take a break from it". That approach would already help a lot with the classic "the world is ending like, tomorrow" kinda story. I do think studios kinda force Open Worlds into their games just because it sells better, so many of them dont gain anything but empty hours of repetetive side quests from having an open world.
Interesting thoughts as always, Raz, but I'm not sure how I feel about trying to push exploration into a more mandatory aspect of progression. It would make sense for some titles, certainly, but a big draw of exploring an open world for some folks is specifically because it is optional and can be picked up or put down at any time. It's nice if a game offers a reward for exploring but I think I'd also get irritated pretty quickly if I instead felt like a game was actively punishing its players for not wandering through enough random forests or some such. If not handled carefully, mandatory exploration could easily turn the joy of discovery into a slog of collect X number of doodads or sprint ten-thousand steps to unlock the next story beat. I doubt many would be satisfied with such a system. Still, there's potential for a better balance with some of the options you've brought up. On the other hand, there is definitely not a one-size-fits-all solution here, either. I suppose in the end it all boils down to case-by-case considerations and game devs putting some serious thought into exactly how they want to present the worlds of their games to their players.
I love exploring, but nothing is worse than feeling finally ready to take on the main story and the realizing you need to do some mandatory exploring first. it makes exploration feel like a grind. I kinda got that feeling in botw (not trying to start discourse, just a personal example). I got sick of seeing shrines and koroks after a while because it felt like I was just grinding items. We should explore because we want to, not because we need 500 more dollars in the camp ledger before we can progress any further
I wish some AAA studio could have the balls to make an open-world game and just fucking drop the player in head first with no direction, no map, no crutches.
I totally agree but I think that a careful balancing of the progression can help there. I hate with all my being the "fetch these 5 things from the furthest corners of the map" missions, because they become not really about exploring but about checking a list, which is mandatory art certain pre-determined points in the story. Instead, the cool thing about the pokemon approach is that you don't need to do anything specific at any specific time, you just need to get to know the environment, in whatever fashion and art whatever pace you want. If you don't want to break the pace of the story, you can also make the two a choice: if you explore more you get *whatever progression item* that lets you (if you so wish) skip certain quests that would require you to find them. That way exploring can provide rewards for whatever objective the player is working on without being mandatory at any point. In a sense, BotW does that by littering the world with shrines both on the "critical path" - i.e. the main roads that lead to the cities and the markers on the map - and in the most remote places of the world, providing enough rewards to beat the game both for those who want to follow the story and those who would just rather climb anything that stands in front of them
As much as I love big sprawling worlds in games (and I love them a *LOT* ), bigger doesn't always mean better. Sometimes it's better to have a smaller map that's chock full of shit than big plains of very little to nothing in between. Yes bigger can have some advantages but they aren't enough nowadays
That's not the point of the video, haha. ^^ That said, i don't entirely agree with you. Space too big and too empty is just as bad as space too stuffed with things. Sometimes, it's good to have empty space. For instance, if a game has a desert area? Well... you'll want to be careful not to put too much there.
God of War does this amazingly. It’s “open world” with a linear story, and the map is very small compared to most open world maps but there’s just so much to do in the map and every part of the map is so full of detail that even doing side dungeons feels like you’re on the main quest. Everything is close together but feels miles and miles apart
I wish I could agree with you but unfortunately Elden Ring proved you wrong. Apparently people value quantity > quality is enough nowadays, and the game simply being bigger than the previous games have already led to people rating it one of the best games they have ever played simply because it lasted over 100 hours. It's pretty sad
I've always wanted a "curated mode" at the difficulty select screen which would just take you through the missions and side missions in the intended order.
Now that you mention it, that would totally work with rockstar games. Like what if they made a “campaign mode” where they get rid of the open world and just play the missions?
I would like that option so I'm not over leveled. Its hard to take anything serious, or even have fun doing early/ mid game stuff i missed with end game world destroying powers.
I think New Vegas has a brilliant open world. Not only do they use thought-out landmarks (like Dinky the Dinosaur) to draw you to where they want you to go, but by following the suggested route of the main quest (which it uses those landmarks for too) you're basically served a tour guide of the setting. You learn who the big players are and what the conflict of the game's about, and by the time you enter the Strip, you are brought up to speed on what will happen going forward.
New Vegas is one of the best games of all time. From the good character development system, the World, the choices in the World, etc... New Vegas is miles better then lets say Witcher.
Rdr2 works here because the missions are presented often without urgency, and its natural to let some days pass inbetween many of the missions. Also many of the sidequest have impact on the gameplay and change the outcome of specific scenes and ways thing happens for Arthur, and makes for interesting conversations, and i think thats somehthing that intrigues alot of players into exploring as much as possible. Partly also because they want to experience the world with Arthur, with all his comments and funny interactions around. Another point is that this is a realistic game, the world doesnt revolve around Arthur, he isnt the chosen one or anything like that. He's just a "normal" guy.
I agree with you for the early chapters particularly 2 & 3. But for me personally, once I got into chapter 4 and the stakes started raising dramatically, it felt wrong (credit to the engaging story) to go on a hunting trip, or help out some random guy get a bunch of moonshine when ***spoilers*** Jack was kidnapped or John in Prison, or Dutch was fuelling a needless war for his own personal gain etc. I didn’t really feel comfortable taking time to do Stranger missions and explore outside of the St Denis Church and debt collection missions until after completing the story 100%
The honor system is also presented beautifully witu ur option directing wether u get high or low honor in a side quest everything jusy happens so naturally
I don't care about "beating" a game, aka following the main story until the end. I want to role play, period. And all the time I take for myself in the open world is what contributes to my personal idea of fun.
Oh, yeah, same! When I played Bully again after a decade, I just want to enjoy myself punching some bullies and getting chased by some prefects and also, for me, I love open-world because it doesn't shove to your face the story that much (maybe some open-world games do but the games that I've played under this genre, doesn't). And it feels like you control the world, you are living in real world in a way where you can control your pace, do something fun or ridiculous. And in Bully, i think managing your time was executed pretty well (you have a clock, and you have a choice if you want to go to class, or do a mission, or do some side quests, etc.) as well as the seasons or holidays, like winters, Christmas and Halloween. Hoping for a remake or remaster from Rockstar Games even though it's highly unlikely.
Well it's interesting that this is basically the complete opposite side of the issue, and also I feel that both you and the video are right, but also wrong, that open world RPGs are made for both of you, but also neither of you. You want exploration, adventure, and no direction. The video author wants direction and a sense of progression. Trying to fit both into one game leaves you with some disagreeable qualities for both parties. You would have much more fun in a game like Subnautica or Outer Wilds. The other person would have much more fun in a game like Bioshock or XCOM 2. These games are just much better at their respective thing than a game that tries to do both.
@@momothewitch I feel like games like skyrim are perfect for role players. The protagonist isnt voiced and you can choose dialogue. You dont have to care about the main storyline at all since your character isnt forcefully portrayed as though he does.
my favorite part of these games IS the mindless running around, completing side quests and collecting random trinkets. so much so, that sometimes i put 100+ hours into a game without ever finishing it.
Same. I've technically never even finished Skyrims main story even though I have 1000's of hours into it. I've done all the other questlines, just never finished the main one, cause I love trying out new characters and builds, and then doing literally everything in the game before the main story.
@@TheOnlyGhxst I think I only completed the main quest once, just for the story. I roleplay all my characters, so no two are the same. I play the same way in most open world games
The problem is that most open worlds games don’t encourage playing like that. It’s still fun, obviously, but a lot of players aren’t going to interact much with it because they’re busy with the story.
Emphasis on the never finishing. I would be ashamed if people saw how much time I put into these games just for me to only make it halfway through the storyline
I feel like urgency can be used as an effective game mechanic if the passage of time has actual consequences and the save system allows the player to rewind to important points.
I think it would interesting in a world that would actively evolve around you and not just in response to you. Something like Shadow of Mordor's nemesis system but even more dynamic.
It is always perfectly okay for a game to design something to be "just for fun" rather than be tied to the plot or contribute to something necessary. Sometimes it's nice to have purpose to your actions, but not everything needs one for it to be enjoyable.
Honestly I prefer it not all being tied to the main plot. Often when playing games I will just finish defeating a boss or a big part in the main quest and I feel like I need a break. I need to just go do something else that doesn’t affect the main story at all.
True, but I think people have different definitions of what's enjoyable. Some like open worlds for the pure fantasy of being there, so frivolous activities build that feeling. But since people I think experience games like a book, so activities that don't matter are like wasted plot threads. Of course, not everyone is all one way or the other, which makes game design tricky.
@@FraserSouris that's not accurate at all. The main story is amazing and focuses on the world around you and it's history as well as how you interact with it. Forcing you to do side quests and interact with other people means that it feels much more natural whenever those people decide to help or hurt you. I hate games, books, and movies where it's just hey this guy's the main character because he's the main character! The "Chosen One" who does nothing to deserve the accolades or ire they receive.
@@FraserSouris It's not about making the side content do heavy lifting, it's about working into the narrative breathing room where the player can reasonably exist and perform activities in the games world without a barely managed or forced sense of constant urgency disrupting the players experience of it.
@@FraserSouris Not really. The main storyline unfolds in pieces where the urgency is never "right now" with a quest marker of "right here," so it never suffers from the weirdness of the main character knowing exactly what they need to be doing and choosing to do other things instead.
I play Open world game for the exploration. I can step into a whole other world and interact with the things within it. The main quest feels more like lore to me. It's there so the world doesn't feel meaningless, but I don't have to focus on it to have fun. It's just living like you are someone else in another world/dimension. That's why open world games like Elden Ring or Skyrim are so much fun!
That might explain why I've never been able to enjoy GTA or RDR despite them being some of the best selling open-world games ever made. Every time I play I outright avoid the story and wander around looking for fun stuff to do and useful items to collect, which works wonderfully in Elden Ring, Skyrim, and Breath of the Wild. But in Rockstar's games... it just makes the world feel empty. There's nothing to progress outside of missions and almost nothing to *do* outside of them, so it feels more like I'm walking around in a diorama than actually playing a game or "living in" their world.
Yes, the exploration is my favourite part, too. They should just forget the story, we can make our own! Also, much prefer games that allow you to create your own character, like Elden Ring and Elder Scrolls.
I would argue that exploration feels better when you know it's not the goal but you are drawn into it without really knowing it. When your sense of curiosity becomes too strong for you to just ignore it, that's when it feels more rewarding. If exploration is the goal it wouldn't feel like you're making your own discovery if it's blatantly the encouraged.
One thing that BotW taught me is that making traversal itself satisfying can make exploring the world more interesting. People complain that Hyrule is too empty because it isn't stuffed to the gills with things like unique bosses, dungeons, weapons, treasure, etc. However, a lot of players don't get that feeling in this game because the simple act of traversing the world via climbing, gliding, shield surfing, etc. is just so fun and satisfying. I think this also helps replay value, as I still enjoy going to areas I've seen before.
i'd not say it's emptyness in the sense of there has to be stuff to distract the player every 15 meters. but it felt empty for me in a way of it was not lived in at all. the same 3 npc or enemy models kind of just walked or sat mindlessly around. the villages felt tiny small. but maybe this was more due to technical limitations.
@@ARKAEOPTREX There's definitely a balance to be found between the freeform exploration and curated content in BotW. For me the game would have been perfect had some of the shrines been combined into longer, traditional zelda dungeons. The divine beasts were short for my taste. However there's no denying that making the traversal feel like a puzzle does make for incredibly engaging moments in the traversal.
@@DongKEKong That's probably why most people don't go out in to the real world to find treasure, and instead play video games to satisfy that urge. Who would've thought that 'realistic' doesn't equal 'better'?
Single player open world are the only games I really get any enjoyment out of personally. I don't really understand the issue of needing every side quest to tie perfectly in with the main story line, as long as those things makes sense in the world that has been set up. Games are not movies or books to me. I find good, coherent stories important for immersion, but going on an adventure into the bushes to find something interesting or find out what a marker on my map is leading to is just as immersive to me and doesn't give me any sort of panic to finish the main story. I always have in the back of my head that this is just a game and I only feel a panic inducing urgency when I'm given an explicit timer. This doesn't break the immersion at all for me as long as what I'm doing on the side is interesting and rewarding.
I often get tired of exploring after a while and then it triggers my OCD along with FOMO and my anxiety. So I feel like I have to see and do everything in order to get it all completed and not miss out any side quest that might be cool or missing on some nice reward, but at the same time I feel like a drag after a while and can't wait to finish? the chores and progressing the story! I'm playing through Horizon Zero Dawn at the moment and just completed everything I''ve found to be completed on the first area, now after arriving on the second area the next main and side missions are on the other fucking side of the map! And I'm already feeling like "oh crap, here we go again! It will take me forever to arrive there as I'll have to stop along the way to fight the new robot dinosaurs, light camps and conquer bandit camps and the missions are so far away that I even if I just try to go there skipping everything it will take forever!" I've already clocked 27h in and I feel like there isn't much more the game can offemr gameplay wise other than different robots, slightly better weapons, so I just want to progress the story
@@asprywrites exactly! For example the small AF pouches! I had the same bad experience playing Far Cry 3! The pouches were so small that I had to keep managing inventory all the time, so I decided to stop playing and grinding/farming resources to max all the crap out of those so I could just play the game without worrying about it. That took me several hours of boring hunting just to prepare the game to be enjoyable for the next hours! Same thing about the skill trees, there's some skills in HZD that shouldn't be skills at all and shoud have been just default mechanics, like a skill for stealth takedowns from below, from above, a skill to recover your unused traps, another skill to rearrange your coils, another one that allows you to use your bow while walking over wires/rope...these are basic stuff that I expect to be already part of the moveset! Idk, the more I play these games the more I feel like if the devs were developing a Street Fighter game you wouldn't be able to do a Hadouken until you reach midgame you know? LOL
So, one minor issue with the notion of having everything in an open world contribute to the main story... a lot of open world fans don't really want that. Much if the appeal is all the small, entirely self contained stories that are set in the same place, with similar themes. Basically, a lot of folks are specifically looking for an anthology, not a novel.
Yeah, a good bit of his take in this video is based off the type of gamer that is more goal oriented. They need what they're doing to be connected to someform of forward progress. They don't want to explore just to kinda get lost in the world they need a good push to get get into the openess of the game. It's not a bad thing but, at least in my experience my favorite part in an open world game is when I'm free to ignore anything related to the main quest for the next 20 hours and just see what the world has to offer.
That's the really funny part... the norm is already more or less what he says he wants. Sidequests provide money, gear, xp, which is global progression and advances any other goal you have, but also have their own goals. What he's actually complaining about is having multiple potential goals at once. He's attributing it to being goal/progression/etc oriented, but those are things that drive a lot of sidequesting.
Funny thing is, two of my favorite games are both technically open-world (in the older sense). LoZ: Majora's Mask and Shadow of the Colossus. They approach the open-world dilemma in opposite ways. SotC is the goal-oriented kind, where the only things you can actually do are a progression. MM is the opposite, where many of the things you can do have nothing to do with stopping Skull Kid but instead with helping the locals of Termina.
@@kreiskhaos8516 The thing with Majora is that it was writen and designed around temporal flexibility. The 3 cycle and manipulation of time are both plot devices and gameplay mechanics. So unless you're planning on slapping time manipulation (beside smoking a blunt to pass time) onto every open-world, that isn't a good study case.
i like when games have an explanation of who the different difficulty modes are intended for and when there's a featured difficulty level labeled with "intended experience" or something. it makes it a lot easier to accurately place myself and i've found i'm a lot more likely to play at a higher difficulty and have a better experience
Open world games went from my favorite genre to least favorite. Every major brand tries to replicate this somehow. This has caused major fatigue with a feeling of sameness. Larger does not translate to better. Linear games are so much more enjoyable to play now.
But what about kingdom come? I think it's the second best open-world. It's so lively, small enough to travel even on foot but still large enough to get lost without a map.
try out the Stalker Call of Pripyat if you haven't, they are pretty brutal when you start and kind of force you to poke and prod everywhere until you manage to learn the incredibly interesting mechanics. it's linear with open world aspects that complement the storyline really well.
@@liamnehren1054 If you call that one linear, practically every open world game is linear, cause usually they have a main story to follow. I don't think that's what the op meant.
This is why I adore The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Every step of the main quest feels like the stakes are going up, but never with immediate urgency, and the themes and structure of the story make exploring the world a key part of it. Right from the start, you're told to go do some sidequests before the main quest can really start, since you have to blend in a bit and get to know the culture of the new land you're in. About half the steps are to go to a new part of the map and get to know the people there in order to get specific information out of them. One long section is to get 7 different factions to accept you as a political and military leader, so you have to go to each one individually and figure out how to convince them (e.g. doing quests and exploring that area to understand their culture so you can be convincing to them). The main quest is purposely built to show off the open world and make you spend time getting to understand it. At no point is there a moment where you have to do something immediately. Things in Morrowind are gradually getting worse, an evil god is gradually growing in strength, blight storms are slowly spreading. These things will destroy the country in a few years and must be taken care of soon, but not instantly. It leaves space to go out and mess around. Best open world out there, despite its age.
I was thinking the same thing. In Oblivion and Skyrim it feels weird to go off and explore when world ending attacks are happening with Daedra/Dragons.
Fast travel in Morrowind is the best in the series. Multiple ways to travel publicly, then you have the Mage's guild where you need to be a member. Some scrolls that only allow 1-way travel. Then Mark and Recall, the most versatile yet also the most restrictive.
10 years ago, the Mass Effect trilogy has shown that you do not need vastly oversized areas to create a huge, interesting and exploreable world and to tell amazing storys.
Arkham City had a small map too but it was amazing because the content was packed into that small map. It meant that every few building there was something interesting happening.
I think that's one of the best parts about Elden Ring. They integrated the main story and side stories so well with the overall open world, and nothing really feels out of place.
@@evacody1249 Yea what the hell? That was easily the worst part of the game, it was laughably bad. The (side) stories themselves were fine, but actually completing the stories without looking up a walkthrough is really unlikely for the average player as it requires the player to go back to previous locations without any clear indication when and where. The game excels in a lot of things, but the quest system and integration of the stories? That was terrible. I get that this is a design choice, but the casual player is going to miss most of the side content that way.
@thijsf395 it's definitely not new player friendly, but I like the quest system because it's somewhat mysterious from not having clear goals. You often stumble upon the next step unexpectedly and it brought me excitement. There's often help from item descriptions, but its still not clear cut, and that was intentional. It's not meant to play like other games
This is why I adore the style of self contained areas often seen in the Zelda series. I much prefer having several "maps" that are well developed than empty fields.
this is what smt5 does so well, its an "open world" jrpg but in reality its mostly linear yet open areas that are a ton of fun to explore and feel kind of like you're running through massive dungeons
@@Slaraffus2750What?!?!? You can't be telling me Zelda is more than 5 years old... I definitely haven't seen this game series throughout most of my life.
The issue i have with some openworlds is that the story itself seems to be focuses on exploring, like Horizon zero dawn. You can explore but the story itself already takes you around the map slowly, so exploring ahead of the story then going back to the story makes you go over the same ground you already explored.
it feels like game like this should use old open world design like locking off areas to difficulty. Because enemies or military will kill you (like gta SA) for trying to access an area to early. or an improvement on that technique
For me, I played Ghost of Tsushima on Lethal difficulty from the outset. It did mean that at the beginning I died countless times to what is now easy encounters for me, but it made exploring, practicing combat in bases and battling duels (in the mythic tales) all the more worth it because I needed better armour or skills to live longer. Going back to Azamo Bay with Gosaku’s armour or Uchitsune’s long bow and destroying the Mongols felt amazing. It worked well for me and made the act-ending missions felt all the more satisfying as I knew exploration and hard-work came together to beat the challenge, cementing Ghost of Tsushima as one of my favourite games of all time.
This is why I Champion the Hitman world of assassination trilogy so much. Even though those missions are technically levels, the extremely dense Design and attention to detail structure make them feel like lived in environments. Because of that they feel more immersive and believable than most open-world games try to "achieve"
Yeah! They’re everything that is fun about an open world game, distilled into a compact level. Small things that would be massively spaced out in an open world game are bunched together, AND they usually supplement the main goal of the level.
@@titlasagna2172 It is not "demi open world". It is just called open level design. It is not open world because the game has no wider world out there beyond the confines of the area immediately relevant to your current objective.
@JoDoFe lol thank you, I really dont see how someone could call hitman levels open world or even compare the two. Open worlds have like activities and side content and stuff. Hitman is all about doing the mission, and everything in the level is either elaborate or less than elaborate ways to do that. Theyre great open-ended levels, and certainly feel more realistic than most environments in games, but open world adjacent even it is most certainly not
What you described for Ghost of Tsushima reminds me a lot of Fallout: New Vegas. Once the player arrives in Vegas, the main story consists in picking one of the game's four main factions to side with and then travelling the open world to recruit minor factions to their chosen side. Those factions will then join the player in the game's final battle. And they have a big impact too, making your final assault much easier. The player is given a lot of freedom in which factions they recruit, how they recruit them, and whether they recruit any factions at all. For instance, for every minor faction in the game, exterminating them or ignoring them is always an option. Furthermore, completing minor side quests will often reward the player with reputation gain with a given faction, which can, in turn, make them easier to recruit or infiltrate. All of this comes together to make the world of New Vegas feel like a cohesive and interconnected place where everything you do is building up to a final climactic confrontation (even when that often isn't the case). I am not saying this is an exact comparison to what you were talking about- the player cannot initiate the final battle at any time and they are explicitly told of most of the factions they should try to recruit - but it is the closest existing example I could think of to what you were describing.
I feel like New Vegas also does well with the idea of "poorly placed pressure to complete the main story missions", as the main story in Fallout starts out as "find the guy who shot you and get answers", which is really presented almost as more of a loose prompt. New Vegas does a really good job, even in comparison to other Bethesda/Obsidian games, of making the main story work in synergy with the open-world & side content instead of working against each other like the video mentions. New Vegas is such a good game, wish we got a Demon Souls-type remake for it or another Fallout game developed by Obsidian. I have high hopes for Avowed, I hope it's a little bit bigger in scope than Outer Worlds.
@@fozzythasalesman6125 fallout new vegas had a lot of developers of the first 2 games. With the original vision etc. Thats why its so different from 3 and 4.
I spent this entire video thinking "Morrowind. You're looking for Morrowind." :) It's honestly wild to me that it solved every problem people complain about regarding open worlds, and developers have spent the last 20 years ignoring it. It has an involved main story, which you'll need to do to defeat the final boss (prophecy-severing aside). But while that will give the information you need to reach him and the tools to fight him, it absolutely does not give the skills, levels and gear required to *win* the fight. For that, you need to do side content. Go dungeon-delving, do some quests for interesting loot, spend money on trainers to improve your levels. It's a lot like Breath of the Wild in that regard. But where Breath of the Wild has no central plot to speak of after leaving the Great Plateau, Morrowind's is very in-depth. It's a solidly structured story about finding your place in this foreign land, making increasingly powerful allies and uncovering ever more layers of the complicated history. All so you ultimately have the context of why the villain's plan, and your fight against it, matters. But crucially, said plan isn't coming to fruition anytime soon. It *will* happen if you don't do anything, but that won't be for months yet. There's no friend to be rescued, no villages being attacked. That gives you the peace of mind to do the main story at your own pace, and actually engage with the side content.
I was thinking of Morrowind as well! I've put in 50 hours into that game and have never progressed the main plot past talking to Caius Cosades. Everytime I make a new character, I just spend my time exploring the world and talking to everybody which leads me to finding quests that I've never found before. I was also thinking of Stardew Valley as well. I would consider it open world since you can do everything at your own pace and focus on what skills you want to improve on. The main quest is completing all Community Chests but you don't really need to do that to progress through the game.
Have't played morrowind or BOTW but what I think you're describing when you said, "while that will give the information you need to reach him and the tools to fight him, it absolutely does not give the skills, levels" and "For that, you need to do side content." is level cap for missions? Which is a thing in almost every open world RPG now.
@@ashikmohds yup i have the same thoughts as yours. In BoTW case, you can literally go straight to the end game boss after the tutorial but you will definitely get your ass kicked because you are weak af without any sort of good gears and powerup that you would get if you did some exploration first.
The way that Baldur’s Gate 3 handles this dilemma is fantastic. There’s a general main plot which can play out in countless ways, and just about all the optional side quests tie into it. Your actions in one may have an unexpected effect on another, or may ripple into the main story in unexpected ways down the line. And then, similar to your Ghost of Tsushima idea, succeeding at many of these side quests will grant you some kind of ally that you can summon at will during the final assault-and their different abilities can honestly make the difference between life and death. It’s an incredible game.
My mind is very simple 🤣 things like clearing “fog-of-war”, item/quest markers, 100%-ing areas (like when the map goes from green to red as you complete objectives in each area in Mad Max) are enough to motivate me. In fact, I find it hard to resist the urge to do everything BUT the main quest, just to make sure i don’t miss out on anything. That said, it’s great to see things from another perspective, and the improvements you talked about that would make things better for those extrinsically motivated would make things even better for those of us that are intrinsically motivated as well.
@@MGrey-qb5xz I was born in the 90s and I'm the same... What about that statement gives you the impression that only recent gamers from 2015+ could feel that way? It's a weird statement to make...
weird how the whole industry "forgot" about New Vegas and how it exemplifies excellent open world design... even though the players never shut up about it
But are Cazadores, that force you to travel away from Vegas, *really* excellent open world design? But, jk, I think I get what you mean - the part where it forces you to deal with "optional" content focused on the different belligerents of the local upcoming battle, right?
@@AusSP They did a good job of placing key points of interest along the path that most people will end up taking not get to New Vegas. Assuming you actually stop to check things out, you’ll know what’s up with all the major factions and even grab a couple of companions by the time you finally reach the city.
@@thedapperdolphin1590 and it levels you up for the city. My only complaint about Vegas is travel speed, walking (i know it considers it running) takes forever and the next fastest option it fast traveling between previously visited locations. (Which on the 360 resulted in a lengthy loading screen, backwards compatibility from current gen eliminates this issue) Note that even in a game like RDR2 where you ride a horse, travel speed should be considered more in terms of time between destinations not litteral mph or m/s.
@@AusSP beyond that, i think the landmarks and stuff like that. I wanted to find the man who shot me real bad, but i just had to see wtf was that giant dinossaur, also kinda following the trail
This is why I love Sable! The whole objective is to just explore and find your place in the world. Every "side quest" is character growth and enforces the themes.
I’d be curious of your take on Spider-Man, which has a strong linear story - but because it’s not built on some singular end goal, it had pauses built in that felt natural where the mainline locks up for a bit and you go exploring. It is, eh, “forcing” you to rather than building the story itself around it, but it was also a bit of a relief having a narrative which didn’t force a continual sense of urgency on you.
Rdr2 does the open world thing beautifully imo. Throughout the whole game you're so focused on the main mission dotting the map, that your main random encounters are only on the way to the next mission But in chapter 6 when Arthur gets diagnosed, alot of the missions are less pressing besides John's imprisonment, but other than that every other mission has a stopping point for you and Arthur to go explore and enjoy what little time Arthur has alive. The only things I wish were present were camp funds being required for progression, and a recipe system paired with a hard-core difficulty that adds in food being more necessary. Which encourages hunting and exploring more than just chapter 6
@@zensoredparagonbytes3985 New game plus would be nice too with added difficulty because you have all your equipment available to you (kinda like elden ring or from software games)
I think Metro Exodus hit a good balance of openness, with large open levels instead of a single open world. There was a lot to do in each level but it rarely overstayed its welcome. And each level was an entirely different environment, which made things never feel repetitive and made me want to explore more
That's a philosophy from at least The Witcher 1 and the first Assassin's Creed back in 2007. I think in terms of nailing it, The Witcher 2 might've been the peak for those limited open worlds. Exodus has an advantage by using whatever design it needs; so it has 2 open-world levels, 3 linear ones, a more open linear one, a prologue, 4 intermissions, and 2 mini-levels inside Volga and Caspian.
Yes I agree. And the metro exodus has what I feel is a must for such open levels. Its a genuine sense of discovery which so few games actually achieve. Elden ring is the best example of this
@@incius8341 it’s not really that limited. The game world is rather large, and that’s considering areas you only go to a few times for the bonus content outside of the main story
The best open world title for me was PS4 Spiderman, I never wanted to fast travel because web swinging was so much fun, and I felt like spidey when I was going in one direction and got strayed out of the path due to some minor crime. You really wanted to stray a little because you were the hero, but never too much because you needed to keep going on
@@chrismao8815 its a Spider-Man game. He’s not known for exploring. What would you find in New York City? The open world just compliments his traversal abilities.
I think a great marker for how well a game incorporates its open world is how often one fast travels. This is not always the case, as in something like BotW the map is crazy big and you need to move around a lot, but when I played Spider-Man the last achievement I got for platinum was the one for using the fast travel 5 times. Swinging around the city is just so fun that fast traveling seems like a waste
Breath of the Wild, Outer Wilds, and Elden Ring are some obvious shining examples of how to do an open world really well, but I'd also like to shout out Westerado. Westerado is a classic flash game (with an expanded full steam release) where you are tasked with getting revenge against the person who murdered your mother and brother. Seems simple enough, but the problem is that you weren't there when it happened. You have no idea what this person looks like, or where they are, so it becomes a pseudo-murder mystery game as when you complete a side quest, the NPC usually gives you a visual clue about them that narrows down who they might be. Also, at any point in the game, you can pull out your gun and shoot literally any NPC, no matter how important you might assume they are, and then you have to deal with the consequences of that. Which is hilarious. It's not as mechanically refined as a lot of other genre trailblazers, but I can't stop thinking about some of the radical things it does to make its open world more interesting than so many others. The game doesn't even tell you if the bad guy is just some randomized NPC in the world or if finding them is some scripted event, and since I've never completed the game, and information about it online is scarce, I've never actually found out myself. I've heard different people tell stories that seem to imply both, meaning some people are definitely lying. It gives the feeling that it's a modern version of Mew Under the Truck or other playground myths.
Elden Ring and BOTW wild have lackluster stories. BOTW wild has some of the best environmental interaction and travsal its a fantastic open world. Elden Ring is above Adverage But the open world has allot of repeated bosses. NPCs are lifeless, Side quests are few and far between And there not much to other than kill enemies. Kingdom Come does a pretty good drop at telling a story and making the player find there own way. But games like Elden Ring you can just do the main quests and you can just farm one area without having to expore anywhere else certain areas give you more XP so its pointlesa farming other areas.
I wish Elden Ring had stuff to do other than kill things. It’s fun but combat is the only thing going for it, and after 60+ hours it starts getting tiring.
@@John-996 Wdym? There's a 4 side quests that unlock 4 different endings. There's secret areas upon secret areas. Maybe it's inaccurate to say side quest, but every NPC has a story that reaches a conclusion. I'd like to push back that if you think the stories are lackluster than you aren't paying attention to the world building. A lot of the story is told through the items you pick up along the way. Even if there are copy paste bosses, at least there's some narrative purpose to all the enemy placement. There are entire UA-cam channels like Vaatividya and SmoughTown dedicated to deciphering the lore.
@@shakkoryu They didn't praise BOTW for it's enemy variety though. Breath of the Wild also isn't focused on just combat in its gameplay loop. A large majority of what you'll be doing in Elden Ring when you're not exploring is fighting in combat, so the game puts a greater emphasis on it. Breath of the Wild might have repetitive enemy types, but it's also focused on solving puzzles, and it gives you a lot more options to take down enemies (Elden Ring gives a lot, but most are locked out depending on your build. Regardless 95% of the time you'll still just dodge, attack, repeat). Elden Ring gets deathly boring after a while because of this, at least to me, while the other Souls games didn't.
I think Bethesda handelded this differently, the main quest was the first story you find however every other story is just as important, is all about the value you put on each narrative as a player.
which except in the case of new vegas was a bit lazy. each story is treated like it's own world and there is no effect on the story from other things happening in the world. Hell some even contradicted the lore of the series! Which points to separate development teams, no mandatory lore readings and fact checking (or at least not enough). Then there's all the retconning of the original games. for example: Fallout 4 is in part a retelling of Fallout: brotherhood of steel's act 3 I think it was, when the brotherhood arrives in the Boston area. There you find a ruined Zeppelin with one surviving soldier from the liberal members of the brotherhood who were sent on a suicide mission to the east coast USA by the conservative isolationist majority. The Zeppelins were used to come from the west coast, something they didn't even mention in Fallout 3, the ones that arrived in DC were stripped, a few were lost crossing the Rockies with all hands on deck, one crashed in Boston. Fallout 4 all of a sudden has one come from DC full of the brotherhood as they were on the west coast, the east coast was 100% the people who were against that kind of way of acting and has barely been there for a few years, the story of brotherhood goes that they start popping vaults open and protecting villages and vaulters from raiders and accepting recruits. The super mutant war we see in FO3 comes after and ends (potentially) in an alliance. Now one of them going around raving against Robots makes sense, spoilers from a really old game: the final enemies the brotherhood face in brotherhood of steel are intelligent robots so such a storyline of how they act would make sense... a few years later... and not in Boston or at least not flying into an area already under brotherhood protection and then not in a destroy them all sense, they would have just shutdown the project so a mystery game ending in arrests would have made more sense cannon wise. I did like the change from ring pulls to bottle caps as currency, makes more sense but Bathesda basically ripped apart a series that was open world before there was a term for it.
New Vegas is really good with this because the entire first act of its story requires you to explore at least a little; if you've never played it before you will, naturally, do the side quests given in order to figure out where Benny went, but you're not blocked from taking a short cut to avoid the First Act altogether if you're capable of hiding from or defeating the difficult enemies in the way.
And they give you the option to act with urgency. Either your custom character wants revenge right away, or he/she is more concerned with other objectives, giving the player more freedom to…actually role-play. NV is just so good.
@@mythhead2688 Its also good since the min story that feel urgent is just to lead you to the main place of the game but then it becomes decide the fate of all the factions.
You and I have totally different approaches to gameplay and that's why I LOVE your videos!! I love hearing about different methods, different motivations, different values. It's so interesting to me! Genuinely excellent content. 💚
I get the more freeing design of BotW, and this could just be me but the threat of Ganon felt so far away and so inconsequential I lost motivation to stop him. I explored a lot of the world but I felt I'd played enough without ever playing to the end.
Yeah very true, and when I killed him I absolutely steamrolled him and was confused that the game ended and I had to reload my save. I was kinda mad that that’s what it had all been building up to
Ganon is easier to beat the more the Guardians(?) you have on your side, the more you play, the stronger you are and the weaker Ganon become. So, technically the Ganon BOSS fight started right from the beginning, everything you do around the world is part of fighting him.
@@andresespinosa4531 100% agree. The boss fights in that game were sad. I died over 50 times in my first two hours of playing. 130 shrines later, I accidently beat Ganon without even getting hit once.
I honestly prefer story games with big levels instead of the whole thing being 1 level with a bunch of missions. I think it makes it less of a chore to get through an area when every area is important to the story.
@@glauberglousger6643 No. Pretty sure they mean games like Jedi Fallen Order, and Mario Odyssey. I also think these designs would work much better for games like RDR2. Of course, BOTW wouldn't work well with that. That game needs an open world. It all really depends on the game.
Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us 2 did a great job of wide linear level design. I usually felt like the world was much bigger and that I could go in any direction, yet it always ended up being the right path.
That sense of urgency mismatch is the biggest thing for me. "Hey. My father had been murdered, the kingdom stolen, and I'm on the run trying to get revenge before the world ends... But hey, this cat needs some gourmet food first."
Ff15 is quite a ridiculous game, if you haven’t I recommend watching Maxors vid on it, makes very funny criticism while also giving it credit where it deserves
@@erniegang8127 If they made ff15 like the ff7 remake it would've likely been their most successful game considering the hype for the franchise and the strong technical aspects, but for marketing purposes they had to promise an open-world to get everyone on the trendy bandwagon.
see, I could imagine a game where this actually works IF it's acknowledged as a core theme: the idea that comraderie, compassion, that every being even a small cat's happiness matters. Imagine a game where to defeat the eldritch darkness, you have to make people happy, then helping a little girl find her doll might be as crucial as taking on an enemy fortress.
My biggest problem with urgency is when they make so many of the main quests seem so urgent so I'll rush to go do them and basically finish the game and, being a completionist myself, skip all the side quests.
Dying light 2 does a good job splitting up missions into day and night, so unless you want to fast forward to day you can "force" yourself into not following them so closely
Xenoblade 2 did this to me in a way that I was even crying fearing what would happen next and I needed to progress, ignoring any other thing in the game
For years I've said I'm not interested in open world games, but rather smaller more focused stories. Then I played Breath of the Wild over the Christmas break, and just finished RDRII a few days ago. Turns out I was wrong, I'm still interested in those smaller games, but an open world game that has charm and atmosphere and life (and most important - lots of tameable horses) is like nothing else. Both are probably in my top ten of all time, RDRII probably in my top five. I've put nearly two hundred hours in and I still just want to wander around, ride my horse, hunt deer, and just be in that world.
I have difficulty with open world games. As you said, in many open world games, the main storyline is typically the most engaging part of the experience. However, there is usually also a ton of extra content and I find myself compelled to complete that before progressing with the storyline. That sounds great, but I typically find that the side content is noticably less engaging than the main storyline, so I end up getting bogged down in the side content and eventually losing interest in the game as a whole. I end up feeling conflicted between thinking that I would have a better experience just playing through the linear story and thinking that if I did I would be missing significant parts of the game. Because of this, I find games like BotW and Elden Ring, which mainly measure progress through the game by how much of the world the player has explored, to be easier games to stay invested in than ones which measure progress through story beats.
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Same here. Side missions are exclusively copy/paste stuff. Same two or three missions hundreds of times again and again.
What makes realism a relevant concern here? Elden Ring is a fantasy game. FromSoft's soulslikes have never gone for realism. That's a good thing. It lets them explore their themes, mechanics, and worlds in more ways than they could if they were adhering to realism.
You read my mind. That FOMO feeling is really ruining the fun for Open Worl games, and even if you pursued it, its quite less satisfying that you thought it would, for the most part at least. This kind of conflict is much more heavier on the mind when you have only a limited amount of free time and several backlog of games.
RDR2 had the exact *opposite* problem for me: I became so bored with the main story quests (which are almost always 'go here shoot lots of people') that I longed for new sidequests to unlock, which usually have much more varied content than the very combat-focused story missions. Just some examples of the more fun sidequests: - Help out a (mad?) scientist by driving a little remote control boat around a lake, firing torpedoes and avoiding mines. - Help a circus performer dressed in drag by gathering his missing circus animals... which may or may not be the animals he claimed they were. - Help a city woman survive in the wilderness after having lost her husband. That third questline in particular I found very engaging, because it mirrored some of the personal stuff Arthur was going through with Mary - very much a 'what if my life had gone another way?' scenario.
I think this is why New Vegas was so greatly acclaimed when it came to an open world rpg game that had a solid foundation of a story, basically everything you do had an effect on the final battle towards the dam. I don't get why most developers aren't trying to replicate the formula of what Obsidian did with their Fallout.
RDR2 Arthur at the beginning of the game only cares for his gang so he won't ever abandon them. Ghost of Tsushima Jin wants to save his uncle to lead to the liberation of their land so he cannot abandon them. In Horizon: Zero Dawn Aloy wants answers about her past on why she was an outcast and why she was targeted by the Killers. The first half of her motivation is all she has cared about since she learned there was a way to get answers so she will not give until she gets what she wants. The difference being most of these stories cannot be avoided. In New Vegas what is your character's motivation? Whatever you want it to be. Hell looking at the world of New Vegas it would actually be better from a survival stand point to avoid the man who just tried to kill you. I honestly don't have much of a problem with the way these games are structured. I've enjoyed every game I've listed. I'm currently still playing Horizon and finished unlocking all I could in the open world and I am now tackling the main story. I know a lot of people cannot do this but it works for me. Now saying that I do need to put down open world games for a few months before hopping into another one.
@@GreenWolf2k well technically the player in new vegas has a question: why murder someone for a poker chip? which pulls them into the whole mystery that leads to mr house and the dam.
@@liamnehren1054 Yeah but think about from a survival stand point. You just got lucky that the bullet didn't kill you or mess you up to the point where you cannot function. Why the hell would you go after the man who just attempted to kill you. Now if you want revenge ok that makes sense but if you don't care for revenge then there is no point other than being really dangerously curious.
@@GreenWolf2k I think the main draw of an open world game is that "What you want it to be" motivation though. And honestly I wish more games have that kind of story, where your character doesn't exist before you create it, doesn't have any outside motivation or purpose, is just a full blank slate for the player to construct however they want.
There are a lot of weird assumptions in this essay. The open world is not a course menu where you have to eat everything. It’s a buffet. The player can pick and choose what he wants to do. I love that I don’t have to engage with every single thing/mechanic that’s included in these massive games.
I think a really interesting solution to the main quest issue could be to tell the player their objective but not how to do it or where to go. The player will have to decide how to go about it by themself by engaging with the open world. Maybe the characters tell you that your first quest is to go and defeat a big bossman but have no clue where he is, so you explore the world to find information about your enemy, where he is and maybe you accidentally stumble into the right place early and surprise him. This way you are motivated by your own goals and ideas of how to complete your quest and actually travel around the open world to contribute towards your end goal, never knowing if a side mission really is a side mission or if it will end up helping you.
@@thedapperdolphin1590 true that, but I think it was the necessary minimum to avoid frustration, and it was way less than previous games in the series. Maybe with a somewhat different design it would actually work
The game would bleed players until the only ones that remained are the ones that like it enough to play, or they’re the players the game was made for to begin with, which isn’t sustainable outside of the indie genre
A game I played called Enderal had a very simple approach that I quite liked. The game has a main questline, but after certain quests it will pause, giving the player time to move around and do whatever they want. These triggers usually make sense. For example, in one quest you find an important plot thing called the Beacon. Once you return, you're given free time, because they don't know what the Beacon is and need some time to figure out what the fuck a Beacon is. This happens several times, where the main quest will tell you to wait, and update when the main questline is ready to continue again. You can still delay the main questline as much as you want, but being given explicit free time to work means you don't feel pressured to keep saving the entire universe or something when some kid out there is still waiting for you to find his dog. This approach is a very simple and obvious one, but it makes sense why it doesn't really get thought about that much. Before video games there were movies, before movies there were books, before books there was theater, and so on. What all these have in common, is limited content. You can't put on a show and have the main character spend a week waiting while the ancient scrolls get deciphered, because unless there's some explicit story purpose, that's really boring and impractical. So they cut to the good stuff and skip the wait time. You can't put an important side character in a coma, because that means the story can't continue until they wake up. Video games don't have to be like that though. The story can leave you on hold for a few in-game days, but a good open world can let a player mess around with it and have fun while they wait. Since the game can make a week of in-game time take a couple hours, and since the player can fill in that time with whatever they want to do, why not give the player actual, real free time to explore the world? When you find a caravan to make it across the scary desert, why not tell the player that they'll need a few days to gather supplies, and let you go on your merry way to explore the city? When you find the forgotten scrolls that predict the end of the world, why not tell the player they'll need a week to decipher it, and let them take on some side quests while they wait? Games don't HAVE to be nonstop, heart pounding action, they can slow down at any time and the player can spend that time on having fun.
I love Enderal and I really agree that this approach worked for me. Enderal was also unique for me in that it made money feel more valuable than most other open-world games I've played. Since you need money to purchase books, a requirement to level up your character, I was constantly using my funds to progress my character. By the end of the game, I didn't have a pile of gold left over, because I had invested it in my character's progression, a house, and crafting items along the way. It made all the money I found from quests and exploration meaningful, which was a huge contrast to games like Skyrim where money just became a satisfying sound effect after awhile
@@one_secular_sparrow Yeah, skill books being used for skill progression was really a stroke of genius. One issue I've always ran into while playing Morrowind and Skyrim, is that I started to look at each fight as experience farming, and as such I would try to exploit the encounter, casting different spells to get more Conjuration, or Illusion, or whatever. Instead of trying to fight objectively and strategically, I looked at each fight as just a grind for more experience. If I ended up forced to use something I didn't want (eg. running out of Magicka so I need to use a sword), I would even feel like I "missed out" on getting that little bit more experience in something I actually wanted/ Using skill books fixed all of that, which allowed me to look at each fight and objectively decide on what would ACTUALLY be the best way to win the fight, instead of trying to theory craft what the best way to get more precious levels would be. Making money a valuable commodity at the same time is a bonus (that said, I used phasmalism, so I ended up spending enough money keeping my boi equipped).
10:04 This is making me think of Middle Earth: Shadow of War, where during a later segment of the game, the main quest becomes "Take over all of Mordor's fortresses." Simple as that. While not fully open world, you have open environments to play around with. You can take on the fortress by yourself, and most likely die to the swarms of orcs before you ever reach the Overlord's throneroom. Or you can amass an army by finding orc captains out in the world or even have spies infiltrate the fortress to rip it apart from the inside the moment you say the word. There's a lot of freedom in how you approach conquering Mordor, but the game also does a great job of giving the enemies the freedom to really screw you over and create interesting, improvised conflicts throughout the game, especially on higher difficulties.
@NatSoc Kaiser Indeed! I played the game on its highest difficulty and it really did enhance the experience. Rather than just beating an enemy, I was creating a nemesis. A Batman and Joker type relationship.
I feel like Subanutica managed to encourage exploration very well. Same goes to story, the game doesn't tell you where to go, it leads you and you'll find the areas where the story progresses by yourself
I have always wanted a zombie game where I can clear out an entire city and restore humanity again. Basically the zombies stay dead and the area remains safe, or unless you don't clear out more areas they can be in danger etc
as a game dev myself, i think an open world doesn’t act to add on to the games experience mechanically - it can! but it doesn’t have to. being able to take it all in and explore can contribute to giving the player some downtime. sure, overly expansive areas can feel unnecessary, but i guess it always just comes down to what kind of player you’re making the game for. some love to roam around, i personally don’t like it if i have to roam around too much. i think open worlds do matter though, and exploring those worlds gives those that want to put their time into it more context into stories and backgrounds that they otherwise would have missed. so yeah, open worlds can be funny and a bit much for some, but they matter.
I agree here. Personally, I love to roam and hate when an open-world game forces me into the main quest thing. I want something akin to Dungeons and Dragons where it is an open world with smaller, localized stories none of which are the main quests but elaborate side-quests. As a writer, I find the use of one main story done to death right now and it would be nice to see games develop a more real-world approach to stories with different "main" villains, conflicts, etc.; all discovered by exploring.
The issue is that open world titles just sell more copies than non open worlds. Which means every studio feels expected to shove an open world into their title whether it needs one or not. This takes a lot of resources and can ultimately make the game fail. However, I think sometimes you can have your cake and eat it too. For RPGs especially, you can have collectibles or even allow the players to take photos that can then be brought back to customize your hub area. So if you want linear, you can just go to hub, and take missions. But for the people that want every last armor color or banner or what not, they feel they are rewarded for exploring the areas out of the way. It's sort of similar to how old linear game designers would leave hidden collectibles in really out of the way or hard to reach places.
I remember as a kid thinking just how cool it was in Mario Sunshine that you could see the other areas/levels from eachother. (Most obviously example being Pina Park from Defino Plaza but in basically every level you can get a peak at some definative landmark of the other levels) I doubt the gamecube could pull off a real open world but this is an example of how to fake one. I also get annoyed by a game disrespecting my time by making me walk at a snails pace between disparate locations. (Fallout Vegas was great but you fast traveled if you weren't expressly going someplace new) I can't even be bothered with AC Odessy because who has time to play 500hrs of effectively the exact same content with enemies scaling with you. Pikmin 1 is an example of an "open world" that respects your time. (It has 5 levels, 3 main ones and you can collect your ship parts in any order so "Open World" it also has a timelimit of 30 in game days which works out to about 6hrs and you lose). I think what matters about an open world is that the term describes a setting and level of player agency. How you use this can create either a masterpiece or a mess. Open world is a setting, a tool, not a genere. Edit: were -> weren't
@@philipfahy9658 I see what you mean, and you raise a great point! You’re very right in saying that forcibly shoving an open world into a title is definitely not the way to go unless exploration is an essential part of the gameplay. It can be one of those things that can make your game better or worse. I haven’t had the chance to play Elden Ring myself, but everyone of my friends that have heavily enjoyed the exploration aspect of the game and the vastness of it, so I think that one’s a great example of when an open world game works well. I think that in the AAA industry the open world stuff is definitely more popular than it should be, but we also have so many indie games that have non-open worlds! And I think they’re becoming a lot more popular nowadays, which is lovely to see.
@@jasonreed7522 So agreed!! It can be a great tool to prolong your game and insert more environmental + other story telling, but if it’s slowing you down too much, as a player you’ll quickly grow frustrated and that’s what every game dev wants to avoid. If it provides just enough challenge but also gives back satisfaction with the completion of your quest/exploration, then it’s a job well done. It can sometimes be really tough to hit that mark though! Takes a lot of really hard work and understanding of a users experience to get it right. Biggest issues happen when execs tell devs to add things that sell but don’t necessarily sit right in games.
I’m just going to note: as someone with ADHD it’s weird to be described as ‘intrinsically motivated’. Open world games work for me because I get distracted for sure… but I don’t think it’s as related to strong intrinsic motivation. Unless you call hyperfocusing on a new shiny intrinsic motivation.
ADHD works in weird ways. Because our dopamine receptors are so fucked up, we become less motivated to do stuff. For me open world games are overwhelming, I keep getting distracted by everything until at some point the main storyline stops giving me any sort of dopamine rush and I just quit the game
There's a specific meaning to the phrase "intrinsic motivation." Intrinsic motivation just means that the motivation is coming from you yourself. Let's say you really enjoy a class and because of that you want to learn the material. That's one intrinsic motivation to study. This is as opposed to extrinsic motivations which come from some external source. An extrinsic motivation to study would be the fact that you have a test coming up that you will be graded on.
Yes. Motivations do no care about your 'disorder'. Your motivations are an emergent phenomena tied to your brain's wiring. If those drives are born of internal impulses, they are autotelic (intrinsic); else, they are exotelic (extrinsic).
Good video! You mention the distinction between intrinsic and external motivation as what leads some to enjoy open worlds while others do not. This certainly seems like a factor; however, to me, the ability to suspend disbelief seems like the main reason why some have no problem doing a bunch of side quests before tackling a seemingly “urgent” main quest. It definitely makes no sense that Geralt would do a ton of side quests before trying to protect his daughter, but when I play I don’t think about it that deeply. I just suspend disbelief in the same way that we suspend disbelief when there are dragons or other unrealistic elements in our games.
I, as a player, always obsess over doing things in the "right order", whatever order the developer intended for me to do the game in, EVEN IF I'm playing an open-world game that intentionally obfuscates or covers up what the correct order is. I always want to avoid doing things in the wrong order but often will end up doing them in the wrong order anyway, which makes me feel like I've ruined the fun for myself.
oh god, I feel the same! but honestly, that's on the developers, though! why make an open world when you're giving us the feeling that we went somewhere tik early? why am I having this feeling in the first place
@@AndYouWillBeWithMe i was playing BoTW a few years back, i had finished the Great Plateau and I made the horrible mistake of going to Gerudo Desert because I saw it and it piqued my interest. I, being a stupid idiot, kept throwing myself at the area like a potato at a brick wall and managed to get to the Divine Beast. However, I simply could not beat Thunderblight Ganon and had to leave the divine beast 3/4 completed while I went and followed the quest for the Zora kingdom, which made me feel very stupid when I found Robbie and Kilton, mechanics that were very clearly intended to be discovered early. I feel that experience influenced my current playstyle of open-world games.
@@no-lifenoah7861 I think that's on the devs not you. Essentially it's an illusion of choice if you truly can't take paths that are presented. Joseph Andersons review of the game covers that issue, he had the same experience
I understand your point and it is logically sound. But as a gamer myself, my approach to any game is *god forbid that I do not explore every inch of land I see in front of me before I move on with the story*. 😂
I think this is also true of people who grew up playing Tomb Raider games. Everything matters if it means we'll get a 3 second comment from a voice actor.
Why I love the small little package A Short Hike. A world I can fit in my head, and exploration/navigation IS the center of the game. The side stuff like fishing is cute if not a little padded, but the game never lets down the creativity in its little island design.
True but with regards to exploration mattering to the player, it doesn't rly matter if it's small or big. The size of the world isn't the problem, it's how it mechanically fits with player progression and with the main story narrative. Outer wilds, for example, technically, due to the 360 degree movement of the player, has a MASSIVE open world, that is almost entirely empty relative to it's size, yet, exploration is the core of progression and intrinsically tied to the narrative, so it works well in that regard.
This is why I love Elden Ring and consider it the golden standard for how to create an open world game. The open world IS the point. And everything in the game is there to support and incentivise you going out and exploring it. And by that I mean true exploration. Get rid of hud markers pointing you towards every notable thing. It's not exploration at that point. It's a guided tour.
I actually think Red Dead 2 handles the story vs. exploration / urgency problem pretty excellently. There are a few moments where you feel a sense of urgency to run to the next story mission, but most of the time a mission just kind of ends (you complete the robbery or whatever) and there's no indication of what you're supposed to do next. Then the next mission starts when you randomly run into one of your gangmates in town or what have you. Most of the story also has the gang just trying to survive rather than working towards some urgent goal, so you don't feel like there's something you should be doing other than hunting, fishing and making money for yourself or the gang. On top of that, most of the story missions start in camp, and there are more than a few parts in the story where it makes total sense that Arthur might not want to go to camp for a while (because Dutch is being a bitch, usually). So taking some time away from the story missions to explore, camp on your own, hunt, gather bounties etc...actually feels like you're still roleplaying as Arthur. It's what he would be doing at that time. It does have the problem of the things you do in the open world not effecting the story. It doesn't matter how many legendary fur coats you make or how often you slaughter the KKK, it's not going to change Arthurs final fate one bit, or make it any easier for John to kill he games true villain. So there isn't "incentive" to do any of those things, but the way I think: if riding around the wild west doing cowboy stuff doesn't sound like its own reward to you, why buy a cowboy game in the first place? It's not like you get anything for completing the game anyway. It just ends. So really there isn't any incentive to do the story missions either if you think about it that way.
I completely agree with you, adding map conquering mechanics like Far Cry 5 would kill the game and its pacing. RD2R is a slow burn to its core and it's ok to not like the simulation aspect, but having it any other way would make it generic, especially with that suggestion.
It effects you emotionally what you did as Arthur. By the end, it matters and hits you, hard. That’s more than enough reason and consequence. And for the legendary coats, that fits fine. Sure, Arthur might have enjoyed, but how does that really change his redemption? It doesn’t actually matter nearly as much as giving money to an orphanage. He does things that ultimately weren’t important, and that’s real life.
Exactly, the world doesn't revolve around Arthur, that's kind of the whole point of the story. And the main story doesn't really just stop between main missions, Arthur is still hacking like crazy and you can still see the effects of your actions (like becoming wanted, or having certain enemy factions come after you).
I remember playing TES IV: Oblivion for the first time and being shook when I beat the main quest by about level 9 or so. I had been so caught up in the urgency the main quest provided that I didn't take time to explore. On my second playthrough I ignored the main quest entirely, which always felt off. Enemies are attacking a city where a plot critical NPC resides and nothing happens until I will it? Yeah, I'll just do 200 hours of side missions. I believe the term for that would be "ludo-narrative dissonance," though heaven strike me down if I've used that term incorrectly.
oh thanks, you just made me realize why I didn't vibe with Oblivion much. It's the urgency in the quest. It made me feel like I had a check list I needed to mark off as quickly as possible
I was the opposite. There is some urgency in the quest, but I didn’t care. It was my first ever open world game, so I just loved exploring, and there were so many cool quests to do.
@@thedapperdolphin1590 Fair point. At the time I started playing, my only open world experience was Morrowind which is very laid back in urging the player to do the main quest, to the point where skipping the main quest in a playthrough feels much more a valid choice than skipping the main quest in Oblivion.
Playing Fallout 4, I found myself totally engrossed in the base building mechanics and the main story line of finding Shaun fell to the wayside. Only after 3 weeks of scavenging, building up fortifications and making mods at work benches did I have the thought "isnt there someone I'm supposed to be looking for ?" 🤔
Total opposite for me. I felt like I couldn't engage in any side quest because they kept giving me such concrete answers about where to go next to look for my son. If they had made it a little less obvious where Shaun might be and how to get to him (something I thought they did way better in Fallout 3), then I probably would've been more encouraged to go out and explore the world.
it needed more blockades or major dangers sprinkled around that clues about Shaun led into. forcing the player to interact with that system to like raise an army but what can we say other then it was no new vegas.
@@viralium104 thats when you ignore the "go here next" dialog and go look for more weapons to play with. getting trapped in the "gotta do the main quest mentality" ruins the game. especially since fallout games typically end after that. you have to explore they map and find new weapons there's more story in the side quests than the main ones. this is why i hate speed runners. they dont care about the actual game they just want to set a stupid record.
@@darkshadowsx5949 That's what I was doing, and it totally shattered my immersion. Much as speedrunners like the challenge of completing a game as fast as possible, I like the experience of getting so absorbed in a game's world that I momentarily forget that I'm even playing a game in the first place.
That's the sign of a successful videogame. Nothing is worse than just doing what a game tells you to do, with the developers assuming you care about their writing. Only when narrative/worldbuilding has gameplay connections or ramifications is a bit of story sufficient "reward" for completing an activity. Horizon Zero Dawn is so good at this, despite what is in this video. In general I disagree with everything in this video haha
As a neurodivergent, I have to disagree with several of your main points. I've never gotten bored of the exploration and rushed the story mode. Nor have several of my also neurodivergent family members. For the ADD/ADHD community, open world games are far more than their linear siblings. No, it isn't for everyone, but not everything has to be appealing to neurotypical interests at the cost of providing diverse options for other people. Open worlds are hugely important for me because I can't get through a game by doing 20hrs of railroading down the single plot given. I need to be able to go look for collectibles, hunt a new kind of monster, upgrade my gear, meet a little old lady and help with her groceries, then I can go back to saving the world for a quest or two before doing it all over again. TL;DR: Open world means options. Options that don't appeal to you specifically are still valuable.
This has never really been an issue for me. In the same way your mind naturally filters out the idea that Wander did probably not spend 30 minutes trying in vain to jump to the top of the temple in Shadow of the Colossus, or Nathan Drake probably did not actually kill about 500 people en route to Ubar in Uncharted 3, so can I usually filter out the urgency of the main quest from a side activity that probably did not canonically "happen" in the actual text of the game. And I would argue that most of the games you mentioned actually benefit from having a contiguous geography and quest flow that would otherwise be interrupted by linear levels. Ghost of Tsushima and Horizon Zero Dawn especially make use of real-world landmarks to add a sense of scope and familiarity to their worlds.
Most of the problems from HZD are still present to some degree in HFW; though that is offset somewhat with the advent of several quest lines where once one quest completes, it doesn't always tell you if that questline is complete, or if there's another quest that is unlocked after that point. This makes it so there's always some narrative content that's can be unlocked by exploring the world, though the rumors system does help facilitate the more story-beat style of casual gameplay by regularly pointing players towards a quest they haven't completed yet and don't feel like checking every settlement they've come across just to check to see if a new quest has popped up. On top of that, there is much more giant robot-dinosaur based content that caps off various mission beats, and even in the engagements where there are human enemies, they're almost always accompanied by larger, more diverse machines than were present in ZD, and the advent of enemy riders makes for a much more intertwined combat between human and machine enemies. Also, the complete lack of Corruptors and Deathbringers as the default 'we need you to fight x large machine' makes for more interesting engagements with each of its more than a dozen boss-tier machines as well as stronger variants for each of them.
I think it's interesting to find parallels in the games that succeed at this: Both Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild have a set of major bosses that serve to contribute to your ability to face the final boss (the Divine Beasts in BotW, and the Shard-Bearers in Elden Ring). Each major boss has an associated area of the map that is thematically or aesthetically tied to them, and each boss gives you a unique upgrade for defeating it (the champion's gifts in BotW, and the great runes in Elden Ring). Having just a few _really_ big extrinsic goals like this, which incentivize you to play the rest of game in order to find and overcome them, seems like a pretty smart structure that more games should ape. They don't have to be bosses! Riven, the sequel to Myst, used a structure like this with puzzles where your ultimate goal is to solve ONE really hard puzzle which requires knowledge of the entire game to do.
The problem with BotW and Ganon is the execution though. Doing the main quest feels like unlocking easy mode with cheats. Having the option to disable the champions powers feels like they know it was bad design but didn't want reviewers complaining about the difficulty.
@@tomstonemale I think the option to disable the champions powers probably came from Urbosa and the goron (can't remember his name)'s powers annoying players during playtesting. I know sometimes I was annoyed they were getting in the way of what I wanted to do (like spin and destroy grass without electrocuting everything around me) or having the glowing shield always appear while I was trying to learn to parry. I do agree that the champions reducing Ganon's health feels like unlocking easy mode, but I think it also fits with the story and it would be weirder to try and have them do something different, like buffing Link when its already an important plot point that each of the guardians are powerful weapons.
@@Misclipss doesn't sound like the same thing at all. My problem with the main quest in BotW is the reward for freeing the Divine Beasts is completely disproportionate for the effort made and for the challenge ahead, hyping the final castle and Ganon but they are a joke just with the champion powers, on top of the giant robots nerfing the final boss. Not a single skill you learned in the entire game is necessary to defeat Ganon if you go after completing the main quest. The dlc boss is harder than the big baddie and even then you are rewarded with a faster cool down for the champion powers.
@@ViridianForests it doesn't fit the story at all. It only made me question how the champions were defeated by Ganon, and telling the player they were defeated because of a surprise attack and that you are fighting a weakened version of Calamity Ganon at the end feels cheap and lacks pay off. Not to mention the way the story is told requires you to leave the castle, talk to Impa, get the last memory and come back to defeat Ganon for a terrible secret ending. I like BotW but in the late game every shortcoming of the story, the combat and the progression comes back to bite it in the ass.
Yes, finally someone mentioned that the storyline tells a narrative of a urgent situation that you need to do smth about rn. In Cyberpunk the story told me to go fast asf or I’m gonna die, every day it is getting worse… so I bearly did any side quests before I was dead
The problem is that open-world games have been dominating the market and so even the linear audience has been forced to adopt them. Pushing to make exploration mandatory risks losing the linear audience, while making a linear game risks losing the open-world audience. So companies basically let the players choose whether they want to play a title like an open world game, or like a linear game. But the resulting experience tends to be lesser than if they had just committed to making the game one way or the other. Companies simply can't fill a modern-scale open world with activities interesting enough to capture the attention of linear players who want everything to matter and feel unique, but at the same time, reducing the scope of the world to an extent that would satisfy linear gamers would leave the open-world gamers dissatisfied.
I have Cyberpunk 2077 in mind. Your mind is disintegrating so you traipse around Nightcity doing races, fighting turf wars, and searching the legendary biker's jacket. The amount of details invested in fleshing out Nightcity is wasted on the single story experience alone, even with the races, wars, loots, and fetch quests, 50% of the maps are barren and missing something.
I myself enjoy a linear story, but nothing catches my attention better than a side quest, i get most of my exploration through side quests and can spend hours running from side quest to side quest. After the second playthrough though I just go in a very linear fashion forward as if the game was made for it. I don't see the problem with playing an open world however you like because it's open for you to play how you like. The only time it's an issue is if missions are level locked, the single worse mechanic in gaming
@@isdrakon9802 The thing is, it's not truly "open for you to play how you like". The only choice you really have is whether or not to ignore side quests / exploration. I like linear games, but I also love expressing myself through character customization. If you play an open world game like a linear game, you probably won't end up getting most of the coolest cosmetics - they tend to gate those behind optional content. I'd like to have the process of acquiring the cosmetics be fun and streamlined to minimize grinding, but I'm not allowed to play that way in these games. Instead, I've got to run around collecting all 147 secret elephant statues or whatever before I can unlock the goodies, which might not be necessary if the game had been designed to be more linear (and as such didn't need to fill a huge space with pointless collection tasks that require extra incentives).
This is what happened to halo infinite. Because of the open world the campaign levels couldn't be those awesome trails of badassery you got in the older games. And so the campaign sucks
Morrowind has a great intro, where after the introduction quest, the Main Quest quest-giver tells you "Go make a name for yourself." You can then keep talking to him and have him start you on the mian quest if you really want, or you can do what he told you and leave, go join guilds, explore, what have you. It's an awesome moment.
Kind of similar with Fable's renown quests. "Earn 120 more renown and come back to me" was a great way to get people to explore the areas they were in and experience the stories. You'd start a quest wanting the reward and then once you start you're invested
I actually think the reason why games like The Witcher 3 and HZD are so successful and popular is *because* they make their worlds matter. Witcher 3 is focused on making the world in-depth, ensuring that every side quest and character is unique, that the appeal of the game and the world is discovering new things - once you realise that there's cool stuff to do, you start to think "what else is cool to do?" and explore naturally from there. HZD on the other hand ties its side content into the world and the story. The story of HZD (and, to an extent, HFW) is tied intrinsically to discovering more about the world, whether it's the past or the present, and so every new thing you discover feels like it contributes to the game. I think your final point is great - we should want open worlds to matter. But in at least those 2 games, *they do*.
I agree with you regarding TW3 and HZD, bit I think HFW completely dropped the ball and fell into the common open world trap of more is better, which for me really hindered the game overall. HZD had the standard open world stuff, but there was not too mich and it didn't really outstay its welcome I feel HFW did outstay its welcome and didn't fit well with the overall narrative.
I think HZD in general does a really good job of tying the world into the main storyline, but there is a split in the worldbuilding I find a bit annoying. I find myself really not caring about any worldbuilding that has to do with the current world, while anything to do with the Old Ones is fascinating. Even with missions, I get annoyed when the sidequest is just about some random local politics between one tribe and another or something, rather than how a tribe is interacting with the global problem.
Yeah I definitely agree with the video that the story objective of The Witcher 3 conveys an urgency that the actually gameplay and world doesn't follow. However, I still found that it felt natural to do stuff like side quests because they were usually either related to side stories (like the ongoing war) or they were witcher contracts, where even though they have nothing to do with the main objective, it still feels natural because Geralt still basically has a day job that he has to do to make enough coin to survive. Finding and saving Ciri is such a massive task in the game that I guess it doesn't actually feel that urgent because there's just so much Geralt has to do. With HFW the main story is a lot more linear and aside from some specific cases the side stuff feels really irrelevant.
Those two titles are the only ones from Raz's list I've played, and I loved them both, flaws not withstanding. HZD drew me in with its story, I was instantly curious about everything and I found the story personally compelling and touching (weird for a video game, but hey, it happened). The side quests got a bit Mary Sue-ish, Aloy being the fixit woman, solving everyone's problems whereas in the Witcher 3 did a much better job on side quests - he's a Witcher and he needs the money, it's internally logical. The latter's story was also great and felt more time-sensitive but it was easier to be caught up in lived-in ("realness"?) of the world. You're a messed up dude in a messed up world and everything felt internally consistent. I found its biggest flaw was (1) an overwhelming number of side quests and (2) lack of a sense of urgency other than "Ciri's in danger". I'm definitely a completionist but I became really tired of having to do so many things that I haven't finished blood and wine yet after 172 hours of play time on my first playthrough. But blame that on the completionism. HZD felt like some of the quests needed to be enforced on their time sensitivity: finding Sona, the Nora being raided after going to Sunfall, saving Ursa, other stuff like that. I feel there should be consequences for dithering and doing other things like how some quests in the Witcher 3 fail if you wait too long to do them. I found HZD's failings to be human combat, human settlements - anything involving humans that wasn't a cut scene. Finding collectibles (hints or rumors would have been nice instead of relying on a outside of the game guide to find the last few things) and HZD's fauna being stationed in specific places and not roaming freely was a choice I made from a game design standpoint that felt like it didn't make sense in-world. Fighting the larger machines felt like it also should have been harder: the final fight inside Thunder's Drum against the fireclaw took me like an hour the first time I did it on normal difficulty. But Raz addressed that in his picking the right difficulty section. I didn't yet understand countering enemies weaknesses properly and it was a real slog, but also felt like a real achievement. doing a fresh playthrough from scratch on the ultra hard SUCKED for the first 10 character levels but then became an appropriate amount of difficult where everything was hard, but still doable and forcing me to counter everything correctly. By comparison, the final battle was a real let down and felt far too easy, like they ran out of development time compared to other quests. On exploring, I was still finding new quests in HZD on my third playthrough simple because I hadn't wandered through a given town or person on a previous playthrough, that was neat.
Yet Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild have no story, no character, no interesting side quests and yet people praised these more than a character and narrative driven game,
I feel like the Arkham games nailed the side missions because it makes sense with the story that has multiple different villains so it is fitting that Batman would go on side missions because he’s trying to solve multiple cases, because he’s Batman. It can have a linear story but the side missions can fit within that linear story and make sense.
As someone who played Horizon Forbidden West, they did kinda fix your problem with the story and the robot dinosaurs l. While the way the story is told is done almost the same as the previous game, almost every mainline stories have you face off against one of the new robots so people who only play the story can actually fight the robot dinosaurs.
That sounds like it addresses the symptoms, rather than the underlying issue, which can be enough, or it can simply shift the complaints to the new most visible symptoms.
@@joshbrabant1098 They also altered the drop rates so you know have to scan and strategically destroy, or keep intact, keep machine parts to recover choice loot.
@@lordneojacks Don't cut yourself on that edge. Frankly I've found that Horizon is a very love it or hate it series. People either really like the setting and get sucked in or it leaves them cold. And I'm cool with that.
I think part of why I struggle with that is a stupid sense of shame and stubbornness. Like, if I just keep practicing I'll get it! But then I don't lol
@@razbuten for me, I almost never play games with difficulty options, with the only ones I remember in recent history are Nier Replicant, Automata, and Doom 2016. Whenever I play/played those games I just chose the highest or second highest available option, for me it makes me want to get better at the core mechanics of the gameplay, while still being able to enjoy the lore and story of games like Nier: Automata. I guess that I do this because the Souls' series taught me how to be a masochist lol.
@@razbuten I feel the exact same way. I also struggle choosing a difficulty because I don't know HOW the game implements difficulty. Will The enemies be faster and more exciting to fight or will their health just double and fights will be more tedious?
@@razbuten If you are struggling at the beginning but are still making it through, then keep that difficulty until it becomes easy. Once it becomes too easy, if you can, change the difficulty to bring back the challenge. I watched some LP of Skyrim and Fallout 4 and he started out on normal but was on the highest level by the end to keep the game somewhat challenging.
When I played Rdr2 I remember wanting breaks from the main story, wanting to progress my character in other ways, own cool side-mission stuff and enjoying the other interesting stories that don't contribute to the main story arc before eventually moving forward
I think open worlds that dont force urgency of the story handle this alot better- Morrowind for example, the main quest is kinda presented as "You can do this but you can also do whatever you have time" , and even asking you to do side work as part of the main quest, makes side quests feel important in their own ways, and exploration is rewarded by loot often
@Evacody124 i think its a wonderful way to integrate that doesnt rush you with urgency when done well- oblivion for example was BAD to me cause I yoloed the main quest. Skyrim I did at least walk off and do whatever for awhile, cause I didnt feel intense urgency even after attacks cause it feels like a "holding pattern" instead of active invasion. Like in morrowind;the threat is real ,active and serious, but not supppper immediate. Idk its a good way to do a main story in rpg style games particularly to me
@@user-bn5df6hl1d the problem is people that that all open worlds are the same kind of game or that open worlds are a genre. They are not. There are open world RPGs with influence from D&D and Diablo. Then there is action adventure games. Taking away the side quests or have very little to no story hurts RPGs. Because that's why people play RPGs is for the story. RDR2 is an action adventure game. People can't compare it to the likes of the Witcher 3 or Skyrim. You can compare it to the Assassin's Creed games before Origions though. Same with Tomb Raider.
For me personally when I played rdr2, my love for all the members of the gang were what encouraged me to earn money and give them a nicer campsite; I loved giving the gang nice table cloths, blankets and stuff like that as well as getting to hear how happy I was making them :)
Fun fact: almost every side mission in Witcher up to finding Ciri has to do with finding Ciri. Often people will tell you they saw her at some point during side quest.
Even the ones that don't have a connection still make sense for the narrative because sometimes you simply need money to continue your search and doing Witcher stuff is literally your job, so it's *necessary*. That, or the people who have the information you need demand you do some unrelated task for them first, so most of it really doesn't feel like it's ignoring the urgency of your quest at all. You're still working towards the same goal.
That's just not true LMAO At best a tenth of side quests will mention Ciri in dialogue, and a third of those will actually actually help you towards that goal. It's A LOT more than in other games and it does relieve the urgency of the main quest to some extent, but the whole world doesn't revolve around Geralt and Ciri and that's a good thing.
I get what he says though. I for example LOVED Witcher 3 did so many side missions had a ton of fun. Playing Main story missions felt like checklist. It told me everything is super urgent and important but I just dicked around 5h on a ghost hunt and finding some herbs... doesn't feel THAT urgent. It wants to tell me the wild hunt is this force of nature to be feared... But I'm over leveled to Ultimo from side missions and 1 shot every encounter. It's this world threatening event... Yet none of the powerful people I knew in game cared or reacted. It just felt disjointed to me. Honest experience main story least favorite part in this masterpiece (almost exact same for Skyrim btw.)
@@notrelevant6702 Because the powerful people in game (Radovid, Dijkstra, Emhyr) have their own problems. On the other hand, some NPC's flat out tell you that they fear the world is ending, and how its going to happen. Also there are powerful people (Skellige's leaders) in the game who care about and acknowledge the Ragh nar Roog.
It seems to me that you just dislike the open world formula. And that's fine, people are different, with different tastes. Just play open world for the main story and leave the rest of the stuff for the players that wanna engage with it, if you don't feel the motivation to do it. But i disagree with the point that breath of the wild is a better game because it has no story, compared to RDR2 or the witcher, and so it can better mix it with the open world stuff. I would take a great story, with great characters and world building, everytime.
His argument is not that open world games suck, nor did he quantify the quality of any of the games he mentioned (he actually praised the quality of most in a sentence towards the end). His argument is that they can be so much better with proper structure through a well implemented story and purposeful "true open world" activities.
@@BittenToe having a true open world RPG and proper structure is kind of an oxymoron. if you're allowed to explore the world at your own pace, then obviously you can't integrate an evenly paced story that would make sense for every player. some people breeze through to the final boss in 10 hours. some people play 50 hours and don't even make it past the first few stages. it's impossible to have an open world RPG that caters to both. most games now just integrate them separately to appease both groups of people.
hope you're having a good day. :)
I am thanks
I have been, thanks. Hope you're having a good day too :)
It's always a good day when you release a video. Hope yours is good too Raz
No, I hope YOU are having a good day raz. Take care of yourself
(｡•̀ᴗ-)✧
Thanks, you too!
I always go into open world games super excited to explore, but I normally quickly realize that 90% of the map is absolutely empty and exploration was never really the devs priority in the first place...
Sounds like you are just bad at exploring or only played the worst games out there
If the game has a quest marker like most do, they don't care about exploration. Nothing kills exploration like being told exactly where to go all the time.
you need Elden Ring
Or botw
Try subnautica
I personally like the fact that in rdr2, you're just part of the world and that's it, the world doesn't revolve around you, and it makes it feel much livelier and basically revives the era it portrays and for me that is what actually makes it an open world game
Exactly
The one thing i think that could have been improved would be to have a better integration between the camp and open world activities and the story missions. Instead of them being prerequisites for progressing the story, have the camp morale not only affect the odd dialogue choices, but combat ability of the gang, and maybe some alternative outcomes within the bigger heists (things that go wrong and stuff).
@@galumir that could work but rockstar made it the Dutch way it is making money how ever you can to help the camp "supposedly " and we make side missions to make more money to supposedly help the camp
All that "aiding the camp" is does unfortunately is rise your honor a bit and filling the various needs nets you a higher passive income via the gang (though that is in the 10s of dollars at most over a week, so hardly any use when you get much more via missions anyways).
@@galumir They should have seasons that slowly change to show actual changes and also use more realistic physics like a game called Phsyicus where you actually had to solve some scientific problems which you had access to knowledge if you didn't know how to do like learning the boiling point of water.
My 2¢: The core idea of open world has always been "I want to see what's on the other side of that mountain over there" - but that's not a genre, it's a setting. You can use that setting as the basis of an exploration/"adventure" game (Outer Wilds), an RPG (Skyrim), a platformer (Super Mario Odyssey), or even a puzzle game (The Pathless), but "open world" is not the genre by itself. It may simply be the case that trying to judge all these disparate titles by the same standard is always going to leave us disappointed in one game or another, no matter how you slice it.
At the same time, you make a valid point: Why bother setting something in an open world if the average player is just going to ignore it? The choice of setting is still a fundamental part of the design process, and developers would do well to seriously consider how an open world could interact with their core gameplay loop(s), as well as whether it's really worth the substantial time and effort which it takes to create such a huge playable area.
yeah agreed. for me open world is mainly just a game that isn't bound by level walls and a set path. Sometimes playing a non open world game i wonder whats on the other side of that wall or what if i went down the other hallway instead, and an open world just has to be a normal game with the freedom to take a little walk just to scratch that itch.
though it does get bonus points for having interesting stuff, im not particularly expecting an immersive world where everything is interactable with our current level of technology.
this man is knowledge
@NYKevin100 Very good comment! Especially the first part, I couldn't have said better.
As for the second part, I'd say that chosing the open world, at least when it comes to triple A titles, has as much of a marketing value, than it has a game design value. And on the past console generation (PS4/One, the Switch being kind of its own thing) that tried to cut the ties with the PS360 era of corridor spectacle shooters, emphasizing the freedom of movement was a logical progression if we talk design trends.
As for: "Why bother setting something in an open world if the average player is just going to ignore it?", I'm not sure how much what most players are going to see is supposed to factor in the game design. Not to make a nitpicky argument, but most player don't play games to completion, and devs still put endings to the stories, final bosses etc. Lead devs should encourage thinking globally about how the open-world re-enforce the qualities and mechanics of the game, sure. But thinking ofgame design in terms of just making things you are sure most players will use is very limiting imho.
@@SebLeCaribou a lot of games aren't finished due to the wealth of side content players are playing, often out if a need to grind or fear it won't be there when they come back later, and not due to the core content going unfinished because there's too much of it. You can play through many 500 hour open world games in the time it takes you to finish a linear and fairly short game like Doom 2016 or Eternal if you focus down the main story, often the thing driving you to side content is grinding levels/gear. And I'm not talking experienced playthroughs, I mean first time playthroughs. This has to do with the fact that the core story of both games results in a similar length due to how the stories are written in most cases.
Linear non-open world games tend to have a far higher completion rate, unless they are RPGs with grinding mechanics and gear/level checks. There's actually something in game design circles called the 20 hour rule. Most people will finish a 20 hour game if it is linear. It's when you surpass that when it gets to low completion rates. However, that doesn't seem as appealing for marketing reasons and is a bit restrictive. Instead those first 20 hours are designed to be as fun as possible.
The question then becomes: is it worth having something over there very few people won't see if that development time can be better allotted to focusing on ensuring the quality of what most people see being higher. That's a very complex question, but the general wisdom is "if it's more important to the experience the game is trying to give, then focus on that over other aspects when it comes to the icing"
For me the question to open world or not becomes "if the act of physically traveling from point A to B, in a free and open way, adds something to the intended experience or not, or does it detract from the experience of this particular game, and is really there because it's a trend or a marketing thing?". I like to say, if an open world game loses nothing but scenery and "exploration" by adding fast travel, the open world is not being leveraged to the advantage of the game. Fast travel is an opt out mechanic. You are using it to opt out of the travel. If the majority of people are going to find opting out of an aspect of your game when they are aware of it desirable when they got time to interact with that aspect, then that thing likely isn't worth having in the game. A good use of open world is finding new ways to travel through the same area, of the experience of crossing the world on your chosen path being about the challenges you faced along the way before you ever reached a destination, regardless of how much exploration I did on the way.
I like to say Skyrim is two games at odds, and it illustrates a game that does and doesn't benefit from open world. The first is a game about fighting against the return of dragons and the imminent destruction of the world as the chosen one. The second is a game about going on am adventure, joining factions, acting as a mercenary for those with work, and completely quests.
The game about dragons doesn't benefit from the open world, instead it's detracted by it. It's a sequence of linear levels with a load screen you hold a walk button through, and if you were to go off and do something else, well we're apparently on a time crunch here, the Dragonborn leaving to complete 5 side faction quest lines, clear dozens of dungeons, build a house, start a family, collect a dozen or so ancient masks, and become the chosen of several daedric princes means that apocalyptic dragon threat seems pretty minor, as it takes the fangs out of that story about imminent destruction.
Meanwhile the game about being an adventurer, exploring, and doing all that side stuff does benefit from the open world. A main quest that suited such would be something about leaving home, arriving in a strange land, or just trying to make a name for yourself as you meet various characters and prove yourself to them. Something that's inherently more open ended, perhaps with a vague goal like "somewhere out there is the answer to the question of where did the dragons go and why are they back?" Without any chosen one nonsense or imminent disaster.
That second game is what Skyrim is famous for. That first one is... Well Skyrim main quest which people famously brag about not playing because it's so pointless. The main quest detracts from the game, and the game detracts from the main quest.
So when does a main quest and open world together serve the betterment of a game? Most Zelda games actually. Even before breath of the wild these games were often open world, just without as much side content in most cases. The open world created an area that made the world feel worth saving. You felt the evil of the big bad, not from his story influence but from the way he made the world more dangerous to travel through. You got to know, learn, and unlock ever faster ways to navigate the terrain. You'd dart around, sometimes seeing the same place dozens of times as you past it to different destinations. The world slowly advances, and while there's minimal side content to do, there's just enough it feels as if you can spare time to do it in passing. It fleshes out the world the main quest has you saving, as you're forced to travel through it. It makes it seem like a world. Having an open world makes the stakes tangible, and having a main quest makes it feel you have a significant part in that world.
Open world games a lot of work. They shouldn't be made unless that work is beneficial to the goals of that particular game. Not every world needs to be fully realized. Sometimes a story leaves no time for that, sometimes the story of how you ran through a linear series of events is the right call.
Just another example of how popular video game genre terms are a convoluted mess lol
I actually always try to NOT progress the main storyline in these games, and get frustrated when side quests themselves can’t be completed unless you progress the main story.
that sounds like a bethesda open world, which I mean as negatively as possible lol
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 Skyrim didn't have this though. You could spend hours wandering into caves and doing weird side-missions without needing to do the main mission. I get that's it's fashionable to hate on Bethesda now, but let's not lie.
@@torchlight1785right? I've played Skyrim for like, 100h on the last months and I don't remember when was the last time I did a single main story quest lol
@@wesleywyndam-pryce5305 Bethesda games are actually the only ones which allow you to do anything you want without even starting the main quest (besides tutorial). Still, they do put this sense of urgency which the video talks about... they really handled this well in Morrowind, where there was no urgency at start and you felt like a true nobody
sameee i always try to explore as much as possible and do all sidequest before the main one just because
The messed up sense of urgency was the worst for me in Dying Light. The other characters are infected and URGENTLY need the antidote. At best they have maybe a day or two left to before people start dying. This stayed the same throughout most of the story, so I always felt like I didn't have any time to engage in side activities. I had to go from story quest to story quest because if I didn't it felt like time would run out and all my allies would die
Oblivion had the same issue. The emperor died, the fate of the entire world depends on you delivering this amulet to his only surviving heir. Oblivion gates are opening across the world and hey wait why are you joining the thieves guild and hunting deer? Skyrim, omg the fate of the world is in your hands. You MUST tell the people of Riverwood about the dragons! Then go over to the Jarl and alert him OMG the greybeards have called you, burial grounds are opening across the world the entire universe is about to be taken over!!!! No time to get drunk and marry that hagraven wtf get back to the blades headquarters and kill Anduin.
Meanwhile in Morrowind. Uhh hey, here's this letter. You should deliver it if you want. I mean its the least you can do for us freeing you from prison and all. Feel free to get distracted nothing is really going on yet. Oh hey adventurer, thanks for giving me this letter immediately now gtfo and go join some guilds and explore or something. I don't really have anything else for you to do yet you should get more experience.
This is unrelated, but where is your profile picture from?
@@Stiksta Morrowind really does have a charm that Oblivion and Skyrim didn't get right.
My exact problem with yakuza 0, it's not that bad because it's more that the story is so engaging rather than a artificial urgency like dying light, but I always felt bad for doing the awesome side quests because I knew that I had very important things that I should be doing instead
@@prcr364 generic one from Google images. I just looked up profile pictures and eventually found it
I felt the biggest "load off" the sense of urgency in Breath of the Wild was not only the shift in objective, but the shift from an _active_ world to a _passive_ one. Usually, if you don't rescue Zelda immediately, that comes with something additional that you're trying to _prevent_ (be it greater harm to Zelda herself, or some apocalyptic event). In Breath of the Wild, that damage is already done. Narratively, the world won't get any worse if you _don't_ immediately stop Ganon, so you're implicitly encouraged to take your time to do things right this time.
You can even kind of see the difference within the same game with the cases of the Divine Beasts. If you go to Death Mountain, the Gorons face an active crisis with their Beast and worsening eruptions. Their homes and livelihood are under active threat, and once I entered the area, I didn't want to leave until that was resolved. When you leave Death Mountain again, the world is just... as it is, suffering passively, and it's easy to imagine the land getting no better or worse if you left it alone another hundred years.
Strangely this is why I quit playing the game. I felt no urgency or reward for playing it. I will pick it up every few months for a few hours but I’ve been playing it for years and probably only about 60% through it
I was literally thinking this same thing as I watched this vid! :) ---> main comment
Even a simple misspelling can ruin an interpretation. That's why even such a small error can have a great impact.
@Thélos Sensei Opinion on literary fiction versus genre fiction?
BotW is more of a "mild wild, inch deep" that Skyrim - but hey, its not the same old crap Zelda always does, so lets all cheer!!!!
as you said "save Zelda" sounds like an immediate objective, that is how i played twilight princess for example, you dont know if saving zelda will take 10 hours or 100 hours, while "defeat Ganon" really sounds like "finish the game" which is obviously not something players will want to do immediately after the start of the game, unless they are speed runners
I'd argue save Zelda sounds like the exact same even if I get your point, sort of. That could easily mean finish the game. For all a player cares this could entail doing everything in the game and that could be the ending cutscene.
@@anecro not really, in many games you rescue zelda early, even if she is captured again later
@@anecro Saving someone always sounds more urgent than defeating an opponent.
Defeating an opponent can be a very long term goal, as even though they can commit horrible atrocities in the time you take to do it, you may not be as concerned as say, if someone you love needs rescuing. The stakes become a lot more personal at that point, and you tend to worry more about what could happen if you don't go soon. It's just an inherent part of our brains to worry about our loved ones I find xD.
I’m reminded of one of my first and favorite truly open world games, Morrowind. Technically you could go after the final boss straight off the boat, though you’d have a hard time without either leveling up or using exploits. There was no sense of urgency in the main quest, and you were actually encouraged to go out and adventure, so it felt natural to do so.
That was my first too. Really wish Skyrim had taken more from that structure. Caius actually sending you to the guilds to become an adventurer before leveraging your growing reputation is brilliant storytelling imo, and makes the side quest lines feel legitimately connected to the main plot. In Skyrim, it really feels like the guilds are nothing more than a distraction from the main quest of saving the world. Wouldn't it be nice if we were supposed to seek allies among one or more guilds and then those allies joined us against Alduin?
Caius straight up tells you "go do some side content and explore a bit" very early in the story. It's not even enforced, you can rush through if you want. He actually does this more than once. It's such a small thing that does so much helping to getting immersed in the world.
Played Morrowind for the first time a year ago and absolutely loved it. It's now one of my all time favourite games.
Morrowind is the best Elder scrolls game
I was a 10 year old kid with English as a second language when I first played Morrowind. I wouldn't learn SHIT about the story until like 10 years later after actually putting the time and effort in but I still had a lot of fun messing around back then, I should give it a new try. Morrowind's story is DEEP in TES lore, much unlike Skyrim's main quest. I still had my hundreds of hours with Skyrim, but Morrowind definitely dropped you off the boat without a clue as to what to do if you haven't been paying attention. In Skyrim it's simple, follow the quest markers and eventually kill the evil dragon.
As a geologist the best open world I've played is death stranding, despite the rain heavily affecting the soil degradation , its the only game i've seen that the geologic formation actually makes sense and its not only there as a substitute to invisible walls (sorry english is not my first language)
As a gamer, Death Stranding isn't a game.
@@armyofninjas9055 Just cause you don't like the mechanics doesn't make it less of a game.
death stranding hooked me in so much. I loved the journey of it.
@@coldfrost3 I agree with the sentiment and everything but I think it was just a joke, they were just poking fun at the game.
"English is not my first language." Goes ahead and speaks impeccable English. Tf is wrong with you lol
Honestly the intrigue of open worlds is the world itself, the exploration is key to making it work, if the player has a reason to go over every hill and look under every rock because the world itself is Interesting and fun to explore, you've nailed it. Adversely, if you have a large area with very little to actually experience within the world you may as well be playing a standard linear map game with Interactive loading screens (walking from objective to objective)
This! The world itself should be welcoming for the players, to a point that they want to explore. Both extremes are bad that are 1. Shallow world with so called activity to just make the game an open world, 2. Too much focus on side activity to a point where it becomes necessary almost compulsory in order to finish the game.
I agree with this, my issue is it’s really hard to make an open world feel incredible more than one play through. I LOVED elden ring, I’ve played it twice, I’m about 1/3rd through my 3rd playthrough but I’m hit with this feeling of fatigue just going throughout the world this most recent time. This may sound like I’m
being hard on the game because it did give me two great play throughs but all of FromSoft’s other games I’ve played over and over again with no feeling of wanting to stop. DS3, Bloodborne, Demons Souls, DS1, they all feel reasonable to start a new file but something about Elden Ring, because it is open world, I feel the fatigue so much harder.
Yes yes yes! Prime examples:
Fallout: New Vegas
Fallout 4
FNV is a game that makes you WANT to go over to the giant green dino and actually gives you choices and in a vault somewhere there’s a really powerful gun just hiding in a corner, so you want to look in every corner because there may be a cool gun here.
Fallout 4 is railroady. You can’t have dynamic dialogue, you can go everywhere and every enemy scales down so that they’re easy as shit and like…that’s not fun. You can go anywhere sure but there’s no reason to do so, it’s all the same random enemies and the same scaled down objects and stuff in safes.
Yes and no. I am I would say driven by 30% challenge 70% immersion in games. Which means exactly a world itself is the biggest pull for me. Ironically I have really enjoyed very few open world games. The world for me nearly always falls apart. Because these games are designed with 5335 different play styles in mind I find myself drawn in by individual sections and then even more disappointed when the section doesn't interact with the rest of the game or worse makes the games world feel fake because it wants to make smth feel threatening but I over leveled on side missions and gameplay of a threatening story feels trivial.
I’d say the Witcher 3 has quite a good open world. There is a lot of stuff off the beaten track and even though the loot system is not a strong point, there is usually a neat little story behind most random encounters or interesting spots. And it’s quite normal to not being able to find everything even a few times through the story. I wouldn’t say it openly encourages exploration as much as it piques your curiosity enough that you go out anyway.
Maybe helped by some of the in-game lonely planet guides.
The DLC does the rewards a bit better, and really perfects storytelling.
Horizon, great as it may be, does feel a bit empty for me.
The Fallout Games have quite strong open worlds, so does Skyrim, even if it does suffer from its age.
Personally this has never been a problem because I'm naturally curious about the open world. In rdr2 for example it never bother me that the details don't contribute to the story because it made the world feel alive like it had nothing to do with me and I was just lucky enough to experience it. But yeah i do get the disconnect you would feel if this is not your approach.
Exactly, what I was thinking. I like the fact that in rdr2, you're just part of the world and that's it, the world doesn't revolve around you, and it makes it feel much more lively and basicaly revives the era it portrays
Agreed. It’s a feeling that the world doesn’t exist just because of your character.
Yeah these sorta videos are ridiculous. In gaming you just take these sort of stuff for granted and go with it.
Also, Assassin's Creed has been utter garbage for many years with shit game design and yet these YTers criticize 3 top games of the genre. It's just nitpicking. You can't simply make an open world game as detailed as RDR2 and include the story freedom that this dude wants
Absolutely agree! I felt like one tiny part of a larger world in RDR2 which is exactly how real life is. I loved that not everything had an effect or tied into the main story. To me, that's one of the biggest draws of that game.
Same. Events and such that had nothing to do with the main story felt like a real world to me.
Ghost of Tsushima did side quests right, even the smaller ones. Pretty much all side quests revolved around helping people displaced by war, which is the central theme of the game. And some of the core side quests take it a bit further by revealing how the enemy can sometimes be someone close to you.
The side quests in GoT are extremely boring and dragged out.
@@JB2FROSTYyou mean the entire Zelda game? It’s such boring trash of a game.
@@Jim-BagelWho said amything about zelda tsushima fanboy😂 ghost of tsushima has horrible repetitive side missions
@@Jim-Bagel Yeah both. But Zelda's world is interesting to explore regardless of side quests' quality, and GoT + all the other ubisoft format games have an inch deep mile wide world, while rarely adding interesting enough stories to offset that
@@k--musicthere is nothing to find tho, only shrines, when the players figures that out, the game is over
Although not an open-world game, yooka-laylee and the impossible lair does almost exactly what you recommended ghost of tsushima do, you can tackle the final level of yooka-laylee at any point, but it is so difficult that it is almost impossible to beat it without the extra lives you get from completing levels.
I have not played it, but it has been on my radar for a long while, and I am almost positive I will love it because of that structure.
I would consider many metroidvanias as open world games
Huge fan of Impossible Lair! Having so many necessary puzzles in the over world also helps break up the platforming and tie the levels together into a greater whole
@@FluffehTheSheep The main point of Metroidvanias is that they're NOT open worlds though? Ability-gated exploration is kind of the main feature of games like that?
Horrible game
For games like The Witcher and RDR2 I always create reasons in my head to explore the open world or do side quests. For example, I might think "oh I'll try and go to the top of that mountain to get a good vantage point of the area". Or maybe "I'll do that side quest so that I can make some extra money to feed my horse". Its an easy way to add immersion and give me a reason to explore even when under time pressure by the story.
yeah I remember doing the same in just cause 3
the world of this game was empty and boring , so I would always use my imagination to enjoy the game like imagining an action scene like car chases and ww3 battles etc.
of course that was all in the past ,if I did the same thing nowadays I'm sure I'll delete the game after 2 hours of playing
Well in real life you don't get to go single mindedly go do one important thing. The world exists with or without you. The witcher works fantastically because Geralt has his objective but the world is full of people who have their own problems and need his help.
@@acendiatstudios6517 buddy i thinks your in the wrong comment section
witcher 3 is freaking boring ngl
@@sparrow7551 that’s called playing in the sandbox.
For once, I want the "fight the last boss at the beginning of the game" trope to have weight on the game. If you beat the boss at the beginning, the games story goes on, and maybe the boss survives it, but it changes how the antagonists view you and the entire course of the story as well as how aggressive they are. Could even function as a NG+ mechanic.
@@lucasjsnyder Shadows Die Twice
I want NPC's to have regret when they see me running from the bonfire towards them
zelda botw
@@madraszewskaPL bad example, nobody gives a shit in the game after you beat the boss. Kinda the only drawback from that game for me. I wanted the story to continue but it just stops there.
Shadow of war allows orcs to remember you which is amazing and they can seek revenge and turn against you if you get them to join ur army
Honestly, exploring or not, I generally just appreciate the freedom, makes the world feel more immersive to me.
Ghost of Tsushima: Save your uncle at the castle
Razbuten: Ok, I am here
Ghost of Tsushima: Ok, but you are facing overwhelming forces
Razbuten: That's the best odds I have in years!
Then its an even fight haha
I honestly get overwhelmed at "open world" games due to my completionist mindset. I feel like I have to do everything. If they would change the open world aspect I would have way more motivation to do side quests for story reasons. That would be so much more satisfying rather than feeling like I'm checking off another thing on a laundry list of side quests to do.
Yup. I've done one 100% playthrough of Dragon Age: Inquisition and never touched it again. Dragon Age Origins and 2 on the other hand I've played multiple times.
that is how you are supposed to feel. Collectathon is a dead genre, it got shoved into open world node stompers for the purpose of profit. Every game is a reskinned GTA, where you follow the minimap markers and set waypoints or even fast travel, sometimes to places you haven't even been yet. And doing the side quests is sometimes at a detriment to the game. For example, leveling up in The Witcher 3 means the final boss is just going to be significantly easier, thus less fun, and the game's level scaling does not fix that.
Sometimes I feel like we just have to get past the completionist mentality to enjoy these games. The one thing that made me give up on Pokemon games as a kid was the "gotta catch em all" mindset. I don't like drudgery and I don't like people telling me I'm a fake fan because I didn't check everything off a video game checklist. I play games until they stop being fun. Once I let go of being a completionist, games got more fun.
I love open world games because I like having free reign and doing what I feel like doing without feeling like I should be doing something else. I like creating a version of the main character in my head and only doing the things that I think my imagined character would do. When people play Skyrim, we don't try to do everything in one playthrough. We play multiple times and go down different paths. Some open world games try to straddle the middle, but I honestly think that they should just lean into saying "you're not _going_ to complete everything in one playthrough and you just have to deal with that."
@@2GoatsInATrenchCoat Sure. You can try to play it your way to have more fun with it but a mor eimportant thing to accept is that games like this are essentially cable TV. They are not the diamonds in the rough they want you to think they are. Some of them might feel like a special experience because of the writing or the message in the story, or the graphics are amazing and the animations seem very human, or the voice acting is top notch but really what happened was they pumped millions, tens of millions of dollars into this thing to make it feel like that, doesn't mean the gameplay is solid, and rarely will they stack up to a real game. I'm sure I may sound biased, but I just judge every game on the same metric, nothing gets a free pass, these games can't stand up to critique and we have to make excuses to like them.
The yakuza games are perfect because the open worlds are so small and densely packed with things to do
i`ve always loved how morrowind, as part of its main quest, has a character directly tell you to do a bunch of side quests before you continue with your mission
Sarcasm?
@@dragonhold4 no
AC valhalla does this too!
Well, most of the time the characters say something along the line of "we'll wait at destination until you are ready"
But one time (for as far as I've played yet) the PC was explicitly told to not immediately follow for the main quest line but to do some side stuff first.
I use this same technique in every DnD game I run-telling players to basically “go outside and play” leads to the best and silliest quests in the game.
@@dragonhold4 morrowind's main quest slowly builds up urgency, it doesn't just start with you're the chosen one who will do blah blah blah, now go do side quests instead of your main mission. you hear about a prophecy and aren't even sure (obviously it's a game so we know the character is but the actual in game character doesn't) and as you explore the world and do side quests along with the main quest you learn more and more about the prophecy. Morrowind doesn't have level scaling in the same ways the newer elder scrolls games did so you can't just only do the main quest and expect to be powerful enough to progress.
I liked how Enderal handled this by giving you periods where other characters were taking over the Main Quest and told you to do other things in the meantime. Its a simple thing but it gives the player the feeling of "this urgent matter is being handled, but I can take a break from it". That approach would already help a lot with the classic "the world is ending like, tomorrow" kinda story.
I do think studios kinda force Open Worlds into their games just because it sells better, so many of them dont gain anything but empty hours of repetetive side quests from having an open world.
It’s nice to see someone who’s played Enderal and talks about one of the best things abt it!!
@@johnbeniedictsantos4763 I'll hype that game up any chance I get!!
Interesting thoughts as always, Raz, but I'm not sure how I feel about trying to push exploration into a more mandatory aspect of progression. It would make sense for some titles, certainly, but a big draw of exploring an open world for some folks is specifically because it is optional and can be picked up or put down at any time. It's nice if a game offers a reward for exploring but I think I'd also get irritated pretty quickly if I instead felt like a game was actively punishing its players for not wandering through enough random forests or some such. If not handled carefully, mandatory exploration could easily turn the joy of discovery into a slog of collect X number of doodads or sprint ten-thousand steps to unlock the next story beat. I doubt many would be satisfied with such a system. Still, there's potential for a better balance with some of the options you've brought up. On the other hand, there is definitely not a one-size-fits-all solution here, either. I suppose in the end it all boils down to case-by-case considerations and game devs putting some serious thought into exactly how they want to present the worlds of their games to their players.
I love exploring, but nothing is worse than feeling finally ready to take on the main story and the realizing you need to do some mandatory exploring first. it makes exploration feel like a grind.
I kinda got that feeling in botw (not trying to start discourse, just a personal example). I got sick of seeing shrines and koroks after a while because it felt like I was just grinding items.
We should explore because we want to, not because we need 500 more dollars in the camp ledger before we can progress any further
Fully agree
I wish some AAA studio could have the balls to make an open-world game and just fucking drop the player in head first with no direction, no map, no crutches.
I totally agree but I think that a careful balancing of the progression can help there.
I hate with all my being the "fetch these 5 things from the furthest corners of the map" missions, because they become not really about exploring but about checking a list, which is mandatory art certain pre-determined points in the story. Instead, the cool thing about the pokemon approach is that you don't need to do anything specific at any specific time, you just need to get to know the environment, in whatever fashion and art whatever pace you want.
If you don't want to break the pace of the story, you can also make the two a choice: if you explore more you get *whatever progression item* that lets you (if you so wish) skip certain quests that would require you to find them. That way exploring can provide rewards for whatever objective the player is working on without being mandatory at any point.
In a sense, BotW does that by littering the world with shrines both on the "critical path" - i.e. the main roads that lead to the cities and the markers on the map - and in the most remote places of the world, providing enough rewards to beat the game both for those who want to follow the story and those who would just rather climb anything that stands in front of them
@@johnnybensonitis7853 umm... Fromsoftware?
As much as I love big sprawling worlds in games (and I love them a *LOT* ), bigger doesn't always mean better. Sometimes it's better to have a smaller map that's chock full of shit than big plains of very little to nothing in between. Yes bigger can have some advantages but they aren't enough nowadays
That's not the point of the video, haha. ^^
That said, i don't entirely agree with you. Space too big and too empty is just as bad as space too stuffed with things. Sometimes, it's good to have empty space.
For instance, if a game has a desert area? Well... you'll want to be careful not to put too much there.
God of War does this amazingly. It’s “open world” with a linear story, and the map is very small compared to most open world maps but there’s just so much to do in the map and every part of the map is so full of detail that even doing side dungeons feels like you’re on the main quest. Everything is close together but feels miles and miles apart
Good example of this is the Yakuza series in my opinion, smaller explorable world full of things to do.
Bigger is always worse
I wish I could agree with you but unfortunately Elden Ring proved you wrong. Apparently people value quantity > quality is enough nowadays, and the game simply being bigger than the previous games have already led to people rating it one of the best games they have ever played simply because it lasted over 100 hours. It's pretty sad
I've always wanted a "curated mode" at the difficulty select screen which would just take you through the missions and side missions in the intended order.
Now that you mention it, that would totally work with rockstar games. Like what if they made a “campaign mode” where they get rid of the open world and just play the missions?
ooo that's neat
I would like that option so I'm not over leveled. Its hard to take anything serious, or even have fun doing early/ mid game stuff i missed with end game world destroying powers.
Isn't that just the main quest in most open world games?
@@FraserSouris i think he means take out the open in the world and make it a level based game
I think New Vegas has a brilliant open world.
Not only do they use thought-out landmarks (like Dinky the Dinosaur) to draw you to where they want you to go, but by following the suggested route of the main quest (which it uses those landmarks for too) you're basically served a tour guide of the setting. You learn who the big players are and what the conflict of the game's about, and by the time you enter the Strip, you are brought up to speed on what will happen going forward.
New Vegas is one of the best games of all time. From the good character development system, the World, the choices in the World, etc...
New Vegas is miles better then lets say Witcher.
Rdr2 works here because the missions are presented often without urgency, and its natural to let some days pass inbetween many of the missions. Also many of the sidequest have impact on the gameplay and change the outcome of specific scenes and ways thing happens for Arthur, and makes for interesting conversations, and i think thats somehthing that intrigues alot of players into exploring as much as possible. Partly also because they want to experience the world with Arthur, with all his comments and funny interactions around. Another point is that this is a realistic game, the world doesnt revolve around Arthur, he isnt the chosen one or anything like that. He's just a "normal" guy.
Also, the gang members will come looking for you if youre gone for too long. I thought that was a really nice touch
I agree with you for the early chapters particularly 2 & 3. But for me personally, once I got into chapter 4 and the stakes started raising dramatically, it felt wrong (credit to the engaging story) to go on a hunting trip, or help out some random guy get a bunch of moonshine when ***spoilers***
Jack was kidnapped or John in Prison, or Dutch was fuelling a needless war for his own personal gain etc. I didn’t really feel comfortable taking time to do Stranger missions and explore outside of the St Denis Church and debt collection missions until after completing the story 100%
The honor system is also presented beautifully witu ur option directing wether u get high or low honor in a side quest everything jusy happens so naturally
I don't care about "beating" a game, aka following the main story until the end. I want to role play, period. And all the time I take for myself in the open world is what contributes to my personal idea of fun.
Oh, yeah, same! When I played Bully again after a decade, I just want to enjoy myself punching some bullies and getting chased by some prefects and also, for me, I love open-world because it doesn't shove to your face the story that much (maybe some open-world games do but the games that I've played under this genre, doesn't). And it feels like you control the world, you are living in real world in a way where you can control your pace, do something fun or ridiculous. And in Bully, i think managing your time was executed pretty well (you have a clock, and you have a choice if you want to go to class, or do a mission, or do some side quests, etc.) as well as the seasons or holidays, like winters, Christmas and Halloween. Hoping for a remake or remaster from Rockstar Games even though it's highly unlikely.
THIS, can't wait for Starfield
Well it's interesting that this is basically the complete opposite side of the issue, and also I feel that both you and the video are right, but also wrong, that open world RPGs are made for both of you, but also neither of you.
You want exploration, adventure, and no direction.
The video author wants direction and a sense of progression.
Trying to fit both into one game leaves you with some disagreeable qualities for both parties. You would have much more fun in a game like Subnautica or Outer Wilds. The other person would have much more fun in a game like Bioshock or XCOM 2. These games are just much better at their respective thing than a game that tries to do both.
I don't want a game to ever truly end
@@momothewitch I feel like games like skyrim are perfect for role players. The protagonist isnt voiced and you can choose dialogue. You dont have to care about the main storyline at all since your character isnt forcefully portrayed as though he does.
my favorite part of these games IS the mindless running around, completing side quests and collecting random trinkets. so much so, that sometimes i put 100+ hours into a game without ever finishing it.
Same. I've technically never even finished Skyrims main story even though I have 1000's of hours into it. I've done all the other questlines, just never finished the main one, cause I love trying out new characters and builds, and then doing literally everything in the game before the main story.
@@TheOnlyGhxst I think I only completed the main quest once, just for the story. I roleplay all my characters, so no two are the same. I play the same way in most open world games
The problem is that most open worlds games don’t encourage playing like that. It’s still fun, obviously, but a lot of players aren’t going to interact much with it because they’re busy with the story.
Emphasis on the never finishing. I would be ashamed if people saw how much time I put into these games just for me to only make it halfway through the storyline
@@agent-row11 why would you be ashamed for enjoying a game?
I feel like urgency can be used as an effective game mechanic if the passage of time has actual consequences and the save system allows the player to rewind to important points.
I think it would interesting in a world that would actively evolve around you and not just in response to you. Something like Shadow of Mordor's nemesis system but even more dynamic.
It is always perfectly okay for a game to design something to be "just for fun" rather than be tied to the plot or contribute to something necessary. Sometimes it's nice to have purpose to your actions, but not everything needs one for it to be enjoyable.
Honestly I prefer it not all being tied to the main plot. Often when playing games I will just finish defeating a boss or a big part in the main quest and I feel like I need a break. I need to just go do something else that doesn’t affect the main story at all.
True, but I think people have different definitions of what's enjoyable. Some like open worlds for the pure fantasy of being there, so frivolous activities build that feeling. But since people I think experience games like a book, so activities that don't matter are like wasted plot threads. Of course, not everyone is all one way or the other, which makes game design tricky.
Morrowind fixed the urgency thing *so* easily. "Dude, you look like a wet paper bag, go do some freelance work and come back when you're useful."
It also means the main story isn't as interesting as a result since its relying on the side content to do the heavy lifting.
@@FraserSouris that's not accurate at all. The main story is amazing and focuses on the world around you and it's history as well as how you interact with it. Forcing you to do side quests and interact with other people means that it feels much more natural whenever those people decide to help or hurt you. I hate games, books, and movies where it's just hey this guy's the main character because he's the main character! The "Chosen One" who does nothing to deserve the accolades or ire they receive.
@@FraserSouris It's not about making the side content do heavy lifting, it's about working into the narrative breathing room where the player can reasonably exist and perform activities in the games world without a barely managed or forced sense of constant urgency disrupting the players experience of it.
@@FraserSouris Not really. The main storyline unfolds in pieces where the urgency is never "right now" with a quest marker of "right here," so it never suffers from the weirdness of the main character knowing exactly what they need to be doing and choosing to do other things instead.
I play Open world game for the exploration. I can step into a whole other world and interact with the things within it. The main quest feels more like lore to me. It's there so the world doesn't feel meaningless, but I don't have to focus on it to have fun.
It's just living like you are someone else in another world/dimension.
That's why open world games like Elden Ring or Skyrim are so much fun!
Hope you have played outer wilds. Sounds like the perfect game for you !
I'd say Skyrim is ok, but has too many random encounters: "Not another bandit troop!"
That might explain why I've never been able to enjoy GTA or RDR despite them being some of the best selling open-world games ever made. Every time I play I outright avoid the story and wander around looking for fun stuff to do and useful items to collect, which works wonderfully in Elden Ring, Skyrim, and Breath of the Wild. But in Rockstar's games... it just makes the world feel empty. There's nothing to progress outside of missions and almost nothing to *do* outside of them, so it feels more like I'm walking around in a diorama than actually playing a game or "living in" their world.
@@cynthius6567 nothing to do outside of missions? Did you play either of those games?
Yes, the exploration is my favourite part, too. They should just forget the story, we can make our own! Also, much prefer games that allow you to create your own character, like Elden Ring and Elder Scrolls.
I would argue that exploration feels better when you know it's not the goal but you are drawn into it without really knowing it. When your sense of curiosity becomes too strong for you to just ignore it, that's when it feels more rewarding. If exploration is the goal it wouldn't feel like you're making your own discovery if it's blatantly the encouraged.
But if in doing so you are neglecting an urgent main story, the two elements are working against each other. That is the criticism.
One thing that BotW taught me is that making traversal itself satisfying can make exploring the world more interesting. People complain that Hyrule is too empty because it isn't stuffed to the gills with things like unique bosses, dungeons, weapons, treasure, etc. However, a lot of players don't get that feeling in this game because the simple act of traversing the world via climbing, gliding, shield surfing, etc. is just so fun and satisfying. I think this also helps replay value, as I still enjoy going to areas I've seen before.
I agree but the botw world is a bit too empty imo, it fits with the story but it feels too barren.
@@Victor-ks3sp you don't find treasure under every rock in the real world.
i'd not say it's emptyness in the sense of there has to be stuff to distract the player every 15 meters.
but it felt empty for me in a way of it was not lived in at all. the same 3 npc or enemy models kind of just walked or sat mindlessly around. the villages felt tiny small.
but maybe this was more due to technical limitations.
@@ARKAEOPTREX There's definitely a balance to be found between the freeform exploration and curated content in BotW. For me the game would have been perfect had some of the shrines been combined into longer, traditional zelda dungeons. The divine beasts were short for my taste. However there's no denying that making the traversal feel like a puzzle does make for incredibly engaging moments in the traversal.
@@DongKEKong That's probably why most people don't go out in to the real world to find treasure, and instead play video games to satisfy that urge. Who would've thought that 'realistic' doesn't equal 'better'?
I get what you mean, but I guess I'm tailor-made for open world games, as I cannot WAIT to explore the entire world.
Single player open world are the only games I really get any enjoyment out of personally. I don't really understand the issue of needing every side quest to tie perfectly in with the main story line, as long as those things makes sense in the world that has been set up. Games are not movies or books to me. I find good, coherent stories important for immersion, but going on an adventure into the bushes to find something interesting or find out what a marker on my map is leading to is just as immersive to me and doesn't give me any sort of panic to finish the main story. I always have in the back of my head that this is just a game and I only feel a panic inducing urgency when I'm given an explicit timer. This doesn't break the immersion at all for me as long as what I'm doing on the side is interesting and rewarding.
I often get tired of exploring after a while and then it triggers my OCD along with FOMO and my anxiety.
So I feel like I have to see and do everything in order to get it all completed and not miss out any side quest that might be cool or missing on some nice reward, but at the same time I feel like a drag after a while and can't wait to finish? the chores and progressing the story!
I'm playing through Horizon Zero Dawn at the moment and just completed everything I''ve found to be completed on the first area, now after arriving on the second area the next main and side missions are on the other fucking side of the map! And I'm already feeling like "oh crap, here we go again! It will take me forever to arrive there as I'll have to stop along the way to fight the new robot dinosaurs, light camps and conquer bandit camps and the missions are so far away that I even if I just try to go there skipping everything it will take forever!" I've already clocked 27h in and I feel like there isn't much more the game can offemr gameplay wise other than different robots, slightly better weapons, so I just want to progress the story
@@andremalerba5281 i hear
you. Sometimes it can feel like busy work just to pad the play time with hours and filler.
@@asprywrites exactly! For example the small AF pouches! I had the same bad experience playing Far Cry 3! The pouches were so small that I had to keep managing inventory all the time, so I decided to stop playing and grinding/farming resources to max all the crap out of those so I could just play the game without worrying about it.
That took me several hours of boring hunting just to prepare the game to be enjoyable for the next hours! Same thing about the skill trees, there's some skills in HZD that shouldn't be skills at all and shoud have been just default mechanics, like a skill for stealth takedowns from below, from above, a skill to recover your unused traps, another skill to rearrange your coils, another one that allows you to use your bow while walking over wires/rope...these are basic stuff that I expect to be already part of the moveset!
Idk, the more I play these games the more I feel like if the devs were developing a Street Fighter game you wouldn't be able to do a Hadouken until you reach midgame you know? LOL
Same
So, one minor issue with the notion of having everything in an open world contribute to the main story... a lot of open world fans don't really want that.
Much if the appeal is all the small, entirely self contained stories that are set in the same place, with similar themes.
Basically, a lot of folks are specifically looking for an anthology, not a novel.
Yeah, a good bit of his take in this video is based off the type of gamer that is more goal oriented. They need what they're doing to be connected to someform of forward progress. They don't want to explore just to kinda get lost in the world they need a good push to get get into the openess of the game. It's not a bad thing but, at least in my experience my favorite part in an open world game is when I'm free to ignore anything related to the main quest for the next 20 hours and just see what the world has to offer.
That's the really funny part... the norm is already more or less what he says he wants. Sidequests provide money, gear, xp, which is global progression and advances any other goal you have, but also have their own goals.
What he's actually complaining about is having multiple potential goals at once. He's attributing it to being goal/progression/etc oriented, but those are things that drive a lot of sidequesting.
Funny thing is, two of my favorite games are both technically open-world (in the older sense). LoZ: Majora's Mask and Shadow of the Colossus. They approach the open-world dilemma in opposite ways. SotC is the goal-oriented kind, where the only things you can actually do are a progression. MM is the opposite, where many of the things you can do have nothing to do with stopping Skull Kid but instead with helping the locals of Termina.
@@kreiskhaos8516 The thing with Majora is that it was writen and designed around temporal flexibility. The 3 cycle and manipulation of time are both plot devices and gameplay mechanics.
So unless you're planning on slapping time manipulation (beside smoking a blunt to pass time) onto every open-world, that isn't a good study case.
@@SonnyFRST The time factor doesn't matter in regards to what he said about MM...
i like when games have an explanation of who the different difficulty modes are intended for and when there's a featured difficulty level labeled with "intended experience" or something. it makes it a lot easier to accurately place myself and i've found i'm a lot more likely to play at a higher difficulty and have a better experience
Open world games went from my favorite genre to least favorite. Every major brand tries to replicate this somehow. This has caused major fatigue with a feeling of sameness. Larger does not translate to better. Linear games are so much more enjoyable to play now.
I don't know about that
But what about kingdom come? I think it's the second best open-world. It's so lively, small enough to travel even on foot but still large enough to get lost without a map.
@@KageToHikari_CG
Which one is the best?
try out the Stalker Call of Pripyat if you haven't, they are pretty brutal when you start and kind of force you to poke and prod everywhere until you manage to learn the incredibly interesting mechanics. it's linear with open world aspects that complement the storyline really well.
@@liamnehren1054
If you call that one linear, practically every open world game is linear, cause usually they have a main story to follow.
I don't think that's what the op meant.
This is why I adore The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Every step of the main quest feels like the stakes are going up, but never with immediate urgency, and the themes and structure of the story make exploring the world a key part of it. Right from the start, you're told to go do some sidequests before the main quest can really start, since you have to blend in a bit and get to know the culture of the new land you're in. About half the steps are to go to a new part of the map and get to know the people there in order to get specific information out of them. One long section is to get 7 different factions to accept you as a political and military leader, so you have to go to each one individually and figure out how to convince them (e.g. doing quests and exploring that area to understand their culture so you can be convincing to them). The main quest is purposely built to show off the open world and make you spend time getting to understand it. At no point is there a moment where you have to do something immediately. Things in Morrowind are gradually getting worse, an evil god is gradually growing in strength, blight storms are slowly spreading. These things will destroy the country in a few years and must be taken care of soon, but not instantly. It leaves space to go out and mess around. Best open world out there, despite its age.
I was thinking the same thing. In Oblivion and Skyrim it feels weird to go off and explore when world ending attacks are happening with Daedra/Dragons.
couldn't have said it better myself.
Morrowind is my favorite of the Elder Scrolls series and very much a contender for best game of all time on my books.
Fast travel in Morrowind is the best in the series. Multiple ways to travel publicly, then you have the Mage's guild where you need to be a member. Some scrolls that only allow 1-way travel. Then Mark and Recall, the most versatile yet also the most restrictive.
@@RipleySawzen More that traversal is within the diagesis as opposed to being from without.
10 years ago, the Mass Effect trilogy has shown that you do not need vastly oversized areas to create a huge, interesting and exploreable world and to tell amazing storys.
And more recently the Yakuza/Judgement games. Small areas but tons of story
Arkham City had a small map too but it was amazing because the content was packed into that small map. It meant that every few building there was something interesting happening.
Not to mention Halo lol
I played the original Mass Effect like last year and I think it could've used some smaller, more detailed maps. :P
@@vibratoryuniverse308 xactly. New Mombasa is such a fantastic place and while I wish it was more dynamic it feels definitely like a place.
I think that's one of the best parts about Elden Ring. They integrated the main story and side stories so well with the overall open world, and nothing really feels out of place.
Some side quests can even change the ending of the game or give you gears that greatly boost your survival.
No they did not.
@@evacody1249 Yea what the hell? That was easily the worst part of the game, it was laughably bad. The (side) stories themselves were fine, but actually completing the stories without looking up a walkthrough is really unlikely for the average player as it requires the player to go back to previous locations without any clear indication when and where. The game excels in a lot of things, but the quest system and integration of the stories? That was terrible. I get that this is a design choice, but the casual player is going to miss most of the side content that way.
@@evacody1249 nuh uh!
@thijsf395 it's definitely not new player friendly, but I like the quest system because it's somewhat mysterious from not having clear goals. You often stumble upon the next step unexpectedly and it brought me excitement. There's often help from item descriptions, but its still not clear cut, and that was intentional. It's not meant to play like other games
This is why I adore the style of self contained areas often seen in the Zelda series. I much prefer having several "maps" that are well developed than empty fields.
this is what smt5 does so well, its an "open world" jrpg but in reality its mostly linear yet open areas that are a ton of fun to explore and feel kind of like you're running through massive dungeons
Cat in box open world
Most of botw and totk were just empty fields my dude
@@Ima_lil_Man He said the Zelda series. Zelda is not limited to BotW and TotK, I'll have you know.
@@Slaraffus2750What?!?!? You can't be telling me Zelda is more than 5 years old...
I definitely haven't seen this game series throughout most of my life.
The issue i have with some openworlds is that the story itself seems to be focuses on exploring, like Horizon zero dawn. You can explore but the story itself already takes you around the map slowly, so exploring ahead of the story then going back to the story makes you go over the same ground you already explored.
it feels like game like this should use old open world design like locking off areas to difficulty. Because enemies or military will kill you (like gta SA) for trying to access an area to early. or an improvement on that technique
@@c.wubby.u861 They seem to have learnt their lesson in Forbidden West though.
Then don't explore...? Problem solved. Who is forcing you to explore ?
So don't explore in an open world, that's stupid, isn't exploring like half of the open world genre.
For me, I played Ghost of Tsushima on Lethal difficulty from the outset. It did mean that at the beginning I died countless times to what is now easy encounters for me, but it made exploring, practicing combat in bases and battling duels (in the mythic tales) all the more worth it because I needed better armour or skills to live longer. Going back to Azamo Bay with Gosaku’s armour or Uchitsune’s long bow and destroying the Mongols felt amazing. It worked well for me and made the act-ending missions felt all the more satisfying as I knew exploration and hard-work came together to beat the challenge, cementing Ghost of Tsushima as one of my favourite games of all time.
Thats why Skyrim and the other TES games are so beloved. The world in those games is awesome to explore, even after multiple playthroughs.
This is why I Champion the Hitman world of assassination trilogy so much. Even though those missions are technically levels, the extremely dense Design and attention to detail structure make them feel like lived in environments. Because of that they feel more immersive and believable than most open-world games try to "achieve"
Yeah! They’re everything that is fun about an open world game, distilled into a compact level. Small things that would be massively spaced out in an open world game are bunched together, AND they usually supplement the main goal of the level.
The Hitman Series is the King of semi open world design
@@titlasagna2172 It is not "demi open world". It is just called open level design. It is not open world because the game has no wider world out there beyond the confines of the area immediately relevant to your current objective.
@JoDoFe lol thank you, I really dont see how someone could call hitman levels open world or even compare the two. Open worlds have like activities and side content and stuff. Hitman is all about doing the mission, and everything in the level is either elaborate or less than elaborate ways to do that. Theyre great open-ended levels, and certainly feel more realistic than most environments in games, but open world adjacent even it is most certainly not
The maps in Hitman are crazy, they feel absolutely huge, alive and maze like. I always find places I never knew about when I replay them.
What you described for Ghost of Tsushima reminds me a lot of Fallout: New Vegas. Once the player arrives in Vegas, the main story consists in picking one of the game's four main factions to side with and then travelling the open world to recruit minor factions to their chosen side. Those factions will then join the player in the game's final battle. And they have a big impact too, making your final assault much easier. The player is given a lot of freedom in which factions they recruit, how they recruit them, and whether they recruit any factions at all. For instance, for every minor faction in the game, exterminating them or ignoring them is always an option. Furthermore, completing minor side quests will often reward the player with reputation gain with a given faction, which can, in turn, make them easier to recruit or infiltrate. All of this comes together to make the world of New Vegas feel like a cohesive and interconnected place where everything you do is building up to a final climactic confrontation (even when that often isn't the case). I am not saying this is an exact comparison to what you were talking about- the player cannot initiate the final battle at any time and they are explicitly told of most of the factions they should try to recruit - but it is the closest existing example I could think of to what you were describing.
I feel like New Vegas also does well with the idea of "poorly placed pressure to complete the main story missions", as the main story in Fallout starts out as "find the guy who shot you and get answers", which is really presented almost as more of a loose prompt. New Vegas does a really good job, even in comparison to other Bethesda/Obsidian games, of making the main story work in synergy with the open-world & side content instead of working against each other like the video mentions.
New Vegas is such a good game, wish we got a Demon Souls-type remake for it or another Fallout game developed by Obsidian. I have high hopes for Avowed, I hope it's a little bit bigger in scope than Outer Worlds.
@@fozzythasalesman6125 fallout new vegas had a lot of developers of the first 2 games. With the original vision etc. Thats why its so different from 3 and 4.
I spent this entire video thinking "Morrowind. You're looking for Morrowind." :)
It's honestly wild to me that it solved every problem people complain about regarding open worlds, and developers have spent the last 20 years ignoring it.
It has an involved main story, which you'll need to do to defeat the final boss (prophecy-severing aside). But while that will give the information you need to reach him and the tools to fight him, it absolutely does not give the skills, levels and gear required to *win* the fight.
For that, you need to do side content. Go dungeon-delving, do some quests for interesting loot, spend money on trainers to improve your levels. It's a lot like Breath of the Wild in that regard.
But where Breath of the Wild has no central plot to speak of after leaving the Great Plateau, Morrowind's is very in-depth. It's a solidly structured story about finding your place in this foreign land, making increasingly powerful allies and uncovering ever more layers of the complicated history. All so you ultimately have the context of why the villain's plan, and your fight against it, matters.
But crucially, said plan isn't coming to fruition anytime soon. It *will* happen if you don't do anything, but that won't be for months yet. There's no friend to be rescued, no villages being attacked. That gives you the peace of mind to do the main story at your own pace, and actually engage with the side content.
I was thinking of Morrowind as well! I've put in 50 hours into that game and have never progressed the main plot past talking to Caius Cosades. Everytime I make a new character, I just spend my time exploring the world and talking to everybody which leads me to finding quests that I've never found before.
I was also thinking of Stardew Valley as well. I would consider it open world since you can do everything at your own pace and focus on what skills you want to improve on. The main quest is completing all Community Chests but you don't really need to do that to progress through the game.
Have't played morrowind or BOTW but what I think you're describing when you said, "while that will give the information you need to reach him and the tools to fight him, it absolutely does not give the skills, levels" and "For that, you need to do side content." is level cap for missions? Which is a thing in almost every open world RPG now.
@@ashikmohds yup i have the same thoughts as yours.
In BoTW case, you can literally go straight to the end game boss after the tutorial but you will definitely get your ass kicked because you are weak af without any sort of good gears and powerup that you would get if you did some exploration first.
The combat is shit and I think that turns a lot of people off, but it's an amazing game.
That also just sounds like Elden Ring to me.
The way that Baldur’s Gate 3 handles this dilemma is fantastic. There’s a general main plot which can play out in countless ways, and just about all the optional side quests tie into it. Your actions in one may have an unexpected effect on another, or may ripple into the main story in unexpected ways down the line. And then, similar to your Ghost of Tsushima idea, succeeding at many of these side quests will grant you some kind of ally that you can summon at will during the final assault-and their different abilities can honestly make the difference between life and death. It’s an incredible game.
My mind is very simple 🤣 things like clearing “fog-of-war”, item/quest markers, 100%-ing areas (like when the map goes from green to red as you complete objectives in each area in Mad Max) are enough to motivate me. In fact, I find it hard to resist the urge to do everything BUT the main quest, just to make sure i don’t miss out on anything.
That said, it’s great to see things from another perspective, and the improvements you talked about that would make things better for those extrinsically motivated would make things even better for those of us that are intrinsically motivated as well.
Quality comment. My thoughts exactly
sounds like u started gaming in 2015 lol
@@MGrey-qb5xz I was born in the 90s and I'm the same...
What about that statement gives you the impression that only recent gamers from 2015+ could feel that way?
It's a weird statement to make...
@@PlaidSuitPinstripeWorld carry on then , no reason to strain our mind on something slightly complicated
@@MGrey-qb5xz I agree with this comment and I also started around that time so you are right?
weird how the whole industry "forgot" about New Vegas and how it exemplifies excellent open world design... even though the players never shut up about it
But are Cazadores, that force you to travel away from Vegas, *really* excellent open world design?
But, jk, I think I get what you mean - the part where it forces you to deal with "optional" content focused on the different belligerents of the local upcoming battle, right?
@@AusSP They did a good job of placing key points of interest along the path that most people will end up taking not get to New Vegas. Assuming you actually stop to check things out, you’ll know what’s up with all the major factions and even grab a couple of companions by the time you finally reach the city.
@@thedapperdolphin1590 and it levels you up for the city.
My only complaint about Vegas is travel speed, walking (i know it considers it running) takes forever and the next fastest option it fast traveling between previously visited locations. (Which on the 360 resulted in a lengthy loading screen, backwards compatibility from current gen eliminates this issue) Note that even in a game like RDR2 where you ride a horse, travel speed should be considered more in terms of time between destinations not litteral mph or m/s.
@@AusSP beyond that, i think the landmarks and stuff like that. I wanted to find the man who shot me real bad, but i just had to see wtf was that giant dinossaur, also kinda following the trail
the game just hasnt aged well
This is why I love Sable! The whole objective is to just explore and find your place in the world. Every "side quest" is character growth and enforces the themes.
You have great taste
I’d be curious of your take on Spider-Man, which has a strong linear story - but because it’s not built on some singular end goal, it had pauses built in that felt natural where the mainline locks up for a bit and you go exploring. It is, eh, “forcing” you to rather than building the story itself around it, but it was also a bit of a relief having a narrative which didn’t force a continual sense of urgency on you.
Rdr2 does the open world thing beautifully imo.
Throughout the whole game you're so focused on the main mission dotting the map, that your main random encounters are only on the way to the next mission
But in chapter 6 when Arthur gets diagnosed, alot of the missions are less pressing besides John's imprisonment, but other than that every other mission has a stopping point for you and Arthur to go explore and enjoy what little time Arthur has alive.
The only things I wish were present were camp funds being required for progression, and a recipe system paired with a hard-core difficulty that adds in food being more necessary. Which encourages hunting and exploring more than just chapter 6
Agree 100% with you. RDR2 really needs a hard-core survival mode for the entire game.
@@zensoredparagonbytes3985 New game plus would be nice too with added difficulty because you have all your equipment available to you (kinda like elden ring or from software games)
I only felt rushed in rdr2 after Arthur fell ill
I think Metro Exodus hit a good balance of openness, with large open levels instead of a single open world. There was a lot to do in each level but it rarely overstayed its welcome. And each level was an entirely different environment, which made things never feel repetitive and made me want to explore more
That's a philosophy from at least The Witcher 1 and the first Assassin's Creed back in 2007. I think in terms of nailing it, The Witcher 2 might've been the peak for those limited open worlds. Exodus has an advantage by using whatever design it needs; so it has 2 open-world levels, 3 linear ones, a more open linear one, a prologue, 4 intermissions, and 2 mini-levels inside Volga and Caspian.
Yes I agree. And the metro exodus has what I feel is a must for such open levels. Its a genuine sense of discovery which so few games actually achieve. Elden ring is the best example of this
@@ThePolistiren NieR automata
@@mum-your another good limited open world.
@@incius8341 it’s not really that limited. The game world is rather large, and that’s considering areas you only go to a few times for the bonus content outside of the main story
The best open world title for me was PS4 Spiderman, I never wanted to fast travel because web swinging was so much fun, and I felt like spidey when I was going in one direction and got strayed out of the path due to some minor crime. You really wanted to stray a little because you were the hero, but never too much because you needed to keep going on
Yes, all the movements of spidey are flawless. But it did not change the fact that the game world is as uninspired as some other titles.
The open world kinda sucked tho and the activities in the world were even worse.
I got bored, it was too repetitive. Suffers from the same issues as the rest.
I also liked the way the city changes as you progress through the story
@@chrismao8815 its a Spider-Man game. He’s not known for exploring. What would you find in New York City? The open world just compliments his traversal abilities.
I think a great marker for how well a game incorporates its open world is how often one fast travels. This is not always the case, as in something like BotW the map is crazy big and you need to move around a lot, but when I played Spider-Man the last achievement I got for platinum was the one for using the fast travel 5 times. Swinging around the city is just so fun that fast traveling seems like a waste
Breath of the Wild, Outer Wilds, and Elden Ring are some obvious shining examples of how to do an open world really well, but I'd also like to shout out Westerado. Westerado is a classic flash game (with an expanded full steam release) where you are tasked with getting revenge against the person who murdered your mother and brother. Seems simple enough, but the problem is that you weren't there when it happened.
You have no idea what this person looks like, or where they are, so it becomes a pseudo-murder mystery game as when you complete a side quest, the NPC usually gives you a visual clue about them that narrows down who they might be. Also, at any point in the game, you can pull out your gun and shoot literally any NPC, no matter how important you might assume they are, and then you have to deal with the consequences of that. Which is hilarious. It's not as mechanically refined as a lot of other genre trailblazers, but I can't stop thinking about some of the radical things it does to make its open world more interesting than so many others.
The game doesn't even tell you if the bad guy is just some randomized NPC in the world or if finding them is some scripted event, and since I've never completed the game, and information about it online is scarce, I've never actually found out myself. I've heard different people tell stories that seem to imply both, meaning some people are definitely lying. It gives the feeling that it's a modern version of Mew Under the Truck or other playground myths.
Elden Ring and BOTW wild have lackluster stories. BOTW wild has some of the best environmental interaction and travsal its a fantastic open world. Elden Ring is above Adverage But the open world has allot of repeated bosses. NPCs are lifeless, Side quests are few and far between And there not much to other than kill enemies. Kingdom Come does a pretty good drop at telling a story and making the player find there own way. But games like Elden Ring you can just do the main quests and you can just farm one area without having to expore anywhere else certain areas give you more XP so its pointlesa farming other areas.
I wish Elden Ring had stuff to do other than kill things. It’s fun but combat is the only thing going for it, and after 60+ hours it starts getting tiring.
@@John-996 Wdym? There's a 4 side quests that unlock 4 different endings. There's secret areas upon secret areas. Maybe it's inaccurate to say side quest, but every NPC has a story that reaches a conclusion. I'd like to push back that if you think the stories are lackluster than you aren't paying attention to the world building. A lot of the story is told through the items you pick up along the way. Even if there are copy paste bosses, at least there's some narrative purpose to all the enemy placement. There are entire UA-cam channels like Vaatividya and SmoughTown dedicated to deciphering the lore.
@@John-996 you can't criticize ER for having repeated bosses while praising BOTW that has only 16 different types of enemies including bosses
@@shakkoryu They didn't praise BOTW for it's enemy variety though. Breath of the Wild also isn't focused on just combat in its gameplay loop. A large majority of what you'll be doing in Elden Ring when you're not exploring is fighting in combat, so the game puts a greater emphasis on it. Breath of the Wild might have repetitive enemy types, but it's also focused on solving puzzles, and it gives you a lot more options to take down enemies (Elden Ring gives a lot, but most are locked out depending on your build. Regardless 95% of the time you'll still just dodge, attack, repeat). Elden Ring gets deathly boring after a while because of this, at least to me, while the other Souls games didn't.
I think Bethesda handelded this differently, the main quest was the first story you find however every other story is just as important, is all about the value you put on each narrative as a player.
which except in the case of new vegas was a bit lazy. each story is treated like it's own world and there is no effect on the story from other things happening in the world. Hell some even contradicted the lore of the series! Which points to separate development teams, no mandatory lore readings and fact checking (or at least not enough).
Then there's all the retconning of the original games.
for example:
Fallout 4 is in part a retelling of Fallout: brotherhood of steel's act 3 I think it was, when the brotherhood arrives in the Boston area. There you find a ruined Zeppelin with one surviving soldier from the liberal members of the brotherhood who were sent on a suicide mission to the east coast USA by the conservative isolationist majority.
The Zeppelins were used to come from the west coast, something they didn't even mention in Fallout 3, the ones that arrived in DC were stripped, a few were lost crossing the Rockies with all hands on deck, one crashed in Boston. Fallout 4 all of a sudden has one come from DC full of the brotherhood as they were on the west coast, the east coast was 100% the people who were against that kind of way of acting and has barely been there for a few years, the story of brotherhood goes that they start popping vaults open and protecting villages and vaulters from raiders and accepting recruits. The super mutant war we see in FO3 comes after and ends (potentially) in an alliance. Now one of them going around raving against Robots makes sense, spoilers from a really old game: the final enemies the brotherhood face in brotherhood of steel are intelligent robots so such a storyline of how they act would make sense... a few years later... and not in Boston or at least not flying into an area already under brotherhood protection and then not in a destroy them all sense, they would have just shutdown the project so a mystery game ending in arrests would have made more sense cannon wise.
I did like the change from ring pulls to bottle caps as currency, makes more sense but Bathesda basically ripped apart a series that was open world before there was a term for it.
But you're always the one who the entire world revolves around.
New Vegas is really good with this because the entire first act of its story requires you to explore at least a little; if you've never played it before you will, naturally, do the side quests given in order to figure out where Benny went, but you're not blocked from taking a short cut to avoid the First Act altogether if you're capable of hiding from or defeating the difficult enemies in the way.
And they give you the option to act with urgency. Either your custom character wants revenge right away, or he/she is more concerned with other objectives, giving the player more freedom to…actually role-play.
NV is just so good.
@@mythhead2688 Its also good since the min story that feel urgent is just to lead you to the main place of the game but then it becomes decide the fate of all the factions.
You and I have totally different approaches to gameplay and that's why I LOVE your videos!! I love hearing about different methods, different motivations, different values. It's so interesting to me! Genuinely excellent content. 💚
I get the more freeing design of BotW, and this could just be me but the threat of Ganon felt so far away and so inconsequential I lost motivation to stop him. I explored a lot of the world but I felt I'd played enough without ever playing to the end.
This describes my playthrough pretty much. I upgraded all the armor I could get back then, but never fought Ganon
Yeah very true, and when I killed him I absolutely steamrolled him and was confused that the game ended and I had to reload my save. I was kinda mad that that’s what it had all been building up to
Ganon is easier to beat the more the Guardians(?) you have on your side, the more you play, the stronger you are and the weaker Ganon become. So, technically the Ganon BOSS fight started right from the beginning, everything you do around the world is part of fighting him.
@@Jakovdred that’s just a roundabout way of saying the final boss sucks
@@andresespinosa4531 100% agree. The boss fights in that game were sad. I died over 50 times in my first two hours of playing. 130 shrines later, I accidently beat Ganon without even getting hit once.
I honestly prefer story games with big levels instead of the whole thing being 1 level with a bunch of missions. I think it makes it less of a chore to get through an area when every area is important to the story.
So like Genshin Impact?
@@glauberglousger6643 No. Pretty sure they mean games like Jedi Fallen Order, and Mario Odyssey. I also think these designs would work much better for games like RDR2. Of course, BOTW wouldn't work well with that. That game needs an open world. It all really depends on the game.
You should try immersive sims
Uncharted 4 and The Last of Us 2 did a great job of wide linear level design. I usually felt like the world was much bigger and that I could go in any direction, yet it always ended up being the right path.
The Witcher 1 & 2 were like this, every chapter of story was a different semi-open area that acted as a hub for most missions.
That sense of urgency mismatch is the biggest thing for me. "Hey. My father had been murdered, the kingdom stolen, and I'm on the run trying to get revenge before the world ends... But hey, this cat needs some gourmet food first."
Ff15 is quite a ridiculous game, if you haven’t I recommend watching Maxors vid on it, makes very funny criticism while also giving it credit where it deserves
@@erniegang8127 If they made ff15 like the ff7 remake it would've likely been their most successful game considering the hype for the franchise and the strong technical aspects, but for marketing purposes they had to promise an open-world to get everyone on the trendy bandwagon.
see, I could imagine a game where this actually works IF it's acknowledged as a core theme: the idea that comraderie, compassion, that every being even a small cat's happiness matters. Imagine a game where to defeat the eldritch darkness, you have to make people happy, then helping a little girl find her doll might be as crucial as taking on an enemy fortress.
My biggest problem with urgency is when they make so many of the main quests seem so urgent so I'll rush to go do them and basically finish the game and, being a completionist myself, skip all the side quests.
Dying light 2 does a good job splitting up missions into day and night, so unless you want to fast forward to day you can "force" yourself into not following them so closely
Xenoblade 2 did this to me in a way that I was even crying fearing what would happen next and I needed to progress, ignoring any other thing in the game
For years I've said I'm not interested in open world games, but rather smaller more focused stories. Then I played Breath of the Wild over the Christmas break, and just finished RDRII a few days ago. Turns out I was wrong, I'm still interested in those smaller games, but an open world game that has charm and atmosphere and life (and most important - lots of tameable horses) is like nothing else. Both are probably in my top ten of all time, RDRII probably in my top five. I've put nearly two hundred hours in and I still just want to wander around, ride my horse, hunt deer, and just be in that world.
I have difficulty with open world games. As you said, in many open world games, the main storyline is typically the most engaging part of the experience. However, there is usually also a ton of extra content and I find myself compelled to complete that before progressing with the storyline. That sounds great, but I typically find that the side content is noticably less engaging than the main storyline, so I end up getting bogged down in the side content and eventually losing interest in the game as a whole. I end up feeling conflicted between thinking that I would have a better experience just playing through the linear story and thinking that if I did I would be missing significant parts of the game. Because of this, I find games like BotW and Elden Ring, which mainly measure progress through the game by how much of the world the player has explored, to be easier games to stay invested in than ones which measure progress through story beats.
Same here. Side missions are exclusively copy/paste stuff. Same two or three missions hundreds of times again and again.
It’s just a shame elden ring is so flashy and not realistic.
What makes realism a relevant concern here? Elden Ring is a fantasy game. FromSoft's soulslikes have never gone for realism. That's a good thing. It lets them explore their themes, mechanics, and worlds in more ways than they could if they were adhering to realism.
You read my mind. That FOMO feeling is really ruining the fun for Open Worl games, and even if you pursued it, its quite less satisfying that you thought it would, for the most part at least. This kind of conflict is much more heavier on the mind when you have only a limited amount of free time and several backlog of games.
RDR2 had the exact *opposite* problem for me: I became so bored with the main story quests (which are almost always 'go here shoot lots of people') that I longed for new sidequests to unlock, which usually have much more varied content than the very combat-focused story missions.
Just some examples of the more fun sidequests:
- Help out a (mad?) scientist by driving a little remote control boat around a lake, firing torpedoes and avoiding mines.
- Help a circus performer dressed in drag by gathering his missing circus animals... which may or may not be the animals he claimed they were.
- Help a city woman survive in the wilderness after having lost her husband.
That third questline in particular I found very engaging, because it mirrored some of the personal stuff Arthur was going through with Mary - very much a 'what if my life had gone another way?' scenario.
I think this is why New Vegas was so greatly acclaimed when it came to an open world rpg game that had a solid foundation of a story, basically everything you do had an effect on the final battle towards the dam. I don't get why most developers aren't trying to replicate the formula of what Obsidian did with their Fallout.
RDR2 Arthur at the beginning of the game only cares for his gang so he won't ever abandon them.
Ghost of Tsushima Jin wants to save his uncle to lead to the liberation of their land so he cannot abandon them.
In Horizon: Zero Dawn Aloy wants answers about her past on why she was an outcast and why she was targeted by the Killers. The first half of her motivation is all she has cared about since she learned there was a way to get answers so she will not give until she gets what she wants.
The difference being most of these stories cannot be avoided. In New Vegas what is your character's motivation? Whatever you want it to be. Hell looking at the world of New Vegas it would actually be better from a survival stand point to avoid the man who just tried to kill you. I honestly don't have much of a problem with the way these games are structured. I've enjoyed every game I've listed. I'm currently still playing Horizon and finished unlocking all I could in the open world and I am now tackling the main story. I know a lot of people cannot do this but it works for me. Now saying that I do need to put down open world games for a few months before hopping into another one.
@@GreenWolf2k well technically the player in new vegas has a question: why murder someone for a poker chip? which pulls them into the whole mystery that leads to mr house and the dam.
@@liamnehren1054 Yeah but think about from a survival stand point. You just got lucky that the bullet didn't kill you or mess you up to the point where you cannot function. Why the hell would you go after the man who just attempted to kill you. Now if you want revenge ok that makes sense but if you don't care for revenge then there is no point other than being really dangerously curious.
@@GreenWolf2k well most of the paths you can take actually do end in revenge against benny so I guess you can say that is what the courier is after.
@@GreenWolf2k I think the main draw of an open world game is that "What you want it to be" motivation though. And honestly I wish more games have that kind of story, where your character doesn't exist before you create it, doesn't have any outside motivation or purpose, is just a full blank slate for the player to construct however they want.
There are a lot of weird assumptions in this essay. The open world is not a course menu where you have to eat everything. It’s a buffet. The player can pick and choose what he wants to do. I love that I don’t have to engage with every single thing/mechanic that’s included in these massive games.
I think a really interesting solution to the main quest issue could be to tell the player their objective but not how to do it or where to go. The player will have to decide how to go about it by themself by engaging with the open world. Maybe the characters tell you that your first quest is to go and defeat a big bossman but have no clue where he is, so you explore the world to find information about your enemy, where he is and maybe you accidentally stumble into the right place early and surprise him. This way you are motivated by your own goals and ideas of how to complete your quest and actually travel around the open world to contribute towards your end goal, never knowing if a side mission really is a side mission or if it will end up helping you.
That's what BoTW did
While this sounds appealing to me, I think this approach would lose the majority of players.
@@aeon_zero But you’re explicitly told where to go in BotW both for Ganon and the divine beasts.
@@thedapperdolphin1590 true that, but I think it was the necessary minimum to avoid frustration, and it was way less than previous games in the series. Maybe with a somewhat different design it would actually work
The game would bleed players until the only ones that remained are the ones that like it enough to play, or they’re the players the game was made for to begin with, which isn’t sustainable outside of the indie genre
A game I played called Enderal had a very simple approach that I quite liked. The game has a main questline, but after certain quests it will pause, giving the player time to move around and do whatever they want. These triggers usually make sense. For example, in one quest you find an important plot thing called the Beacon. Once you return, you're given free time, because they don't know what the Beacon is and need some time to figure out what the fuck a Beacon is. This happens several times, where the main quest will tell you to wait, and update when the main questline is ready to continue again. You can still delay the main questline as much as you want, but being given explicit free time to work means you don't feel pressured to keep saving the entire universe or something when some kid out there is still waiting for you to find his dog.
This approach is a very simple and obvious one, but it makes sense why it doesn't really get thought about that much. Before video games there were movies, before movies there were books, before books there was theater, and so on. What all these have in common, is limited content. You can't put on a show and have the main character spend a week waiting while the ancient scrolls get deciphered, because unless there's some explicit story purpose, that's really boring and impractical. So they cut to the good stuff and skip the wait time. You can't put an important side character in a coma, because that means the story can't continue until they wake up.
Video games don't have to be like that though. The story can leave you on hold for a few in-game days, but a good open world can let a player mess around with it and have fun while they wait. Since the game can make a week of in-game time take a couple hours, and since the player can fill in that time with whatever they want to do, why not give the player actual, real free time to explore the world? When you find a caravan to make it across the scary desert, why not tell the player that they'll need a few days to gather supplies, and let you go on your merry way to explore the city? When you find the forgotten scrolls that predict the end of the world, why not tell the player they'll need a week to decipher it, and let them take on some side quests while they wait? Games don't HAVE to be nonstop, heart pounding action, they can slow down at any time and the player can spend that time on having fun.
I love Enderal and I really agree that this approach worked for me. Enderal was also unique for me in that it made money feel more valuable than most other open-world games I've played. Since you need money to purchase books, a requirement to level up your character, I was constantly using my funds to progress my character. By the end of the game, I didn't have a pile of gold left over, because I had invested it in my character's progression, a house, and crafting items along the way. It made all the money I found from quests and exploration meaningful, which was a huge contrast to games like Skyrim where money just became a satisfying sound effect after awhile
@@one_secular_sparrow Yeah, skill books being used for skill progression was really a stroke of genius. One issue I've always ran into while playing Morrowind and Skyrim, is that I started to look at each fight as experience farming, and as such I would try to exploit the encounter, casting different spells to get more Conjuration, or Illusion, or whatever. Instead of trying to fight objectively and strategically, I looked at each fight as just a grind for more experience. If I ended up forced to use something I didn't want (eg. running out of Magicka so I need to use a sword), I would even feel like I "missed out" on getting that little bit more experience in something I actually wanted/
Using skill books fixed all of that, which allowed me to look at each fight and objectively decide on what would ACTUALLY be the best way to win the fight, instead of trying to theory craft what the best way to get more precious levels would be. Making money a valuable commodity at the same time is a bonus (that said, I used phasmalism, so I ended up spending enough money keeping my boi equipped).
10:04 This is making me think of Middle Earth: Shadow of War, where during a later segment of the game, the main quest becomes "Take over all of Mordor's fortresses." Simple as that. While not fully open world, you have open environments to play around with. You can take on the fortress by yourself, and most likely die to the swarms of orcs before you ever reach the Overlord's throneroom. Or you can amass an army by finding orc captains out in the world or even have spies infiltrate the fortress to rip it apart from the inside the moment you say the word. There's a lot of freedom in how you approach conquering Mordor, but the game also does a great job of giving the enemies the freedom to really screw you over and create interesting, improvised conflicts throughout the game, especially on higher difficulties.
@NatSoc Kaiser Indeed! I played the game on its highest difficulty and it really did enhance the experience. Rather than just beating an enemy, I was creating a nemesis. A Batman and Joker type relationship.
@NatSoc Kaiser one of the rare games where the default difficult actually massive hinders the experience
I feel like Subanutica managed to encourage exploration very well. Same goes to story, the game doesn't tell you where to go, it leads you and you'll find the areas where the story progresses by yourself
I have always wanted a zombie game where I can clear out an entire city and restore humanity again.
Basically the zombies stay dead and the area remains safe, or unless you don't clear out more areas they can be in danger etc
Dead rising 5
Project zomboid with zombie spawning turned off
Cataclysm dark days ahead
@@Azure9577 god i love CDDA
@@Azure9577 That's cool thanks
while i love both zomboid and CDDA theyre really not a good option for what youre looking for is probably something in the "rebuild" series.
as a game dev myself, i think an open world doesn’t act to add on to the games experience mechanically - it can! but it doesn’t have to. being able to take it all in and explore can contribute to giving the player some downtime. sure, overly expansive areas can feel unnecessary, but i guess it always just comes down to what kind of player you’re making the game for. some love to roam around, i personally don’t like it if i have to roam around too much. i think open worlds do matter though, and exploring those worlds gives those that want to put their time into it more context into stories and backgrounds that they otherwise would have missed. so yeah, open worlds can be funny and a bit much for some, but they matter.
I agree here. Personally, I love to roam and hate when an open-world game forces me into the main quest thing. I want something akin to Dungeons and Dragons where it is an open world with smaller, localized stories none of which are the main quests but elaborate side-quests. As a writer, I find the use of one main story done to death right now and it would be nice to see games develop a more real-world approach to stories with different "main" villains, conflicts, etc.; all discovered by exploring.
The issue is that open world titles just sell more copies than non open worlds. Which means every studio feels expected to shove an open world into their title whether it needs one or not. This takes a lot of resources and can ultimately make the game fail. However, I think sometimes you can have your cake and eat it too. For RPGs especially, you can have collectibles or even allow the players to take photos that can then be brought back to customize your hub area. So if you want linear, you can just go to hub, and take missions. But for the people that want every last armor color or banner or what not, they feel they are rewarded for exploring the areas out of the way. It's sort of similar to how old linear game designers would leave hidden collectibles in really out of the way or hard to reach places.
I remember as a kid thinking just how cool it was in Mario Sunshine that you could see the other areas/levels from eachother. (Most obviously example being Pina Park from Defino Plaza but in basically every level you can get a peak at some definative landmark of the other levels) I doubt the gamecube could pull off a real open world but this is an example of how to fake one.
I also get annoyed by a game disrespecting my time by making me walk at a snails pace between disparate locations. (Fallout Vegas was great but you fast traveled if you weren't expressly going someplace new) I can't even be bothered with AC Odessy because who has time to play 500hrs of effectively the exact same content with enemies scaling with you. Pikmin 1 is an example of an "open world" that respects your time. (It has 5 levels, 3 main ones and you can collect your ship parts in any order so "Open World" it also has a timelimit of 30 in game days which works out to about 6hrs and you lose).
I think what matters about an open world is that the term describes a setting and level of player agency. How you use this can create either a masterpiece or a mess. Open world is a setting, a tool, not a genere.
Edit: were -> weren't
@@philipfahy9658 I see what you mean, and you raise a great point! You’re very right in saying that forcibly shoving an open world into a title is definitely not the way to go unless exploration is an essential part of the gameplay. It can be one of those things that can make your game better or worse. I haven’t had the chance to play Elden Ring myself, but everyone of my friends that have heavily enjoyed the exploration aspect of the game and the vastness of it, so I think that one’s a great example of when an open world game works well. I think that in the AAA industry the open world stuff is definitely more popular than it should be, but we also have so many indie games that have non-open worlds! And I think they’re becoming a lot more popular nowadays, which is lovely to see.
@@jasonreed7522 So agreed!! It can be a great tool to prolong your game and insert more environmental + other story telling, but if it’s slowing you down too much, as a player you’ll quickly grow frustrated and that’s what every game dev wants to avoid. If it provides just enough challenge but also gives back satisfaction with the completion of your quest/exploration, then it’s a job well done. It can sometimes be really tough to hit that mark though! Takes a lot of really hard work and understanding of a users experience to get it right. Biggest issues happen when execs tell devs to add things that sell but don’t necessarily sit right in games.
I’m just going to note: as someone with ADHD it’s weird to be described as ‘intrinsically motivated’. Open world games work for me because I get distracted for sure… but I don’t think it’s as related to strong intrinsic motivation. Unless you call hyperfocusing on a new shiny intrinsic motivation.
What else would you call that?
ADHD works in weird ways. Because our dopamine receptors are so fucked up, we become less motivated to do stuff. For me open world games are overwhelming, I keep getting distracted by everything until at some point the main storyline stops giving me any sort of dopamine rush and I just quit the game
@@VioPLayable This is exactly me. The only open world that seems to work for me is Forza Horizon since I can treat the map as a diverse race track.
There's a specific meaning to the phrase "intrinsic motivation." Intrinsic motivation just means that the motivation is coming from you yourself. Let's say you really enjoy a class and because of that you want to learn the material. That's one intrinsic motivation to study. This is as opposed to extrinsic motivations which come from some external source. An extrinsic motivation to study would be the fact that you have a test coming up that you will be graded on.
Yes. Motivations do no care about your 'disorder'. Your motivations are an emergent phenomena tied to your brain's wiring. If those drives are born of internal impulses, they are autotelic (intrinsic); else, they are exotelic (extrinsic).
Good video! You mention the distinction between intrinsic and external motivation as what leads some to enjoy open worlds while others do not.
This certainly seems like a factor; however, to me, the ability to suspend disbelief seems like the main reason why some have no problem doing a bunch of side quests before tackling a seemingly “urgent” main quest.
It definitely makes no sense that Geralt would do a ton of side quests before trying to protect his daughter, but when I play I don’t think about it that deeply. I just suspend disbelief in the same way that we suspend disbelief when there are dragons or other unrealistic elements in our games.
I, as a player, always obsess over doing things in the "right order", whatever order the developer intended for me to do the game in, EVEN IF I'm playing an open-world game that intentionally obfuscates or covers up what the correct order is. I always want to avoid doing things in the wrong order but often will end up doing them in the wrong order anyway, which makes me feel like I've ruined the fun for myself.
oh god, I feel the same!
but honestly, that's on the developers, though!
why make an open world when you're giving us the feeling that we went somewhere tik early? why am I having this feeling in the first place
@@AndYouWillBeWithMe i was playing BoTW a few years back, i had finished the Great Plateau and I made the horrible mistake of going to Gerudo Desert because I saw it and it piqued my interest. I, being a stupid idiot, kept throwing myself at the area like a potato at a brick wall and managed to get to the Divine Beast. However, I simply could not beat Thunderblight Ganon and had to leave the divine beast 3/4 completed while I went and followed the quest for the Zora kingdom, which made me feel very stupid when I found Robbie and Kilton, mechanics that were very clearly intended to be discovered early. I feel that experience influenced my current playstyle of open-world games.
@@no-lifenoah7861 I think that's on the devs not you. Essentially it's an illusion of choice if you truly can't take paths that are presented. Joseph Andersons review of the game covers that issue, he had the same experience
I understand your point and it is logically sound. But as a gamer myself, my approach to any game is *god forbid that I do not explore every inch of land I see in front of me before I move on with the story*. 😂
We must get our money's worth ong
I think this is also true of people who grew up playing Tomb Raider games. Everything matters if it means we'll get a 3 second comment from a voice actor.
I feel like a more dense and smaller world is the way to go. Deffinitely for me, since I'm an indie dev.
I dont mind a bit of atmospheric emptiness ( mountains, plains, large lakes). It has to be well designed though.
Why I love the small little package A Short Hike. A world I can fit in my head, and exploration/navigation IS the center of the game. The side stuff like fishing is cute if not a little padded, but the game never lets down the creativity in its little island design.
Love this method! stuff like outer wilds and a short hike
True but with regards to exploration mattering to the player, it doesn't rly matter if it's small or big. The size of the world isn't the problem, it's how it mechanically fits with player progression and with the main story narrative. Outer wilds, for example, technically, due to the 360 degree movement of the player, has a MASSIVE open world, that is almost entirely empty relative to it's size, yet, exploration is the core of progression and intrinsically tied to the narrative, so it works well in that regard.
Like The witcher 2 ?
This is why I love Elden Ring and consider it the golden standard for how to create an open world game.
The open world IS the point. And everything in the game is there to support and incentivise you going out and exploring it. And by that I mean true exploration. Get rid of hud markers pointing you towards every notable thing. It's not exploration at that point. It's a guided tour.
I actually think Red Dead 2 handles the story vs. exploration / urgency problem pretty excellently. There are a few moments where you feel a sense of urgency to run to the next story mission, but most of the time a mission just kind of ends (you complete the robbery or whatever) and there's no indication of what you're supposed to do next. Then the next mission starts when you randomly run into one of your gangmates in town or what have you. Most of the story also has the gang just trying to survive rather than working towards some urgent goal, so you don't feel like there's something you should be doing other than hunting, fishing and making money for yourself or the gang.
On top of that, most of the story missions start in camp, and there are more than a few parts in the story where it makes total sense that Arthur might not want to go to camp for a while (because Dutch is being a bitch, usually). So taking some time away from the story missions to explore, camp on your own, hunt, gather bounties etc...actually feels like you're still roleplaying as Arthur. It's what he would be doing at that time.
It does have the problem of the things you do in the open world not effecting the story. It doesn't matter how many legendary fur coats you make or how often you slaughter the KKK, it's not going to change Arthurs final fate one bit, or make it any easier for John to kill he games true villain. So there isn't "incentive" to do any of those things, but the way I think: if riding around the wild west doing cowboy stuff doesn't sound like its own reward to you, why buy a cowboy game in the first place? It's not like you get anything for completing the game anyway. It just ends. So really there isn't any incentive to do the story missions either if you think about it that way.
I completely agree with you, adding map conquering mechanics like Far Cry 5 would kill the game and its pacing.
RD2R is a slow burn to its core and it's ok to not like the simulation aspect, but having it any other way would make it generic, especially with that suggestion.
Exactly what I came to say here. 👏👏👏👏
It effects you emotionally what you did as Arthur. By the end, it matters and hits you, hard. That’s more than enough reason and consequence.
And for the legendary coats, that fits fine. Sure, Arthur might have enjoyed, but how does that really change his redemption? It doesn’t actually matter nearly as much as giving money to an orphanage. He does things that ultimately weren’t important, and that’s real life.
Exactly, the world doesn't revolve around Arthur, that's kind of the whole point of the story. And the main story doesn't really just stop between main missions, Arthur is still hacking like crazy and you can still see the effects of your actions (like becoming wanted, or having certain enemy factions come after you).
I remember playing TES IV: Oblivion for the first time and being shook when I beat the main quest by about level 9 or so. I had been so caught up in the urgency the main quest provided that I didn't take time to explore. On my second playthrough I ignored the main quest entirely, which always felt off. Enemies are attacking a city where a plot critical NPC resides and nothing happens until I will it? Yeah, I'll just do 200 hours of side missions. I believe the term for that would be "ludo-narrative dissonance," though heaven strike me down if I've used that term incorrectly.
oh thanks, you just made me realize why I didn't vibe with Oblivion much. It's the urgency in the quest. It made me feel like I had a check list I needed to mark off as quickly as possible
I was the opposite. There is some urgency in the quest, but I didn’t care. It was my first ever open world game, so I just loved exploring, and there were so many cool quests to do.
@@thedapperdolphin1590 Fair point. At the time I started playing, my only open world experience was Morrowind which is very laid back in urging the player to do the main quest, to the point where skipping the main quest in a playthrough feels much more a valid choice than skipping the main quest in Oblivion.
Playing Fallout 4, I found myself totally engrossed in the base building mechanics and the main story line of finding Shaun fell to the wayside. Only after 3 weeks of scavenging, building up fortifications and making mods at work benches did I have the thought "isnt there someone I'm supposed to be looking for ?" 🤔
Total opposite for me. I felt like I couldn't engage in any side quest because they kept giving me such concrete answers about where to go next to look for my son. If they had made it a little less obvious where Shaun might be and how to get to him (something I thought they did way better in Fallout 3), then I probably would've been more encouraged to go out and explore the world.
it needed more blockades or major dangers sprinkled around that clues about Shaun led into. forcing the player to interact with that system to like raise an army but what can we say other then it was no new vegas.
@@viralium104 thats when you ignore the "go here next" dialog and go look for more weapons to play with.
getting trapped in the "gotta do the main quest mentality" ruins the game. especially since fallout games typically end after that. you have to explore they map and find new weapons there's more story in the side quests than the main ones.
this is why i hate speed runners. they dont care about the actual game they just want to set a stupid record.
@@darkshadowsx5949 That's what I was doing, and it totally shattered my immersion. Much as speedrunners like the challenge of completing a game as fast as possible, I like the experience of getting so absorbed in a game's world that I momentarily forget that I'm even playing a game in the first place.
That's the sign of a successful videogame. Nothing is worse than just doing what a game tells you to do, with the developers assuming you care about their writing.
Only when narrative/worldbuilding has gameplay connections or ramifications is a bit of story sufficient "reward" for completing an activity. Horizon Zero Dawn is so good at this, despite what is in this video. In general I disagree with everything in this video haha
As a neurodivergent, I have to disagree with several of your main points. I've never gotten bored of the exploration and rushed the story mode. Nor have several of my also neurodivergent family members. For the ADD/ADHD community, open world games are far more than their linear siblings. No, it isn't for everyone, but not everything has to be appealing to neurotypical interests at the cost of providing diverse options for other people. Open worlds are hugely important for me because I can't get through a game by doing 20hrs of railroading down the single plot given. I need to be able to go look for collectibles, hunt a new kind of monster, upgrade my gear, meet a little old lady and help with her groceries, then I can go back to saving the world for a quest or two before doing it all over again.
TL;DR: Open world means options. Options that don't appeal to you specifically are still valuable.
This has never really been an issue for me. In the same way your mind naturally filters out the idea that Wander did probably not spend 30 minutes trying in vain to jump to the top of the temple in Shadow of the Colossus, or Nathan Drake probably did not actually kill about 500 people en route to Ubar in Uncharted 3, so can I usually filter out the urgency of the main quest from a side activity that probably did not canonically "happen" in the actual text of the game. And I would argue that most of the games you mentioned actually benefit from having a contiguous geography and quest flow that would otherwise be interrupted by linear levels. Ghost of Tsushima and Horizon Zero Dawn especially make use of real-world landmarks to add a sense of scope and familiarity to their worlds.
Most of the problems from HZD are still present to some degree in HFW; though that is offset somewhat with the advent of several quest lines where once one quest completes, it doesn't always tell you if that questline is complete, or if there's another quest that is unlocked after that point. This makes it so there's always some narrative content that's can be unlocked by exploring the world, though the rumors system does help facilitate the more story-beat style of casual gameplay by regularly pointing players towards a quest they haven't completed yet and don't feel like checking every settlement they've come across just to check to see if a new quest has popped up.
On top of that, there is much more giant robot-dinosaur based content that caps off various mission beats, and even in the engagements where there are human enemies, they're almost always accompanied by larger, more diverse machines than were present in ZD, and the advent of enemy riders makes for a much more intertwined combat between human and machine enemies.
Also, the complete lack of Corruptors and Deathbringers as the default 'we need you to fight x large machine' makes for more interesting engagements with each of its more than a dozen boss-tier machines as well as stronger variants for each of them.
I think it's interesting to find parallels in the games that succeed at this:
Both Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild have a set of major bosses that serve to contribute to your ability to face the final boss (the Divine Beasts in BotW, and the Shard-Bearers in Elden Ring). Each major boss has an associated area of the map that is thematically or aesthetically tied to them, and each boss gives you a unique upgrade for defeating it (the champion's gifts in BotW, and the great runes in Elden Ring). Having just a few _really_ big extrinsic goals like this, which incentivize you to play the rest of game in order to find and overcome them, seems like a pretty smart structure that more games should ape. They don't have to be bosses! Riven, the sequel to Myst, used a structure like this with puzzles where your ultimate goal is to solve ONE really hard puzzle which requires knowledge of the entire game to do.
The problem with BotW and Ganon is the execution though. Doing the main quest feels like unlocking easy mode with cheats. Having the option to disable the champions powers feels like they know it was bad design but didn't want reviewers complaining about the difficulty.
@@tomstonemale I think the option to disable the champions powers probably came from Urbosa and the goron (can't remember his name)'s powers annoying players during playtesting. I know sometimes I was annoyed they were getting in the way of what I wanted to do (like spin and destroy grass without electrocuting everything around me) or having the glowing shield always appear while I was trying to learn to parry.
I do agree that the champions reducing Ganon's health feels like unlocking easy mode, but I think it also fits with the story and it would be weirder to try and have them do something different, like buffing Link when its already an important plot point that each of the guardians are powerful weapons.
@@tomstonemale elden ring does the same thing though seeing as if you grind for soul lvls for a good chunk of time it would be a complete breeze
@@Misclipss doesn't sound like the same thing at all. My problem with the main quest in BotW is the reward for freeing the Divine Beasts is completely disproportionate for the effort made and for the challenge ahead, hyping the final castle and Ganon but they are a joke just with the champion powers, on top of the giant robots nerfing the final boss.
Not a single skill you learned in the entire game is necessary to defeat Ganon if you go after completing the main quest. The dlc boss is harder than the big baddie and even then you are rewarded with a faster cool down for the champion powers.
@@ViridianForests it doesn't fit the story at all. It only made me question how the champions were defeated by Ganon, and telling the player they were defeated because of a surprise attack and that you are fighting a weakened version of Calamity Ganon at the end feels cheap and lacks pay off. Not to mention the way the story is told requires you to leave the castle, talk to Impa, get the last memory and come back to defeat Ganon for a terrible secret ending.
I like BotW but in the late game every shortcoming of the story, the combat and the progression comes back to bite it in the ass.
Yes, finally someone mentioned that the storyline tells a narrative of a urgent situation that you need to do smth about rn. In Cyberpunk the story told me to go fast asf or I’m gonna die, every day it is getting worse… so I bearly did any side quests before I was dead
The problem is that open-world games have been dominating the market and so even the linear audience has been forced to adopt them. Pushing to make exploration mandatory risks losing the linear audience, while making a linear game risks losing the open-world audience. So companies basically let the players choose whether they want to play a title like an open world game, or like a linear game. But the resulting experience tends to be lesser than if they had just committed to making the game one way or the other. Companies simply can't fill a modern-scale open world with activities interesting enough to capture the attention of linear players who want everything to matter and feel unique, but at the same time, reducing the scope of the world to an extent that would satisfy linear gamers would leave the open-world gamers dissatisfied.
I have Cyberpunk 2077 in mind. Your mind is disintegrating so you traipse around Nightcity doing races, fighting turf wars, and searching the legendary biker's jacket. The amount of details invested in fleshing out Nightcity is wasted on the single story experience alone, even with the races, wars, loots, and fetch quests, 50% of the maps are barren and missing something.
In their efforts to appease everyone they end up pleasing no-body.
I myself enjoy a linear story, but nothing catches my attention better than a side quest, i get most of my exploration through side quests and can spend hours running from side quest to side quest. After the second playthrough though I just go in a very linear fashion forward as if the game was made for it.
I don't see the problem with playing an open world however you like because it's open for you to play how you like. The only time it's an issue is if missions are level locked, the single worse mechanic in gaming
@@isdrakon9802 The thing is, it's not truly "open for you to play how you like". The only choice you really have is whether or not to ignore side quests / exploration. I like linear games, but I also love expressing myself through character customization. If you play an open world game like a linear game, you probably won't end up getting most of the coolest cosmetics - they tend to gate those behind optional content. I'd like to have the process of acquiring the cosmetics be fun and streamlined to minimize grinding, but I'm not allowed to play that way in these games. Instead, I've got to run around collecting all 147 secret elephant statues or whatever before I can unlock the goodies, which might not be necessary if the game had been designed to be more linear (and as such didn't need to fill a huge space with pointless collection tasks that require extra incentives).
This is what happened to halo infinite. Because of the open world the campaign levels couldn't be those awesome trails of badassery you got in the older games. And so the campaign sucks
Morrowind has a great intro, where after the introduction quest, the Main Quest quest-giver tells you "Go make a name for yourself." You can then keep talking to him and have him start you on the mian quest if you really want, or you can do what he told you and leave, go join guilds, explore, what have you. It's an awesome moment.
And he smokes skooma
Kind of similar with Fable's renown quests. "Earn 120 more renown and come back to me" was a great way to get people to explore the areas they were in and experience the stories. You'd start a quest wanting the reward and then once you start you're invested
I actually think the reason why games like The Witcher 3 and HZD are so successful and popular is *because* they make their worlds matter.
Witcher 3 is focused on making the world in-depth, ensuring that every side quest and character is unique, that the appeal of the game and the world is discovering new things - once you realise that there's cool stuff to do, you start to think "what else is cool to do?" and explore naturally from there.
HZD on the other hand ties its side content into the world and the story. The story of HZD (and, to an extent, HFW) is tied intrinsically to discovering more about the world, whether it's the past or the present, and so every new thing you discover feels like it contributes to the game.
I think your final point is great - we should want open worlds to matter. But in at least those 2 games, *they do*.
I agree with you regarding TW3 and HZD, bit I think HFW completely dropped the ball and fell into the common open world trap of more is better, which for me really hindered the game overall. HZD had the standard open world stuff, but there was not too mich and it didn't really outstay its welcome I feel HFW did outstay its welcome and didn't fit well with the overall narrative.
I think HZD in general does a really good job of tying the world into the main storyline, but there is a split in the worldbuilding I find a bit annoying. I find myself really not caring about any worldbuilding that has to do with the current world, while anything to do with the Old Ones is fascinating. Even with missions, I get annoyed when the sidequest is just about some random local politics between one tribe and another or something, rather than how a tribe is interacting with the global problem.
Yeah I definitely agree with the video that the story objective of The Witcher 3 conveys an urgency that the actually gameplay and world doesn't follow. However, I still found that it felt natural to do stuff like side quests because they were usually either related to side stories (like the ongoing war) or they were witcher contracts, where even though they have nothing to do with the main objective, it still feels natural because Geralt still basically has a day job that he has to do to make enough coin to survive. Finding and saving Ciri is such a massive task in the game that I guess it doesn't actually feel that urgent because there's just so much Geralt has to do.
With HFW the main story is a lot more linear and aside from some specific cases the side stuff feels really irrelevant.
Those two titles are the only ones from Raz's list I've played, and I loved them both, flaws not withstanding. HZD drew me in with its story, I was instantly curious about everything and I found the story personally compelling and touching (weird for a video game, but hey, it happened). The side quests got a bit Mary Sue-ish, Aloy being the fixit woman, solving everyone's problems whereas in the Witcher 3 did a much better job on side quests - he's a Witcher and he needs the money, it's internally logical. The latter's story was also great and felt more time-sensitive but it was easier to be caught up in lived-in ("realness"?) of the world. You're a messed up dude in a messed up world and everything felt internally consistent. I found its biggest flaw was (1) an overwhelming number of side quests and (2) lack of a sense of urgency other than "Ciri's in danger". I'm definitely a completionist but I became really tired of having to do so many things that I haven't finished blood and wine yet after 172 hours of play time on my first playthrough. But blame that on the completionism.
HZD felt like some of the quests needed to be enforced on their time sensitivity: finding Sona, the Nora being raided after going to Sunfall, saving Ursa, other stuff like that. I feel there should be consequences for dithering and doing other things like how some quests in the Witcher 3 fail if you wait too long to do them.
I found HZD's failings to be human combat, human settlements - anything involving humans that wasn't a cut scene. Finding collectibles (hints or rumors would have been nice instead of relying on a outside of the game guide to find the last few things) and HZD's fauna being stationed in specific places and not roaming freely was a choice I made from a game design standpoint that felt like it didn't make sense in-world. Fighting the larger machines felt like it also should have been harder: the final fight inside Thunder's Drum against the fireclaw took me like an hour the first time I did it on normal difficulty. But Raz addressed that in his picking the right difficulty section. I didn't yet understand countering enemies weaknesses properly and it was a real slog, but also felt like a real achievement. doing a fresh playthrough from scratch on the ultra hard SUCKED for the first 10 character levels but then became an appropriate amount of difficult where everything was hard, but still doable and forcing me to counter everything correctly. By comparison, the final battle was a real let down and felt far too easy, like they ran out of development time compared to other quests.
On exploring, I was still finding new quests in HZD on my third playthrough simple because I hadn't wandered through a given town or person on a previous playthrough, that was neat.
Yet Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild have no story, no character, no interesting side quests and yet people praised these more than a character and narrative driven game,
I feel like the Arkham games nailed the side missions because it makes sense with the story that has multiple different villains so it is fitting that Batman would go on side missions because he’s trying to solve multiple cases, because he’s Batman. It can have a linear story but the side missions can fit within that linear story and make sense.
As someone who played Horizon Forbidden West, they did kinda fix your problem with the story and the robot dinosaurs l. While the way the story is told is done almost the same as the previous game, almost every mainline stories have you face off against one of the new robots so people who only play the story can actually fight the robot dinosaurs.
That sounds like it addresses the symptoms, rather than the underlying issue, which can be enough, or it can simply shift the complaints to the new most visible symptoms.
both horizons are same all open world lamery
Strike pieces require drops from the specific robo, which made hunting them an enjoyable part of the mini game. (+ Gear upgrades :] )
@@joshbrabant1098 They also altered the drop rates so you know have to scan and strategically destroy, or keep intact, keep machine parts to recover choice loot.
@@lordneojacks Don't cut yourself on that edge.
Frankly I've found that Horizon is a very love it or hate it series. People either really like the setting and get sucked in or it leaves them cold. And I'm cool with that.
19:54 The way i solve that problem is always starting on the hardest difficulty and lowering it if it's too hard.
I think part of why I struggle with that is a stupid sense of shame and stubbornness. Like, if I just keep practicing I'll get it! But then I don't lol
@@razbuten for me, I almost never play games with difficulty options, with the only ones I remember in recent history are Nier Replicant, Automata, and Doom 2016. Whenever I play/played those games I just chose the highest or second highest available option, for me it makes me want to get better at the core mechanics of the gameplay, while still being able to enjoy the lore and story of games like Nier: Automata. I guess that I do this because the Souls' series taught me how to be a masochist lol.
@@razbuten I feel the exact same way. I also struggle choosing a difficulty because I don't know HOW the game implements difficulty. Will The enemies be faster and more exciting to fight or will their health just double and fights will be more tedious?
@@razbuten If you are struggling at the beginning but are still making it through, then keep that difficulty until it becomes easy. Once it becomes too easy, if you can, change the difficulty to bring back the challenge. I watched some LP of Skyrim and Fallout 4 and he started out on normal but was on the highest level by the end to keep the game somewhat challenging.
When I played Rdr2 I remember wanting breaks from the main story, wanting to progress my character in other ways, own cool side-mission stuff and enjoying the other interesting stories that don't contribute to the main story arc before eventually moving forward
I think open worlds that dont force urgency of the story handle this alot better- Morrowind for example, the main quest is kinda presented as "You can do this but you can also do whatever you have time" , and even asking you to do side work as part of the main quest, makes side quests feel important in their own ways, and exploration is rewarded by loot often
Morrowwind like Skyrim, Witcher 3, Kingdoms of Amalur, AC Odyssey are RPGs. The side quests in those games tie into the main story.
@Evacody124 i think its a wonderful way to integrate that doesnt rush you with urgency when done well- oblivion for example was BAD to me cause I yoloed the main quest. Skyrim I did at least walk off and do whatever for awhile, cause I didnt feel intense urgency even after attacks cause it feels like a "holding pattern" instead of active invasion. Like in morrowind;the threat is real ,active and serious, but not supppper immediate. Idk its a good way to do a main story in rpg style games particularly to me
@@user-bn5df6hl1d the problem is people that that all open worlds are the same kind of game or that open worlds are a genre. They are not.
There are open world RPGs with influence from D&D and Diablo.
Then there is action adventure games.
Taking away the side quests or have very little to no story hurts RPGs. Because that's why people play RPGs is for the story.
RDR2 is an action adventure game. People can't compare it to the likes of the Witcher 3 or Skyrim.
You can compare it to the Assassin's Creed games before Origions though. Same with Tomb Raider.
For me personally when I played rdr2, my love for all the members of the gang were what encouraged me to earn money and give them a nicer campsite; I loved giving the gang nice table cloths, blankets and stuff like that as well as getting to hear how happy I was making them :)
Fun fact: almost every side mission in Witcher up to finding Ciri has to do with finding Ciri. Often people will tell you they saw her at some point during side quest.
Even the ones that don't have a connection still make sense for the narrative because sometimes you simply need money to continue your search and doing Witcher stuff is literally your job, so it's *necessary*. That, or the people who have the information you need demand you do some unrelated task for them first, so most of it really doesn't feel like it's ignoring the urgency of your quest at all. You're still working towards the same goal.
That's just not true LMAO
At best a tenth of side quests will mention Ciri in dialogue, and a third of those will actually actually help you towards that goal.
It's A LOT more than in other games and it does relieve the urgency of the main quest to some extent, but the whole world doesn't revolve around Geralt and Ciri and that's a good thing.
I get what he says though. I for example LOVED Witcher 3 did so many side missions had a ton of fun. Playing Main story missions felt like checklist. It told me everything is super urgent and important but I just dicked around 5h on a ghost hunt and finding some herbs... doesn't feel THAT urgent. It wants to tell me the wild hunt is this force of nature to be feared... But I'm over leveled to Ultimo from side missions and 1 shot every encounter. It's this world threatening event... Yet none of the powerful people I knew in game cared or reacted. It just felt disjointed to me. Honest experience main story least favorite part in this masterpiece (almost exact same for Skyrim btw.)
@@notrelevant6702 I think the tradeoff is worth feeling disjointed (if you didn't pace yourself while doing the main story, I mean).
@@notrelevant6702 Because the powerful people in game (Radovid, Dijkstra, Emhyr) have their own problems. On the other hand, some NPC's flat out tell you that they fear the world is ending, and how its going to happen. Also there are powerful people (Skellige's leaders) in the game who care about and acknowledge the Ragh nar Roog.
It seems to me that you just dislike the open world formula. And that's fine, people are different, with different tastes. Just play open world for the main story and leave the rest of the stuff for the players that wanna engage with it, if you don't feel the motivation to do it. But i disagree with the point that breath of the wild is a better game because it has no story, compared to RDR2 or the witcher, and so it can better mix it with the open world stuff. I would take a great story, with great characters and world building, everytime.
A perfect blend is probably possible, but it hasnt really been done yet.
His argument is not that open world games suck, nor did he quantify the quality of any of the games he mentioned (he actually praised the quality of most in a sentence towards the end). His argument is that they can be so much better with proper structure through a well implemented story and purposeful "true open world" activities.
@@BittenToe the video just sounded like he wanted a linear game because that's exactlt what you and he describe.
@@roxlife8173 lol maybe learn not to write in run-on sentences and use proper punctuation before telling someone their opinion is "pure bs".
@@BittenToe having a true open world RPG and proper structure is kind of an oxymoron. if you're allowed to explore the world at your own pace, then obviously you can't integrate an evenly paced story that would make sense for every player. some people breeze through to the final boss in 10 hours. some people play 50 hours and don't even make it past the first few stages. it's impossible to have an open world RPG that caters to both. most games now just integrate them separately to appease both groups of people.