90% Of the time open world in DnD is an illusion. Not dissing it, but tbf having a world of that scale on the shoulders of one person instead of a machine would be torture. Then there's Curse of Strahd.
@@gaburelmesmo3824 Tomb of Annihilation is the "Super hard Gary-Gygax approved" Dungeon or the "Sneaky dethroning of Acererak" one? I always get them confused.
I just realized that BotW doesn’t show you objectives till you discover them yourself. Props to it for requiring you to be on the lookout when trying to find shrines/korok seeds/ map towers
I mean I feel like it got the idea that you should have points of interest visible in world instead of on a map. Honestly it's the kind of discovery that makes a game like Minecraft fun
botw is cool bc it says "go to the shrines, beat the bosses, kill ganon. good luck!" and almost nothing else. you're free to discover almost all of the mechanics, items and secrets by yourself, you can climb anywhere to accomplish that, and you're rewarded with something you never could have predicted finding. perfect exploration game.
I really hate that every game add the stupid "?" on EVERY point of interest in the map. Like no Jimmy, I am not gonna cry if I miss couple of pieces of your content.
BOTW made me realize how much I didn’t care for open world before. It was the first time I was naturally compelled to stop and wander, to let the ambiance sink in. That’s why it’s such a beautiful game to me: I felt like I played it exactly how I felt.
BotW is a really special kind of game. The exploration and sense of discovery, to me, still hasn't been outdone in any game since. The developers didn't bombard you with points of interest and quest markers constantly but instead trusted that you would be curious and perceptive enough to discover them yourself. It was a very refreshing take on the genre and it's a shame it didn't have more impact on the industry as a whole.
"You've got to look at yourself and say, 'okay, 50% of our game is riding a horse, 25% is character-driven story, and 25% is shoot-outs. Now, is riding the horse really the best part of our game?'" -dunkey
I said the same damn thing at the start of last gen! I am also 30 and I cannot stomach any open world games anymore. Feels like a chore and the level design falls much shorter.
I’ve finally got around to playing rdr2 and all I’m thinking is that this game should just be a naughty dog style experience, whereas younger me would have been thinking every game should be open world, I’ve felt so alone on my opinion for so long it’s good to know that other people have similar feelings to me
@Every Woman Jobs To The Wall games are a form of art and creative expression age shouldn’t matter that would be like judging you for watching your films in your 30s it just doesn’t make sense
its not the genre aging its the genre getting milked. its like ubisoft has a machine to make action adventure open world games and activate it every year either for an ac game or another "new" game and i highly agree with the movement part its really really fun to just engage with the open world without actually engaging with the open world. last thing i swear, the side quests feel like work. work bad :(
Its not just Ubisoft. My problem is when they throw too much stuff at you. RDR2 is probably a great game, but I’ll never enjoy it cause there are just too many mechanics. For me, the ideal open world game is Spider-Man. Not too big, but big enough to be enjoyable.
@@delirious_z9987 between sony and ubisoft open world is one of the least interesting tags these days I could play *insert 3rd person open world action adventure game with crafting and stealth elements here* Or I could play ULTRAKILL, Cruelty Squad, Doom Eternal, what is released of Deltarune, and Dishonored 2 all in the time it takes to finish said game giving me a much more fulfilling set of experiences for my time
Tbh I feel like some games with open worlds are good not because of the “open world sticker” that’s put on them, but the gameplay itself, or perhaps the story. I absolutely love the Witcher 3 for it’s interesting lore and the characters, the fighting system is also neat, but it’s the first point that made the game for me. It’s kinda interesting to view the different “?” marks on the map and destroy ghoul hives and etc, but after researching like 20% of them I got bored... and traveling between significant places in the game became so tedious without using a fast travel. The same happens with Skyrim, I absolutely love the gameplay, but getting places is such a chore. But would they work if they weren’t open world games? Would they still hold the same charm? What could be done instead of making them open worlds?
I think that I love the games that are open world more *in-spite-of* the fact that they're open world, than because of it. The Witcher 3 is a masterpiece of a game, and if you ask anyone why, not ONE person will say "the ? on the map". No, they'll say "the story" or "the bloody baron" or "gwent". The issue with open world games is filling them. I love a LOT of the sidequests in cyberpunk207. They're genuinely interesting and with a huge variety of paths to solve them and some fantastic characterisation and writing. There are 10x as many that are complete wastes of time. "kill this person" by passing a strength/athletics check to break into a room and shoot them in the face. The cyberpsycho fight where they had performed an entire satanic ritual was eerie and unnerving. I felt something when doing that mission. The exact same style of mission but it was just a dude in a street was boring, even if the combat was the same between the two. Videogames are art, and open-world games strive for immersion, but often sacrifice their artistry to achieve it.
Yeah I loved the world of tw3. Finding I treating quests and lore surrounding an area. But I started to realise there was just so much other crap that o didn't care about on theap outside that. I think New Vegas kinda did the vast open world well because it's a wasteland desert and it's pretty easy to pick out where to go without being glued to a map. I tried Assassin's creed odyssey for that Witcher feeling. But God it was the worst parts of the witchers open world with none of the good.
I think yes, they can be done and be done excellently without making it such an open world. It truly depends on the type of experience the game is attempting to allay to a player and I find an important point Yakko brings up is that there is an extreme lack of focus to these games, meaning any enjoyment of them is largely up to the player. If what you wanted and enjoyed out of Witcher 3 is characters, character interactions, lore, fighting, and the RPG elements, then the game can be made with small maps and extremely crafted setpieces for the player to move through. No part of the game has to be open world in order for you to enjoy these elements as a whole, as the open world contributes nothing but time riding your horse to experience more of them. In the very beginning of the Witcher 3 you get into a bar fight and quite honestly I had figured the game had asked me to either knock them out or just kill them, to place myself into Geralt's shoes and do what I think is right, but it doesn't matter what you do in that plot point. To me, the game isn't even Open World in that regard, and moments like that specific barfight can be delivered so much better in a tight, constrained story.
The Fable series, even just the OG game, is proof that great games and even RPGs don't need to be open world to be fantastic or classics. They told great stories, with great characters and memorable moments littered throughout. All that extra stuff to do in a game like The Witcher 3 doesn't make the game more engaging to me, if anything it's part of the reason I stopped coming back to play it, was the scale of the world and feeling like there was no such thing as a small task in that game - that even the smallest quest seemed like some kind of epic ordeal, just left me feeling like "ugh....not today". I wanted to do all the things I liked, but without having to do all the things I didn't like in between, otherwise feeling like I'm missing out on the majority of what the game actually is, and ultimately realizing that what I like about the game ISN'T the fact that it's a huge open world game with a million things to do. Sure, it makes the World feel more real and makes my role in it as a character more believable, especially when I am left with some impactful choices - but does all of that _make it a better GAME?_
Another thing to add to the “bigger is not always better” idea is that smaller worlds can feel way bigger. When I think back to twilight princess’ smaller map, it feels way bigger because everything is was placed intentionally and not just to fill space. I would much rather have a twilight princess sized map that is fun to explore and feels natural than one that takes 50 hours to cross and has nothing in it.
And even Twilight Princess' Hyrule Field was as barren as it could've been. Imo TP's map feels superficial in exchange for gameplay purpose (which I consider a good thing), and for it's time it certainly wasn't a small map. Still my favorite Zelda game. When I hear that term the first thing that comes to mind is Assassins Creed Valhalla. Developers even said before, the map was going to originally be way smaller but they thought it was weird you could see London from the most northern city on the map, so they scaled it out x3, without adding any more content in the overworld.
and now comes elden ring,another good linear semi open world video game series defiling itself with the open world plague. Like why not go the ff12 route and make an actual kingdom filled with established npcs and stuff,oh yeah cause then that would require actual effort.
Or like San Andreas, that while being open world had different places to see and things to do in different parts of the map. It felt huge at the time, now it's small but it's so much better than say, Just Cause
Elden ring and botw is the high water mark for me when it comes to open world games. Just being able to explore and finish the game how ever I want is so refreshing.
@@CockLord2059 honestly, as someone whose first real open world game was skyrim (and i was OBSESSED with it for a long time), i dont hold it as the high water mark of anything tbh. i think maybe it's because there were enough surface level things in it to keep the attention of my middle school brain before i learned what actually good story telling and gameplay design was. i think maybe the reason i liked it was because the game let you do pretty much anything you wanted within hardware/software limitations. besides that, there are so many problems with the game that were i to attempt to lay them all out in a single comment, i'd need to spend several hours typing up an essay...and i have enough college work rn without that
I love both of these games. But if you take a really hard critical look, the open world experience is still mediocre at best. I think we often enjoy these types because most of them prefer to favor the lowest common denominator of gamers or what I like to call, contaminating them with the Ubisoft Syndrome. While BotW and ER are mediocre in typical Open World design, they are still different enough from the usual standard open world cattle feed to where it feels really fresh. The sense of discovering something new is amazing in both these games and I will cherish them to my grave. I just hope with further advancements in creativity with the hardware we have, we'll see more rewarding results when we check the next nooks and crannies in future Open World games. Tears of the Kingdom looks like is gonna take every last inch of the Switch's power to make it happen and who knows what we can expect from FromSoft after how good their first take of a Souls Like Open World game turned out.
I really liked how you brought up Ghost of Tsushima as an example of being a beefy AAA open world game that is good. That game's UI only appears at points when you actually need it on screen, which thus keeps all the clutter away when you're riding around the beautiful scenery. Breath of the Wild and Ghost of Tsushima are to me, the epitome of good modern open world games.
The UI is definitely better than in other open worlds but it ultimately doesn't fix many of the problems that are present in GoT such as content creep and generic quests that love wasting your time (so. many. unskippable. cutscenes.) and a fairly uninteresting combat system. I only got up to the end of act 1 before I dropped it. Just one look at all the new markers on the world map I had spent the last 30 hours painstakingly exploring was enough to discourage me from continuing the game further.
@@Skallva I played through the whole game and maybe it was because I actually did enjoy the storyline and the combat that made me get through it. I willingly would go to enemy outposts because I knew it's where I could sharpen my combat skills and check out new abilities I gained in action. Plus the game looks really great so that added to it. I found Act 2's story stuff to be more interesting than Act 1's.
I'd say the four (4) total enemy types is what drags the game down for me. That and them rarely throwing enough guys at once at you to make fights actually challenging.
@@JoaoVitor-ge4le Just say that it's stockholm syndrome Even Genshin gacha system is nonsensical and even stingier than vast majority of other gacha games aside from pity (oh yeah on top of of premium currency scarcity from actually playing the game)
They are not strictly open-world games, but Dark Souls and Bloodborne give that sense of exploration and mystery of where to go and where hidden things are located. One of the keys to achieve this is removing mini maps, pointers, compasses or anything to guide you from point A to point B. Also, some games like RDR2 tell us exactly what to do during a mission (pick up the hay, give it to your horse, enter the building, now pick this item up, etc.), and many other games have a to-do list which feels like a Supermarket item list; the Souls games, on the other hand, don’t have any objectives/mission list, and aren’t telling us exactly what to do. And that’s really where immersion is achieved in a videogame: using all your brain power to mindfully explore, discover hidden treasures, side quests, and items on your own, figuring things out like puzzles or how to beat a boss. It also feels incredibly rewarding after completing the game instead of feeling like “finally it’s done”.
Open World games can work, especially for rpgs. It's for games that aren't rpgs they struggle to make things interesting I think. Unless they find good middle ground usually it ends up really shallow.
Props to this guy for taking out the time to write down and properly vocalize the things I've been trying to get my friends to understand for years because I just can't get more than halfway through their favorite open-world titles.
@@兄貴-d3q a game with similar concept to metroid and castlevania game (2d platformer) . for example : dead cells, hollow knight, super metroid, castlevania etc.
Can I ask what meaningful upgrades those are? I got every shrine and every side quest done and I don’t remember getting anything more meaningful than occasionally getting armor I wasn’t going to use because food was so broken so why would I
I would argue that The Witcher 3’s multitude of side content stands apart from a lot of the mindless tasks in most other open-world games. Most of the side quests in that game are rewarding for their little bits of story, even if they boil down to repetitive formulas and actions in the actual gameplay. I also found much of the game’s world to be quite scenic and visually distinct, to the point where I would often ride my horse between locations instead of fast traveling so I could soak in the view. As for Spider-Man, web-swinging is probably my favorite part of those games, and I think fun traversal is itself a great justification for a large open map to move around in. Everyone has already talked about BotW, so I won’t reiterate those points, but it’s magnificent as well. But yeah, games like Skyrim have never really been able to hold my attention for long. I’ve started Skyrim several times, trying to do a pure playthrough, but then I get bored, load a bunch of mods, mess around for a few hours, and drop it again for years lol.
Open world was pointless in Witcher 3 , other than the quests represented i.e. *!* marks , the entire map was filled with nonsensical copy paste *?* marks , I mean in the entire Velen only 30% of the map actually had those quality side quests excluding the filler, if the game was like Witcher 2 i.e. small sections of the map joined together it would not have hurt the game at all
the repetitiveness argument is bs anyway. every game ever is repetitive. there is only so many different things and mechanics you can put into a game. in fact, I'd bet my ass off that if we look at every game and look at it's mechanics (especially the turn based combat stuff this guy loves so much) we get 2 hands full of different mechanics that exist in games, similar to how there are only 7 story plots when boiled down. it's all just a different skin. "it's repetitive" is a lazy mans game analysis/review by someone who can't articulate why doing this type of activity in a game gets boring and has been repeated so often that it literally became "repetitive" itself. imagine someone saying "Super Mario Bros is bad because it's repetitive. all you do in a world is move right, jump at enemies and collect coins"
@@COHOFSohamSengupta Witcher 2 was garbage because it wasn't open world "other than the quests represented i.e. ! marks , the entire map was filled with nonsensical copy paste ? marks " So?
My biggest pet peeve about open worlds is the size. It feels like every game has to one-up the others by making it bigger and better with more places to be, things to explore, quests to do, when all it does is water down the experience and make the game feel empty and lifeless.
Part of it was a general consensus some time ago that gamers were tired of paying $60 for a short 10-20hr game. So game devs made more open worlds games with about 40,60,100hrs of gameplay. Skyrim, Fallout, and a few open world games do things decently since each area has some lore, important item to collect, or NPC's to interact with in each area.
This why we called open world games walking simulator because we just walking in emptiness. I hate same stuffs over and over again like why not add something new and make the world super interesting.
My only problem with them is that I can never be sure that I'm experiencing all the content. In RDR2, there are so many random encounters and side quests that stem from minor actions that I'm scared I'm always missing something.
and thats the wrong mentality to have, most modern open world games if not all dont force you to do these things and if u do miss out, well then just make a new game, srsly if u enjoy playing the game, creating a new save file to hit the spots u missed shouldnt be a problem, if it is, then quit gaming cuz ull never enjoy anything based on an irrational fear.
@@Aqsticgod I think you're picking up what I said wrong, I love open-world games because when they're really good I do try to hit everything. Just kinda always on my toes with RDR2 because some stuff becomes unavailable based on progress and I wanna do everything before I pass it up and read about it later lol
@@Aqsticgod These games can reach into 100+ hours. Not everybody wants to start over and wipe away all of that time they invested and do it all again to see the one thing they missed.
I really love games like Deus Ex, Control and Dishonoured, where you have a series of smaller open worlds that all have side quests that are completely different next to the main ones. Sometimes these side missions actually have a effect on the main story like "Oh, I see you have already taken out the gangsters in the South, mission complete" that's so satisfying haha in RDR2 I spent more time in the towns and cities like Saint Denis & Valentine, same with GTA5 I rarely visited the countryside outside of missions. So I'd prefer smaller city centres where you can visit every store, talk to everyone and have side quests that are completely different and not checklist crap. There was a PS2 game I played years ago called Spy Fiction. Level 2 was set in this huge mall, with a parking area, downstairs, upstairs, attic, basements, kitchens and bars in every store. The game never told you what to do either, so you had to figure it all out yourself and everything was interactive. Huge openworlds have all these buildings and structures everywhere, but they are just building blocks with no point but to look pretty.
Ever since Breath of the Wild, the cracks in open-world games have just continued to show themselves more and more. Even ones I used to like have lost a lot of their magic.
Especially when you realize that all the time you waste playing these games could be spent learning a trade or valuable real life skill that could help you get out of your parents basement. I can tell you’re young because if you grew up when 3D games were new you’d be marveling at how far video games have come
Botw is probably one of the most exhausting, dullest, worst examples of open world games ever made. Are you people just doing a bit, like you did with Shadow of the Colossus?
@@videogamemusic2962 I don't think people who claim to like it are liars or idiots. I think they're doing a bit, an elaborate rick roll. It's pretty good.
I mean, it is. even without the gross predatory business practices of gacha, it's absurdly tedious and repetitive. the exploration drip feeds you dopamine by absolutely drowning the world in collectibles to find, and a lot of them are actually hidden behind enjoyable little puzzles or combat encounters that are just challenging enough to be rewarding without being annoying, but the sheer volume of these things makes it mind-numbingly boring after a while. the traversal is just a mediocre copy of breath of the wild, and the combat pretends to have enjoyable mechanical depth when in reality the extent of its elemental system is "element A + element B = extra damage" with literally two exceptions (Geo's shield mechanic and hydro+cryo's freezing), and other than that it boils down to spamming left click and pressing E and Q when they're off cooldown, different weapon types making next to no real difference and abilities really boiling down to "press button to damage/heal/shield"
@@smug_slime The only parts of what makes Genshin's exploration worth something close to good is when it's giving primogems or weapons' blueprints, the rest are just superficial or facade Just think of the stuffs you loot in the game compared to mobile games' grinding tedium and actual open world games' loots
@@ohamatchhams just what do you mean by superficial and facade means? I genuinely don't understand what you mean. give examples please. and about grinding on mobile games doesn't really bother me since currently I play 3 gacha games including GI and I'm sure other open world game has better loot reward but I bet they are not on mobile phone.
@@marcog.verbruggen674 i played genshin since release and was AR56 and good lord that game was so draining and I'm so glad I quit. I still feel exhausted when I even see genshin mentioned, but that's a me problem lol. I was entirely f2p and super invested in the world of genshin but it was wasting so much of my time and helping to deteriorate my mental health at an alarming rate!!
you bringing up RDR2 as an example of a barren open-world just shows to me that you didn’t engage with it’s open world. There are stories told in that world around every corner. Every location (with very few exceptions) is used for something.
yes, I loved going out and exploring the world, finding secret ruins or interesting points, looking at them and Arthur drawing a little sketch in his journal. RDR 2's open world was amazing
thank you, someone gets me here. yeah i felt this way too when he spoke about witcher 3. open world game he found million flaws with, and im still playing it in 2021. what i got from this video is that he wants all games to be like metroidvania.
This video just seems like you PREFER other game types. Open World games usually strive to do more than most that just focus on one specific feature. At times it works out and sometimes it doesn't. There are bad open world games but there's bad games of every type. Usually they're way more easy to get into and the point of wanting more realism is... Well people eat that shxt up XD. Look at Red Dead, I personally don't care for it at all but it has its audience. There's plenty of good games and open world games have definitely been good. Botw is an obvious point but I'd say Skyrim was pretty good too. Of course it's better with mods, but despite not being too crazy depth wise it's an easy jumping on point and a good RPG. Combat is simple, but enjoyable and the growth is satisfying, the power fantasy is apparent, the movement is basic but works, the world is actually pretty good but it's believability beyond simple scripts isn't there. But it can still give you those occasional moments of beauty if you get yourself immersed. Also for the record mini-maps make lots of things easier and they're not bad in the slightest. The casual audience makes use of them a lot, and it also works amazing with large scale games.
Honestly preferred Oblivion to Skyrim. The dark style of Skyrim took me a while to get used to, while Oblivion was colorful from the start. But I like both of them equally in terms of artstyle, just saying Skyrim's took me a while to adjust. And I played Skyrim before Oblivion. Also, Oblivion forces you to be much more specialized. I feel like in Skyrim you could pretty much be all powerful and skilled in every single aspect of the game, which doesn't really appeal to me. For me, TES games put the "Role Playing" in RPG. Skyrim less so than it's predecessors. I understand it's to appease the completionists who don't role play, but it makes it so that the character creation part matters less. How I play TES (or Bethesda RPGs in general) is I don't complete everything on a single save file. I have a character in mind, with a certain personality and philosophy. I don't make choices based on what I would do, I make them based on what my character would. Kinda like video game D&D, which is what it was always meant to be.
@J Prez Honestly barely used the minimap while playing BoTW. Sometimes I feel that it's not even there. I feel like BoTW is really good at using scale to it's advantage. Unlike other open world games, it distracts you a lot. It really brings out your "ooh, shiny" instinct. Every feature of the landmass is strategically placed to pique your interest, which is, in my opinion, what an open world ought to be. Not just downtime from the main story, but something that actively distracts you and leads you on an addictive discovery trail. And the mechanics of climbing and gliding complement this perfectly. In BoTW I barely use horses simply because I'm so compelled to get off them to explore the beaten path. The story may be the same, but you mark your own path, which is the ideal spirit of an open world. In BOTW, I felt compelled to keep playing long after beating Ganon. In GTA I feel empty after the story ends.
Yeah BotW is the only open world game I ever actually finished, and it avoids almost all of the issues you laid out here. I tried playing Skyrim 3 or 4 times, and everytime the long intro, walking around forever, Inventory management, and the game not autosaving often enough always put me off after 10 hours max.
@@isodoubIet There's weapon/shield/bow management, but your material storage is infinite. Also it's less management and more "This one has smaller number" *proceeds to throw sword out of atmosphere*
@@videogamemusic2962 " There's weapon/shield/bow management," And food. "Also it's less management and more "This one has smaller number" proceeds to throw sword out of atmosphere" The fact that it's so braindead, but I'm still forced to do it, is one of the biggest issues I have with it. Weapons in this game are for all intents and purposes just ammo, but unlike an FPS that has an ammo counter in the corner and then politely fucks off out of my way, with botw I'm forced to manually pick out inventory space for every single bullet.
I don't understand why they think its a good idea to have exp systems in open world games. It is legit there to stop you from going to areas where you are "underleveled". in BOTW you can legit just run to the castle, its hard, but you can do it. The ability to do it is really important to me as a gamer.
I mean, how do you think an RPG open world would work without levels? The character would start the game with every spell and combat skill? It would be unlocked trough doing quests therefore allowing the game to lock some abilities until they want you to have it?
That makes me think of one of my favorite moments from the first Zelda: in following my curiosity and exploring, I found level 8. I hadn't completed level 3, so I was woefully underpowered. Since I had no expectations that I would stand a chance at that point, it wasn't discouraging to get killed very quickly. But the fact that I could just go to level 8 like that was incredible to me. It's not like sequence breaking, where you have to get around the design. It's just... There.
@Luis Filipe BOTW kind of proved that you don't need level up system in a open world just got find way to increase HP and STAM through exploration. In Hollow Knight you get skills through mean of exploring and finding that those skills. So it possible for open world games to do without leveling systems or skill tree.
if more open world games employ that from botw, a lot of open world games would become better imho. but at the same time i get that its something the bled over from the past. like if they make witcher 4 with the open world mentality of botw that game will surpass botw. but yeah exp could still be used just not for excluding you from areas, that we agree wholeheartedly.
The implementation of RPG mechanics in more and more games have put me off. I personally only think they makes sense in turn based and strategy games. It is easier to replace interesting game design by throwing in RPG mechanics.
Hit so many nails on so many heads that I didn’t even know existed. I’ve found myself drawn to games like resident evil and devil may cry, from the old open worlds I used to play without knowing why
One time, I was playing BotW by running around the edges of the map looking for secrets that were super out of the way, maybe even secret spots off the side of the map. I saw a big rock in a pit, walked up to it, climbed on it, and I nearly shit myself when it suddenly moved. That was my first Talos encounter. That was the best and most memorable experience I had with that game. I love that shit.
The only open world game i can do is Minecraft bc of the lack of to do's and confusing map. I love small worlds that are "open" in that you can do whatever you want in them. Like how delfino plaza feels or a short hike.
This is how I felt once the PS4 generation took off with basically every game becoming an open world. Felt like nothing was fun anymore, and it's how I fell so much in love with JRPGs because they don't waste my time, have so many layers to combat and storytelling, and there's constantly something interesting and new for me to do every 20 minutes for me to get engaged with instead of finding the same 1 dimensionally enjoyable thing 3 hours later.
I find that a lot of JRPGs do, indeed, waste my time, that they have garbage gameplay that feels like a chore and yet they devote 30 hours to it, and the stories are often full of filler sub-plots to squeeze in an extra dungeon with more garbage gameplay. And they never stop holding your hand, and rely on gimmicks to keep themselves even slightly interesting. But the ones I’ve found that don’t do that have gone on to become some of my favorite games of all time. I have a very love-hate relationship with the genre.
@@andytheawesome7592 I feel the exact same. Yakuza 7 was one of the few JRPG's I thoroughly enjoyed. Even that had a spike in the middle where I had to grind like no tomorrow and some of the pacing was so slow and drawn out tutorials.
My only real problem with JRPGs is that many of them don't always have the best gameplay to storytelling ratio. I enjoy the combat and like the story being told, but when the balance between the two is thrown off it can feel jarring and make me want to stop playing for a time. Everyone who has played Persona 5 knows about the part of the game towards the middle that deprives the player of choice and combat and only consists of dialogue and some walking around while character drama happens. It is not fun and just makes the player want to skip through it.
Ironically, my favorite part of Horizon: Zero Dawn was the Lore and the new game+ modes, both things that specifically *dont* have to do with it being an open world, new game+ is fun because I already have the tools and now just have to get through the good story.
I feel like the best story about open world games is that of Dragon Age Inquisition. They wanted to push their limits and make this HUUUUUUGE open world…but didn’t think about how to fill it, no stories no quests nothing. So they scrambled to fill it with anything, creating this kinda expasnsively empty world
@@loglog7 I actually have like 100+ hours in it. But I get physically I’ll if I focus on how much I haven’t done in the game or I see the percentage markers
@@tiniestlumpia it was one of those games that I got onto with the sole focus of beating the main story to be able to enjoy it. thinking about it that has been kinda like that for alot of openworld games, I have to actively force myself to ignore alot of side stuff so I wont get burnt out and actually get to see the main story with good set pieces.
Yep kinda agree although i didn't really see the problem until after my 2nd playthrough. On the 1st playthrough, the only part i found tedious was the hinterlands. Being my 1st dragon age game, i was amazed at the character interactions, team building and strats i could use with them. The voice acting is amazing as well as the story. And some of the romances, interactions and relationships can literally tear your heart out or make you cry in joy. The exploration was a massive chore but everything else was worth it. Then after playing Origins, you're like what's Inquisition lmao??
i think it helps that in Yakuza instead of making the open world wider, they just built more and more into smaller spaces. helps counteract a lot of the bloat that the open world genre is facing.
It helps that the world's are small and dense, you barely spend time travelling in those games, you're always doing something, and if you ever get bored of doing one thing there's always variety and depth in other things
It's really intersting how differently we are all wired. My monkey brain couldn't be happier when I see numbers go up, skills getting unlocked and maps getting checkmarked, and even if I get a burn-out, I reopen the game 1-2 moths later until it eventually shows that sweet 100%. To use the pie analogy: sometimes I crave nothing more than that small locally owned restaurants pie, whos family-recipie has been refined and aged by grandmas to come, and it's always the sweetest delight. On other days, I march into the closest "Cheap&Unhealty" supermarket, stock up on microwave pie, and get sick of that many I can eat in one sitting. Life is about balance.
because its entirely depends on preference.... cause for me 2d platform/metroidvania is boring af.. we all should think for ourselves and not because a youtubers says its bad then you hate it too..
@@Mc4est Lol, boring why though? You didn't reason your opinion, there is such a thing as an invalid opinion... Taste should be an informed thing, you liking or disliking something isn't rng from god, you dislike them/find them boring for a reason.
@@musicfriendly12 I state my opinion somewhere in this comment section .. TLDR environment looks similar AF with no sense of main and sub path, nothing really memorable, you dont stop for a moment and take a screenshot admiring because it looks boring... I burst out laughing on how he introduced hollow knights map about how its important sitting with npc, talking to a big man... like how does that prove his point?? you can do that in open worlds... LOL, Im not defending open world games as I hate some of them, but dont say its bad because of a shitt ass reason..
@@Mc4est personally I don't like metroidvanias either, I believe the gameplay just really isn't for me, but I can understand why he would bring it up, because he does like them, you seem to be trying to invalidate his opinion because it doesn't match yours.
@@gapropgaming1814 LOL... wtf?? do you even understand whats going on? ... if your super smart logic is correct, then is he also invalidating my opinion cause it doesn't match his?? LOL thats hypocrisy dummy... its okay to say he likes hollow knight map or think its better... but the problem is, his reasons why its more important (him saying "you can sit with this npc", "you can talk to this big guy", bla bla bla) that reason is dogshitt... just like your logic...
Gotta say, this video is great. Having a massive open world has just become a marketing point. By far though, my favourite open world is in Shadow of the Colossus. I don't fully understand why I love it so much, but even knowing that I'm going to find nothing, I still want to explore just to see what the developers built, as the scenery is just so beautiful.
Whilst I think all of the points raised are valid, open world games definitely have a place in the industry. Sometimes when your brain is just fried from work I don’t want to try and reload that stressful save I have on floor 5 of Enter the Gungeon, but instead wanna just go round looking for some Koroks, or have a ride with Roach and listen to the gorgeous music in Skellige
nah... its entirely about preference, same as I hate Metroidvania style games cause I dont feel like I'm the right direction like, all the time.. I just feel lost and when reaching new area, I always feel like I haven't explored enough or I missed a lot of things... I'd rather follow quest markers and enjoy the view travelling than going blind and accidentally beat the game and have to do multiple playthrough to fully explore everything... (plus 2d platform environments are boring to explore and feels dead than 3d mountain landscapes or city buildings full of life)..
I feel like I rarely enjoy open world games, but when I do I can't exactly pin point why. The only open world game I enjoyed quite a lot was Breath of the Wild, but most of the enjoyment was sucked out on replays. I just liked walking around and discovering things- just taking enjoyment in stopping to smell the flowers or watch the scenery around me, but once I knew all of its secrets it became more like an extended optional quest to collect all the items to upgrade all my gear because there was nothing else left for me to do.
A big thing that BOTW did differently was how it handled exploration. there's a difference between seeing a weird mountain shape in the distance and going "I wanna climb that" or a generic open world game that has all the markers with bars on the left saying how many you got left to do as if it was a checklist. my kind of thinking with this is that I'd be much happier being able to buy 1 thing in a store vs having to absolutely buy 20 things off a checklist for no reason
Yeah, BOTW had its charm, for sure, but my main problem with it was that exploration never rewarded you with interesting prizes. Yes, the view is beautiful, but that really doesn't matter when I'm fighting the 100th Bokoblin camp to get average weapons that are replaceable and breakable, or I'm lifting another rock to get another seed. It gets pretty formulaic pretty fast so, unless you REALLY appreciate the aesthetic and atmosphere, you're bound to lose interest
@@victorteste5325 Seeds are pretty important (even if searching for yellow poo all over the map isn't that thrilling) and there are some cool armor to find here and there it's not just breakable shields and weapons, sometimes just finding a boss you never knew about is the reward, tho I agree in a lot of ways BOTW feels more like a proof of concept for a new Zelda formula and I hope the sequel actually rewards exploration a lot more, not necessarily with loot but at least with a lot more unique things to find
I had to pause the video when you mentioned the Witcher 3 getting pan for old woman as an example of trivial open world quests that just keep you busy. In fact the quest is built to make you think "oh wow she's right there and she wants me to grab the thing next to her.. classic quest.." but then you go on to find that the pan's soot was used to write a letter, that letter leads you to an NPC with a whole other quest that you may have missed if you didn't stop to see what that old woman needed
This shows a problem I had with the video. I mean, the guy admitted he wasn't engaged with medieval fantasy and that's fair( I for example don't care about shooters so Fallout ain't my cup of tea design-wise) but if he actually cared about the game for five minutes at the point he did the quest, he'd know the pan quest ain't about the pan at all, but the mystery behind the guy whom used the pan to make the report. I mean, the whole thing about Witcher 3's side quests are mysteries to solve and nothing is like it is at face value and there's always something else behind the first impressions of the quest. It's not much about gameplay but find out the little stories behind each side quest. I never found a game where I cared so much about doing the side quests despite their gameplay being so repetitive, because I didn't care about gameplay at those points, only knowing what is the truth behind the story presented by the quest-giver. Then there was the whole side critique about Genshin Impact. Just pointing it out it's a BOTW clone and critiquing the monetization ain't a critique about Open world,. I was expecting a critique about Genshin's open world design, not about the damn monetization. For example, the game is pack full of content and unlike most open worlds, it's world is quite dense, but given it's a live-service game, once you complete a region, there ain't much a reason to re-explore that part of game, so you go do your daily quests or grind some levels or do the events that come once every few weeks. So it's a game that you have to be casual about it, playing a little every day, because if you do otherwise, you won't have much to do next day. Also, there is some Ubisoft-like design regarding quests and shit. A Perfect Open world game, at least for me, has to have the density of Genshin, the narrative and side quests of Witcher 3, the attention to detail of a Rockstar game and the freedom of choices of Baldur's Gate 3, and a very interesting combat system, and such a game ain't coming for at least half a decade.
"lifeless breath of the wild rip off" oof that's pretty harsh. As much as i like to shit on genshin monetization system, the game lore, story, music and designes are incredibly solid and are able to stand on their own (I hate to say this too but there is virtually no reason to spend on the game either).
People really like to shit on Genshin Impact a lot these days. I guess it's trendy. And sure, Gacha bad, but I'm still not a fan of how oversimplified those arguments get.
@@Archflip I mean, it's not really trendy, it's because people often try it already thinking of the negatives. Most people wouldn't have the best first impressions about a gacha game which was said to be a "BotW rip off", and having bad first impressions is enough to ruin a game for some people. It's an incredible game but it needs to completely change most players first impressions instead of just being good.
The thing is, when you only play the first few hours or so? It rly does seem like a botw ripoff. The way it introduces the mechanics and some animations in the beginning are just very similar. Ofc as the game goes on and you start to understand it more there are a lot of differences but at first glance you can't rly blame people for the assumption
I think what he meant is on the mechanical level of the game. I'm AR 57 on Genshin Impact but I quit playing months ago because it gets tad boring. The lore is there sure, but what can you do when your stamina (forgot what it is called in-game) gets depleted? Literally nothing else matters. The world is massive too but it's so bland like there's nothing to it after you get all the chests and stuff. The lack of mobs, variety and spawn rate makes the open world doesn't make sense as well. These are the reasons why I stopped playing and just follow the story/lore on Genshin Impact youtubers.
I really like open world games most of the time because of how pretty and "adventerous" they are supposed to be. Your video perfectly examined and explained a lot of problems which make me never want to actually finish them, thank you for the video.
id argue this video didnt do that. what i got from this vid is that he wants every game to be like hollow knight or metroidvanias cuz according to him they provide a better "open world" experience. two different genres cannot be compared when it comes to gameplay and emersion. u just cant do that. he even trashed on botw, the one open world game thats actually really good, because he sees the same problem that not many other people see. to me this video should be titles "why i hate open world games and love metroidvanias"
@@Aqsticgod He's talking about why he doesn't like open world games and doesn't play them, he never said he wanted to obliterate them from existence. Some people don't like your walking simulators, cope.
@@Aqsticgod He didn't say open worlds are bad he is just pointing out many of the flaws that many open world games suffer with which end up contradicting the idea of an open world. He is just comparing to games like hollow knight to illustrate the points better
While I agree with a lot of your criticisms regarding size over substance and mission or game design, I feel like your criticism is sometimes way too harsh and guided by the lack of interaction or engagement you got out of the games you mention for reasons that are completely personal for you, namely the tastes you mention about halfway through your video. Games like Skyrim or The Witcher are, for a lot of people, big juicy pies with amazing slices thanks to their beautiful landscapes and worlds. The fact you don't enjoy certain aesthetics or genres shows quite a lot, but for some players its exactly the things you don't like (medieval settings, story focus, beautiful landscapes with sidequests and side activities that stop you from finishing their main story and distract you for hours upon hours) that keep them coming back to some open world classics.
@@rufius4050 It is probably the best open world aside from fallout New Vegas and maybe Zelda breath of the wild. It's very atmospheric and it doesn't have the feeling of everything being the same, one of the reasons is the terrain, you'll see cliffs and structures pretty much everywhere, something that connects with another interesting thing, there's no 2d background, everything you see you can go there and explore find items and etc; it also gives the player the sensation of a massive yet not a hollow world, and although smaller than assassin's creed or other games map wise, there's enemy packs, caves, mini bosses, secret areas, ruins castles everywhere making it feel actually neverending. And my last point is that because it's a open world, if you don't like souls-like combat, (which if you never experienced is definitely something to try) you can pretty much have an easy mode by exploring getting more levels upgrading weapons and spirits, and you can summon people online to help you out.
@@PrimeiroEnjoyer Both BOTW and ER are the contenders for the worst open world ever made. The fact it tells player nothing about side quest or have markers makes both some of the worst gaming experience ever.
I just recently bought Breath of the Wild and I just stopped playing Last os us 2, ghost of tsushima, horizon zero dawn, the witcher iii and just focus on what BoTW has to offer us... and it's just amazing... I can spend literally hours around a stupid mountain climbing and finding ores or kokorot seeds or shrines without actually going throughout camping. Props for your video
as someone who's played genshin since release, the world is nice and story so far is getting better and better, but I really CANNOT recommend it. even just casually exploring things, after a while you'll run out of things to do besides daily commissions and the tedious late game grind that gets more and more needed to even SURVIVE the world itself. and as a gacha just like you said it ticks all the boxes to try and milk your money, and I myself at a few points in time have almost faltered to it. if you're still interested in the game, id advise just waiting until the main story is complete in 2075 or something
Well one could just play casually you know, late game grinding is FAR from necessary. They have the function to lower the world level specifically for that reason. And idk what you mean by milking, the game doesn't shove microtransactions in your face, battle pass is completely unecessary, and it's easy enough to get the 5 stars you want as a free to play player with the sheer amount of primogems given out for story, exploration, and events (to say nothing of how good 4 stars are comparatively). And for those that casually want to spend, that 5 buck blessing is actually quite generous (genesis crystal prices are awful though, I'll give you that).
Yeah, it's absolutely one of those games where if you aren't down for the grind you can't keep playing it that much after a while. It can still be nice as a "seasonal player" who basically comes back every time they update the game with new content and events. That's probably the healtheist way to experience the game, the way it's being produced right now. Waaaay down the line when the story gets finished I would probably call it an easy recommend because of how much sheer content the game will have by then.
Aether currents in FFXIV are fine. It's an MMO and they barely make you traverse the world after the stroy is done anyway, might aswell go litterally half a minute off the beaten path after *you make the decision to click your aether compass* to get all the mcguffins so you can fly in the zone later. Or just ignore them and have a friend fly you to each one after you complete the story. It's a non-issue.
They're fine but honestly speaking, just unlocking flying after completing the story in the area would probably be just as fine. I don't have an issue with them though, and it gives me a reason to explore the areas
I get a lot of anxiety when playing open world games, I just get overwhelmed on what to do, and it feels like an endless world that I have to explore to find one specific thing.
funny, Metroidvanias and rougelikes make me overwhelmed from how intense they are at all times. i much prefer chill atmostpheres where i can chose what to do. to each his own (:
Your arguments are solid, yet we disagree on the empty space thing. I really like the exploration piece of elder scrolls games without a purpose. Just exploring IS the purpose. Getting lost in the world. I love it.
The problem of big worlds is that they seem to be designed without immersive navigation in mind. They're literally a checklist + GPS, a delivery boy simulator.
2:48, Mario Odyssey is more like a dozen good pies that are almost all alike. You finish those pies, and then someone throws a bunch more pie scraps and filling into the empty trays and asks you to eat all of that as well to reach the true ending. 10:36 the game literally keeps track of that, and technically gives you a unique item for getting all of them. Will ~less~ people attempt to 100% the korok seeds with no up-front tracker? Yes. Are there still 900 of them that many completionists will hunt down with no sense of joy? Also yes.
yeah but the point of the korroks is to be a nice surprise not something to be saught out and if you are arguing that the collectothon has too many collectables and a congratulations for finishing which has nor baring on the ending and just says thanks and congrats
The whole mario odyssey pie scrap thing is why i never got all the moons, i felt no happiness after getting the 400th Completely Identical Collectable after doing some menial task. Though, if you just play for the main story, it’s a fine game.
@@chickennugget6684 just east as much of a pie as you want, no need to eat more when you're already full. In my feeling, it's more like "hey, I know you're done eating, but if you ever want more, there's always gonna be more pie waiting" and that's what I like.
On the korok seeds, you are missing his main point. The way they're presented as a mechanic is important and sets an expectation of how the player should interact with them. The korok seeds aren't put on some sort of checklist or a bar that fills up over time. Just a counter in your inventory that tells you how many you currently hold. Yes, the game DOES track how many you collect total internally, and you get a unique item (with no function whatsoever), but that's not what matters. The game NEVER tells you in its design to seek these seeds out to ends of the earth. They're supposed to be a little incidental reward for doing a little puzzle you run across, or getting to a hard to reach area. There are so many because the designers can assume you won't happen to get every seed you come across in this massive open world. It's something you pick up along the way, and eventually get enough to redeem them for upgrades. And after long enough, you can't get anymore upgrades, so they become superfluous and only collected out of the joy of finding a secret. Anyone insane enough to go out of their way to find them all is never told by the game that they should do it, nor that there is some extrinsic reward waiting for them at the end.
When your trying to play Genshin impact in you own way, until you realize that sidemissions are tedious beating monsters to strong for you doesn't reward you and every dungeon is locked by a level border forcing you to do them in a specific order in which they are all easy. (And then you implement the worst parts of Breath of the Wilds movement mechanics, gliding literally feels like walking as slow as it is)
When I walk into a zone with 100 different quest markers I’m like ”do I have to do all of this stuff?” rather than ”oh boy do I get to do all of this stuff?” I hate when a game blasts me with all kinds of useless shit to do rather than letting me discover things by myself. This is why a game like Breath of the Wild is so good. It gives you a direction and you go and run into things organically.
BOTW is so good because it knows it's fanbase is full of jobless morons who find fun in running at grass aimlessly and make a 60 hour run time into 120 because they want to discover "bY tHeMsElVeS"
Ages like fine wine honestly, after playing so much of Elden Ring (best open world game next to Zelda) with the freedom of gameplay and exploration. I tried Hogwarts Legacy and quit after 1 hour, its still another ubisoft clone of a game. I'm so sick of this linear experience I've had over like 50 times
I always remember the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games fondly, especially for the way they handled fast travel. If you found a group on their way to somewhere, you could ask where they were headed and possibly join them. This was a great way to handle it since travel was very dangerous (there are actually invisible hazards, it's a whole thing) and it made you sometimes go places you may not have been planning on just to travel safely. You could always head to a settlement and hire someone to guide you someplace, too, but your money would run out fast if you did that much. It always felt good to finally see a group, and find we were headed the same way. It was an old series, and there weren't many npcs but it felt more alive because of how those few npcs were presented as friends you actually wanted to talk to because they could legitimately help.
What i realized recently is that I want to see worlds that feels lived in and purposeful. Just like in games like Monster Hunter and Breath of the Wild, I want to see that deer sleep underneath a tree when there isnt anybody actively hunting them. It's nice seeing monsters chilling around or fighting amongst themselves. Add more landmarks, interactivity, better traversal or movement mechanics, or interesting verticality.. just dont just have me slowly move about fulfilling a checklist that I can't emotionally resonate with. Toukiden II scratches the same itch as Monster Hunter Rise, but some of the enemy placement just felt random, like set dressing to cover up the wide and mostly barren environments. Had the same issue with Gen 8 Pokemon's wild area.
This is why I prefer small open worlds/adventure games like Witcher 2, Shenmue and Majora's Mask over sandbox games. Large open worlds start off strong but you'll quickly realize how much repetitive side content, repetitive combat and ridiculously long traveling there is to artificially make the game longer. They are entirely dependent on the copy paste formula and while they give you the freedom to do whatever you want other than the main story, it usually comes down to completing one quest after the other, grinding or farming. Whereas smaller open worlds have more variety in content, more focused storylines and sidequests and actually finishing the game without feeling overwhelmed by its size and repetitive design.
I appreciate all of the effort and thought put into this. My biggest issue with linear games is that I get bored easily, and repeating the same sequence of events for the 50th time, trying to get past a certain level, before being allowed to do ANYTHING else has caused me to abandon countless games. At least in most open world games I have the ability to go attempt another quest, farm for better gear, or explore more of the map. I get it that you dont enjoy the noncombat/running aspects of games but those of us that grew up on the early days of WOW appreciate that "the grind" is not just about fighting and completing the main story line. I also appreciate the dynamic content prevelant in many open world games, especially in MMOs. Logging in on Christmas day to find a new Santa Sword of the Frost available is exciting to me. Most of all, I view open world games as the greatesst form of escapism. Got the next few hours I get to put myself in the shoes of a cowboy/orc/archer/samurai and do sh*t that cowboys/orcs/archers/samurais do (which involves more than running and fighting).
@@DaveUnknown I never said any of that is exclusive to that type of game. Im not talking about other genres. And what I described may not be exclusive to those genres (not sure why that matters anyway), they are characteristics of the actual game genres on topic here
A short hike does the small open world concept very well, having a whole island to explore, but never seeming too empty. You can find treasure, find people, fish, drive a boat, and just enjoy the scenery. It’s not very complex, but it is fun. It’s absolutely something I recommend.
The Uncharted series feels like the perfect blend of open-world environments and tight cinematic storytelling. Especially Uncharted 4, with occasional open-world segments, but an overarching linear story that keeps the game flowing at a solid pace.
I agree, and I Uncharted 2 and 3 also are really replayable for me, they have this blend of linear story game with very dynamic shootouts, and the games are not very long on repeat playthroughs.
Wholeheartedly agree. Set pieces are sprinkled in to keep the action going, and (in the case of Uncharted 4 mostly) the games have very quiet moments letting the characters just talk and have optional conversations, as well as react to the insanity they just survived.
Yeah as much as I wna love open world games, only one I enjoy is the insomniac Spider-Man’s and gta’s. Otherwise I’d rather play a linear game like uncharted or the gow trilogy to gow 2018. I don’t know if hitman is considered an open world or linear game with big open levels but I truly love that series too
Uncharted is as linear as it gets, though. Except for very short "open" areas in Uncharted 4, I wouldn't call any of the Uncharted anything remotely close to open world. I love those games, but they are pretty linear on-rail experiences.
My experience with open world games have been hating all the open world parts , but loving fighting giant robot monsters in horizon or the fantastic engaging story of Red Dead.
A great open world game that doesn't get much mention was Sleeping Dogs. It's action focus made the world fun to travel across while the map wasn't too big
Phew! I thought it was just me. I’ve realised in recent years that for me it comes down to gameplay vs experience. A game can be the most cinematic, beautiful, large scale experience but if the gameplay isn’t there I just won’t be compelled to play.
Even though I love open worlds for various reasons, I can see your points. It's not that I'm not aware of the issues, but the things I like far outweigh the cons for me. I think it comes down to what each person likes in a game I like to explore different worlds with different lore and I like to collect things. Horizon is a game that I really really like. Its lore made me really love the game, and the gameplay loop is nice . Doesn't mean I'm not aware that things can be improved, I do not like how half of the sidequests are just use the Focus to follow footprints to a lady's water vase. Still, that and other problems weren't deal breakers for me like it clearly were for Yakko lol Anyway, great video :)
I think what made Skyrim so addicting is how the compass works. You're just walking from point A to B and you see a marker on the compass indicating something is nearby, you investigate, around 70% of the time it's just Draugr Crypt number 155 but sometimes there's some environmental storytelling going on. IDK why but Skyrim feels denser than most open worlds, and also, MODS.
Also one massive point this guy forgot is a games soundtrack botw, Skyrim and the Witcher are all games that are fun to explore and walk around in because the music just puts you in a trance where doing anything can be fun.
Skyrim was a good game for its time. When skyrim came out, open world was not really huge yet. Nowadays, all the games that come out are friggin open world and its very exhausting. I have to work and take care of my family and i dont have enough time for all these 20000 different open world games. I prefer playing short linear games like resident evil, and speed running through them, seeing how fast i can complete them. I can finish most resident evil games in about 2 hours. Im not stuck on one long videogame for 100-200 hours, burning myself out. Even hardcore gamers like me have their limits. We have too many games!
There's nothing wrong with having taste... It's human. But somehow some of us have blurred the line between taste and general assessment. Not a lot of people these days can say "It's amazing, but not for me". A game is not bad because I don't like it. However, if like over 50% of the fans don't like a game, then something is wrong somewhere (And you'll still find people that love it). But if you had to dawn a mighty armor and shield to criticize a game, perhaps it's just not to your taste (which is ok). I really enjoyed the video though.
Though many of your points are valid, I find the perspective you hold to be very narrow and unfair when judging the entire open world genre as a whole. You compare and contrast these open world games with other games that carry very different goals and require different mind sets to both play and create. And your bias towards certain games and gameplay design decisions also weakens some of your arguments, especially your bias towards BotW. Breath of the Wild carries many flaws that other open world games carry, like just because it innovates on one core aspect of open world design doesn't mean it's repetitive side dungeons, uneventful side quests, and underwhelming story are free from criticism. And even if they are more forgivable because of the parts done incredibly well, why doesn't this extend to the other open world games? Why are their well done aspects either ignored, mentioned dismissively, or contrasted by their faults, while BotW gets a pass? I also find some of your comparisons to other game genres unjustified, because they're part of different genres that require very different mindsets to play. For example you compare metroidvanias to open world games, and though it's a minor and short comparison, I still find the point to be null, because open world games aren't metroidvanias, they can have similarities, but they are not the same. This extends to many other points you've made, but I don't want to make this a UA-cam COMMENT a whole critique of your pretty good video. But I can't help but want to say this since the handful of your videos I've seen carry similar problems, some more than others, but still, I see this as a problem.
@@YWNBAW69 my point's that he's biased towards BotW's design philosophy, and saying everything in a certain group is bad (this group being open world games) just because he enjoyed the exception (BotW) is close minded and ignores other's perspectives. This is amplified even more by the fact that criticisms that are completely valid towards Breath of the Wild like any other open world game are dismissed for arbitrary reasons. For example: Repetitive dungeons, flawed combat, too many collectables, and etc. Another thing is, how can we trust his judgement of open world games, when he hasn't finished many? It's like asking someone whose only ever seen Shang Chi to accurately describe martial arts films. We're supposed to trust his judgement of "Open World Games are Boring" when he's only ever completed like two. In the end of the day he does have a point, but it's hard to truly trust that point when it's obvious he doesn't have the information or experience to back it up any of his points.
this. the story, lore, music, and the drop-dead gorgeous environment is honestly amazing but goddamn the gacha and grinding make me wanna chew on some glass sometimes.
You redeemed yourself at the end there, I put down my master sword shaped pitchfork 😂 Joking, but I loved the video and looking forward to the BotW one!
I can get how some people don’t like open world games, especially if they like multiplayer which is usually an afterthought for these type of games.. but I just love the role playing capabilities that comes with it. I’ve be a Viking, I’ve been a cowboy, I’ve been an assassin, a Samurai, a knight, a gladiator, a pirate, anything you can think of I’ve experienced through these games
I started playing skyrim again after quite some time. This time I downloaded some mods to make it look better and more immersive, and I completely removed fast travel. The difference it makes to play an open world without fast travel is incredible. The best example i can give is I had to go to a faraway place early on, but instead of "just teleport there" or use the carriage, i slowly made my way using road signs(mod) and found myself through small towns and slowing down to take a break and talk to people or do a small quest. On my way I would delve into a dungeon if i found one and had the inventory, while slowly making my way to the main quest. It took me 4 hours to get there, but getting there was incredibly fun and immersive. It stopped being about just going to the next mission, and turned to setting of to a small 7 day journey. If you like taking it easy on games, try playing open worlds without fast travel. It's a great change.
Another example is Shadow of the Colossus, it truly feels amazing chasing the right path across the forbidden lands, finding the colossus and killing them
"Open-World games are a mess"
Me, a DND Player: Well, Yes.
90% Of the time open world in DnD is an illusion.
Not dissing it, but tbf having a world of that scale on the shoulders of one person instead of a machine would be torture.
Then there's Curse of Strahd.
@@elinquisidorperseverante6835 And TOA, Ironically my favorite campaigns were very linear tho.
@@gaburelmesmo3824 Tomb of Annihilation is the "Super hard Gary-Gygax approved" Dungeon or the "Sneaky dethroning of Acererak" one? I always get them confused.
@@elinquisidorperseverante6835 It's the latter LOL
I'm quite the opposite, all of my campaigns are as open as possible. I love it.
I just realized that BotW doesn’t show you objectives till you discover them yourself. Props to it for requiring you to be on the lookout when trying to find shrines/korok seeds/ map towers
*laughs in shrine seeker*
I mean I feel like it got the idea that you should have points of interest visible in world instead of on a map. Honestly it's the kind of discovery that makes a game like Minecraft fun
botw is cool bc it says "go to the shrines, beat the bosses, kill ganon. good luck!" and almost nothing else. you're free to discover almost all of the mechanics, items and secrets by yourself, you can climb anywhere to accomplish that, and you're rewarded with something you never could have predicted finding. perfect exploration game.
@@MariLui64 entirely optional
I really hate that every game add the stupid "?" on EVERY point of interest in the map. Like no Jimmy, I am not gonna cry if I miss couple of pieces of your content.
BOTW made me realize how much I didn’t care for open world before. It was the first time I was naturally compelled to stop and wander, to let the ambiance sink in. That’s why it’s such a beautiful game to me: I felt like I played it exactly how I felt.
Same here, normally massive maps feel like a chore but botw is so pretty I just wanted to see everything
It's the only open world that made me interested in the world
It’s designed around being an open world which is done surprisingly little in games that are sold on having a large open world
BotW is a really special kind of game. The exploration and sense of discovery, to me, still hasn't been outdone in any game since. The developers didn't bombard you with points of interest and quest markers constantly but instead trusted that you would be curious and perceptive enough to discover them yourself. It was a very refreshing take on the genre and it's a shame it didn't have more impact on the industry as a whole.
@Sonic 2013 No, they're pointing out that BotW is the only open world game that feels truly open.
"You've got to look at yourself and say, 'okay, 50% of our game is riding a horse, 25% is character-driven story, and 25% is shoot-outs. Now, is riding the horse really the best part of our game?'"
-dunkey
Donkly good
Still the greatest game of all time tho
@@samuelmcdonald1300 haha nice joke!
@@gamerpiss6747 Still better than garbage like BOTW, even tho both games arent good
You gotta be kidding. Summarizing RDR to this just shows how people didn't play the game properly lol
Me in my teens: “ open world games are the future!!”
Me now in my 30’s: ain’t no body got time for that
I said this too!!! I hope every game was open world. I was hooked on fallout 3. Now I regret those words
I said the same damn thing at the start of last gen! I am also 30 and I cannot stomach any open world games anymore. Feels like a chore and the level design falls much shorter.
I’ve finally got around to playing rdr2 and all I’m thinking is that this game should just be a naughty dog style experience, whereas younger me would have been thinking every game should be open world, I’ve felt so alone on my opinion for so long it’s good to know that other people have similar feelings to me
@Every Woman Jobs To The Wall I actually have a 2 year old son. Hence why the “ain’t nobody got time” joke.
@Every Woman Jobs To The Wall games are a form of art and creative expression age shouldn’t matter that would be like judging you for watching your films in your 30s it just doesn’t make sense
its not the genre aging its the genre getting milked. its like ubisoft has a machine to make action adventure open world games and activate it every year either for an ac game or another "new" game
and i highly agree with the movement part its really really fun to just engage with the open world without actually engaging with the open world.
last thing i swear, the side quests feel like work. work bad :(
Its not just Ubisoft. My problem is when they throw too much stuff at you. RDR2 is probably a great game, but I’ll never enjoy it cause there are just too many mechanics. For me, the ideal open world game is Spider-Man. Not too big, but big enough to be enjoyable.
@@Diphenhydra same here with horizon zero down
@@delirious_z9987 between sony and ubisoft open world is one of the least interesting tags these days
I could play *insert 3rd person open world action adventure game with crafting and stealth elements here*
Or I could play ULTRAKILL, Cruelty Squad, Doom Eternal, what is released of Deltarune, and Dishonored 2 all in the time it takes to finish said game giving me a much more fulfilling set of experiences for my time
@@Diphenhydra play breath of the wild
@@derpstick5467 Absolutely not, play what you enjoy and enjoy whatever you want!
Tbh I feel like some games with open worlds are good not because of the “open world sticker” that’s put on them, but the gameplay itself, or perhaps the story. I absolutely love the Witcher 3 for it’s interesting lore and the characters, the fighting system is also neat, but it’s the first point that made the game for me. It’s kinda interesting to view the different “?” marks on the map and destroy ghoul hives and etc, but after researching like 20% of them I got bored... and traveling between significant places in the game became so tedious without using a fast travel. The same happens with Skyrim, I absolutely love the gameplay, but getting places is such a chore. But would they work if they weren’t open world games? Would they still hold the same charm? What could be done instead of making them open worlds?
I think that I love the games that are open world more *in-spite-of* the fact that they're open world, than because of it. The Witcher 3 is a masterpiece of a game, and if you ask anyone why, not ONE person will say "the ? on the map". No, they'll say "the story" or "the bloody baron" or "gwent". The issue with open world games is filling them. I love a LOT of the sidequests in cyberpunk207. They're genuinely interesting and with a huge variety of paths to solve them and some fantastic characterisation and writing. There are 10x as many that are complete wastes of time. "kill this person" by passing a strength/athletics check to break into a room and shoot them in the face. The cyberpsycho fight where they had performed an entire satanic ritual was eerie and unnerving. I felt something when doing that mission. The exact same style of mission but it was just a dude in a street was boring, even if the combat was the same between the two. Videogames are art, and open-world games strive for immersion, but often sacrifice their artistry to achieve it.
Yeah I loved the world of tw3. Finding I treating quests and lore surrounding an area. But I started to realise there was just so much other crap that o didn't care about on theap outside that.
I think New Vegas kinda did the vast open world well because it's a wasteland desert and it's pretty easy to pick out where to go without being glued to a map.
I tried Assassin's creed odyssey for that Witcher feeling. But God it was the worst parts of the witchers open world with none of the good.
I think yes, they can be done and be done excellently without making it such an open world. It truly depends on the type of experience the game is attempting to allay to a player and I find an important point Yakko brings up is that there is an extreme lack of focus to these games, meaning any enjoyment of them is largely up to the player. If what you wanted and enjoyed out of Witcher 3 is characters, character interactions, lore, fighting, and the RPG elements, then the game can be made with small maps and extremely crafted setpieces for the player to move through. No part of the game has to be open world in order for you to enjoy these elements as a whole, as the open world contributes nothing but time riding your horse to experience more of them. In the very beginning of the Witcher 3 you get into a bar fight and quite honestly I had figured the game had asked me to either knock them out or just kill them, to place myself into Geralt's shoes and do what I think is right, but it doesn't matter what you do in that plot point. To me, the game isn't even Open World in that regard, and moments like that specific barfight can be delivered so much better in a tight, constrained story.
The Witcher would still work if it wasn't open world, there's two games in the franchise before The Witcher 3 that show this.
The Fable series, even just the OG game, is proof that great games and even RPGs don't need to be open world to be fantastic or classics. They told great stories, with great characters and memorable moments littered throughout. All that extra stuff to do in a game like The Witcher 3 doesn't make the game more engaging to me, if anything it's part of the reason I stopped coming back to play it, was the scale of the world and feeling like there was no such thing as a small task in that game - that even the smallest quest seemed like some kind of epic ordeal, just left me feeling like "ugh....not today".
I wanted to do all the things I liked, but without having to do all the things I didn't like in between, otherwise feeling like I'm missing out on the majority of what the game actually is, and ultimately realizing that what I like about the game ISN'T the fact that it's a huge open world game with a million things to do. Sure, it makes the World feel more real and makes my role in it as a character more believable, especially when I am left with some impactful choices - but does all of that _make it a better GAME?_
When I think this man can’t get any more eloquent, he surprises me with the pie analogy.
Some dougdoug vibes with food analogy for games
Another thing to add to the “bigger is not always better” idea is that smaller worlds can feel way bigger. When I think back to twilight princess’ smaller map, it feels way bigger because everything is was placed intentionally and not just to fill space. I would much rather have a twilight princess sized map that is fun to explore and feels natural than one that takes 50 hours to cross and has nothing in it.
This is why the Yakuza maps are always good. They're only the size of 2 or 3 city blocks and are packed with mini games and short, fun side stories
And even Twilight Princess' Hyrule Field was as barren as it could've been. Imo TP's map feels superficial in exchange for gameplay purpose (which I consider a good thing), and for it's time it certainly wasn't a small map. Still my favorite Zelda game. When I hear that term the first thing that comes to mind is Assassins Creed Valhalla. Developers even said before, the map was going to originally be way smaller but they thought it was weird you could see London from the most northern city on the map, so they scaled it out x3, without adding any more content in the overworld.
and now comes elden ring,another good linear semi open world video game series defiling itself with the open world plague. Like why not go the ff12 route and make an actual kingdom filled with established npcs and stuff,oh yeah cause then that would require actual effort.
@@DelNiceBeto Yakuza 7 Like a Dragon's Yokohama is my favorite videogame environment. It was so rich with detail and life.
Or like San Andreas, that while being open world had different places to see and things to do in different parts of the map. It felt huge at the time, now it's small but it's so much better than say, Just Cause
Elden ring and botw is the high water mark for me when it comes to open world games. Just being able to explore and finish the game how ever I want is so refreshing.
I agree, BotW and Elden Ring have the best open world structure imo.
And skyrim?
@@CockLord2059 honestly, as someone whose first real open world game was skyrim (and i was OBSESSED with it for a long time), i dont hold it as the high water mark of anything tbh. i think maybe it's because there were enough surface level things in it to keep the attention of my middle school brain before i learned what actually good story telling and gameplay design was. i think maybe the reason i liked it was because the game let you do pretty much anything you wanted within hardware/software limitations. besides that, there are so many problems with the game that were i to attempt to lay them all out in a single comment, i'd need to spend several hours typing up an essay...and i have enough college work rn without that
I love both of these games. But if you take a really hard critical look, the open world experience is still mediocre at best. I think we often enjoy these types because most of them prefer to favor the lowest common denominator of gamers or what I like to call, contaminating them with the Ubisoft Syndrome.
While BotW and ER are mediocre in typical Open World design, they are still different enough from the usual standard open world cattle feed to where it feels really fresh. The sense of discovering something new is amazing in both these games and I will cherish them to my grave.
I just hope with further advancements in creativity with the hardware we have, we'll see more rewarding results when we check the next nooks and crannies in future Open World games. Tears of the Kingdom looks like is gonna take every last inch of the Switch's power to make it happen and who knows what we can expect from FromSoft after how good their first take of a Souls Like Open World game turned out.
Elden Ring is high water mark, Breath of the Wild is lazy.
"Nintendo channels and turn based rpgs"
*Proceeds to Hey All with virgin intent*
It’s hey y’all you Baffoon
@@doplayxx8309 should we even start this argument?
@@p3p07 well I am right so there should be no argument
@@doplayxx8309 oh no… you’re too confidant in your ignorance.
HEY Y'ALL SCO-
I really liked how you brought up Ghost of Tsushima as an example of being a beefy AAA open world game that is good. That game's UI only appears at points when you actually need it on screen, which thus keeps all the clutter away when you're riding around the beautiful scenery. Breath of the Wild and Ghost of Tsushima are to me, the epitome of good modern open world games.
The UI is definitely better than in other open worlds but it ultimately doesn't fix many of the problems that are present in GoT such as content creep and generic quests that love wasting your time (so. many. unskippable. cutscenes.) and a fairly uninteresting combat system. I only got up to the end of act 1 before I dropped it. Just one look at all the new markers on the world map I had spent the last 30 hours painstakingly exploring was enough to discourage me from continuing the game further.
@@Skallva I played through the whole game and maybe it was because I actually did enjoy the storyline and the combat that made me get through it. I willingly would go to enemy outposts because I knew it's where I could sharpen my combat skills and check out new abilities I gained in action. Plus the game looks really great so that added to it. I found Act 2's story stuff to be more interesting than Act 1's.
I love ghost of tsushima ❤ and the game have good and bad side but the good side win for me
@@Skallva except you can skip cutscenes tho lol
I'd say the four (4) total enemy types is what drags the game down for me. That and them rarely throwing enough guys at once at you to make fights actually challenging.
*yakko hating on genshin impact*
Me who plays genshin daily: so true go off king
Now time for the classic quote “Same”
"yeah fuck that game"
"don't you play genshin impact?"
"oh yeah, everyday"
@@JoaoVitor-ge4le Just say that it's stockholm syndrome
Even Genshin gacha system is nonsensical and even stingier than vast majority of other gacha games aside from pity (oh yeah on top of of premium currency scarcity from actually playing the game)
Me hearing this man roast the game that had me in a downward spiral: please continue
@@ohamatchhams Girl Hot
They are not strictly open-world games, but Dark Souls and Bloodborne give that sense of exploration and mystery of where to go and where hidden things are located. One of the keys to achieve this is removing mini maps, pointers, compasses or anything to guide you from point A to point B. Also, some games like RDR2 tell us exactly what to do during a mission (pick up the hay, give it to your horse, enter the building, now pick this item up, etc.), and many other games have a to-do list which feels like a Supermarket item list; the Souls games, on the other hand, don’t have any objectives/mission list, and aren’t telling us exactly what to do. And that’s really where immersion is achieved in a videogame: using all your brain power to mindfully explore, discover hidden treasures, side quests, and items on your own, figuring things out like puzzles or how to beat a boss. It also feels incredibly rewarding after completing the game instead of feeling like “finally it’s done”.
Open World games can work, especially for rpgs. It's for games that aren't rpgs they struggle to make things interesting I think. Unless they find good middle ground usually it ends up really shallow.
This is because souls games are more similar to metro venias
Elden ring
Bonjour
And that's exactly why all soulsborne games are garbage. Exploring on your own is boring, games should always tell you everything
@@hydrocy.9165 You couldn't have made this bait more obvious if you tried
Props to this guy for taking out the time to write down and properly vocalize the things I've been trying to get my friends to understand for years because I just can't get more than halfway through their favorite open-world titles.
Poor Amber, bullied by Genshin community and now beaten by a guy criticizing game she is in.
I just appreciate you giving so much love to Metroidvania's in this video XD
Metroidvania's what?
@@兄貴-d3q a game with similar concept to metroid and castlevania game (2d platformer) . for example : dead cells, hollow knight, super metroid, castlevania etc.
Same
@@rudernshaw9636 that's great but they said metroidvania's
Metroid Dread babbyyyy
I think breath of the wilds system of putting meaningful upgrades instead of quests around the map makes it more enjoyable.
Can I ask what meaningful upgrades those are? I got every shrine and every side quest done and I don’t remember getting anything more meaningful than occasionally getting armor I wasn’t going to use because food was so broken so why would I
@@123silverslash maybe the champions abilities?
@@123silverslash getting more hearts and stamina from the shrine rewards is the meaningful upgrade
It’s almost kind of a survival game tbh, just without the survival...
I genuinely got so bored of the shrines so quickly that I beat the game on my first time with 5 hearts and half an extra stamina wheel
Mario odyssey is level based game, not an open world one
It’s not a pie, it’s a tray of cupcakes
Which is still good, just a different desert :)
I would argue that The Witcher 3’s multitude of side content stands apart from a lot of the mindless tasks in most other open-world games. Most of the side quests in that game are rewarding for their little bits of story, even if they boil down to repetitive formulas and actions in the actual gameplay. I also found much of the game’s world to be quite scenic and visually distinct, to the point where I would often ride my horse between locations instead of fast traveling so I could soak in the view. As for Spider-Man, web-swinging is probably my favorite part of those games, and I think fun traversal is itself a great justification for a large open map to move around in. Everyone has already talked about BotW, so I won’t reiterate those points, but it’s magnificent as well. But yeah, games like Skyrim have never really been able to hold my attention for long. I’ve started Skyrim several times, trying to do a pure playthrough, but then I get bored, load a bunch of mods, mess around for a few hours, and drop it again for years lol.
Open world was pointless in Witcher 3 , other than the quests represented i.e. *!* marks , the entire map was filled with nonsensical copy paste *?* marks , I mean in the entire Velen only 30% of the map actually had those quality side quests excluding the filler, if the game was like Witcher 2 i.e. small sections of the map joined together it would not have hurt the game at all
the repetitiveness argument is bs anyway. every game ever is repetitive. there is only so many different things and mechanics you can put into a game. in fact, I'd bet my ass off that if we look at every game and look at it's mechanics (especially the turn based combat stuff this guy loves so much) we get 2 hands full of different mechanics that exist in games, similar to how there are only 7 story plots when boiled down. it's all just a different skin. "it's repetitive" is a lazy mans game analysis/review by someone who can't articulate why doing this type of activity in a game gets boring and has been repeated so often that it literally became "repetitive" itself.
imagine someone saying "Super Mario Bros is bad because it's repetitive. all you do in a world is move right, jump at enemies and collect coins"
@@COHOFSohamSengupta Witcher 2 was garbage because it wasn't open world
"other than the quests represented i.e. ! marks , the entire map was filled with nonsensical copy paste ? marks " So?
@@hydrocy.9165 That is your personal opinion on witcher 2 which has nothing to do with its reviews or reception in general
fr
Gotta commend the dedication in the Pie Skit. Yakko bought/made a Pie for this
*sad Amber noises*
If you think thats dedication watch scott the woz
@@msteoporras1146 ikr scott even got robbed for jokes his recent videos like damn this guy is dedicated
@@flayncele really does suck he had to be robbed off-schedule but hey at least he made the most out of financial instability
I like that pie 😋
My biggest pet peeve about open worlds is the size. It feels like every game has to one-up the others by making it bigger and better with more places to be, things to explore, quests to do, when all it does is water down the experience and make the game feel empty and lifeless.
Part of it was a general consensus some time ago that gamers were tired of paying $60 for a short 10-20hr game. So game devs made more open worlds games with about 40,60,100hrs of gameplay. Skyrim, Fallout, and a few open world games do things decently since each area has some lore, important item to collect, or NPC's to interact with in each area.
16 times the detail 4 times the map size
@@DotHacker99 making games cheaper? nah, let's make the games unecessarilly bigger!
This why we called open world games walking simulator because we just walking in emptiness. I hate same stuffs over and over again like why not add something new and make the world super interesting.
@@Ningen8023 they can't make games cheaper since the companys need to make profit too
like what do you think how mutch it costs to make a game?
My only problem with them is that I can never be sure that I'm experiencing all the content. In RDR2, there are so many random encounters and side quests that stem from minor actions that I'm scared I'm always missing something.
and thats the wrong mentality to have, most modern open world games if not all dont force you to do these things and if u do miss out, well then just make a new game, srsly if u enjoy playing the game, creating a new save file to hit the spots u missed shouldnt be a problem, if it is, then quit gaming cuz ull never enjoy anything based on an irrational fear.
@@Aqsticgod I think you're picking up what I said wrong, I love open-world games because when they're really good I do try to hit everything. Just kinda always on my toes with RDR2 because some stuff becomes unavailable based on progress and I wanna do everything before I pass it up and read about it later lol
@@RustyShackleford556 yeah but honestly i think thats a good thing
There only like 9 side missions
@@Aqsticgod These games can reach into 100+ hours. Not everybody wants to start over and wipe away all of that time they invested and do it all again to see the one thing they missed.
the metaphors use to theme out the videos are so good 😂 loved this man!
Except Mario Odysey is NOT a small pie.
I really love games like Deus Ex, Control and Dishonoured, where you have a series of smaller open worlds that all have side quests that are completely different next to the main ones. Sometimes these side missions actually have a effect on the main story like "Oh, I see you have already taken out the gangsters in the South, mission complete" that's so satisfying haha in RDR2 I spent more time in the towns and cities like Saint Denis & Valentine, same with GTA5 I rarely visited the countryside outside of missions. So I'd prefer smaller city centres where you can visit every store, talk to everyone and have side quests that are completely different and not checklist crap. There was a PS2 game I played years ago called Spy Fiction. Level 2 was set in this huge mall, with a parking area, downstairs, upstairs, attic, basements, kitchens and bars in every store. The game never told you what to do either, so you had to figure it all out yourself and everything was interactive. Huge openworlds have all these buildings and structures everywhere, but they are just building blocks with no point but to look pretty.
Ever since Breath of the Wild, the cracks in open-world games have just continued to show themselves more and more. Even ones I used to like have lost a lot of their magic.
Especially when you realize that all the time you waste playing these games could be spent learning a trade or valuable real life skill that could help you get out of your parents basement. I can tell you’re young because if you grew up when 3D games were new you’d be marveling at how far video games have come
@@austins.2495 Or maybe they’ve just lost their replayability? It could be the prettiest game ever but after the 6th time it’s boring.
Botw is probably one of the most exhausting, dullest, worst examples of open world games ever made. Are you people just doing a bit, like you did with Shadow of the Colossus?
@@isodoubIet "I personally dislike a critically acclaimed game, therefore anyone that likes it is a liar or an idiot"
@@videogamemusic2962 I don't think people who claim to like it are liars or idiots. I think they're doing a bit, an elaborate rick roll. It's pretty good.
If only Genshin Impact was a bad game. There is a lot of great stuff there, buried under the heavy microtransactions and exploitative practices.
I mean, it is. even without the gross predatory business practices of gacha, it's absurdly tedious and repetitive.
the exploration drip feeds you dopamine by absolutely drowning the world in collectibles to find, and a lot of them are actually hidden behind enjoyable little puzzles or combat encounters that are just challenging enough to be rewarding without being annoying, but the sheer volume of these things makes it mind-numbingly boring after a while.
the traversal is just a mediocre copy of breath of the wild, and the combat pretends to have enjoyable mechanical depth when in reality the extent of its elemental system is "element A + element B = extra damage" with literally two exceptions (Geo's shield mechanic and hydro+cryo's freezing), and other than that it boils down to spamming left click and pressing E and Q when they're off cooldown, different weapon types making next to no real difference and abilities really boiling down to "press button to damage/heal/shield"
@@marcog.verbruggen674 I agree with your point yet I still think genshin is a fun game.
@@smug_slime The only parts of what makes Genshin's exploration worth something close to good is when it's giving primogems or weapons' blueprints, the rest are just superficial or facade
Just think of the stuffs you loot in the game compared to mobile games' grinding tedium and actual open world games' loots
@@ohamatchhams just what do you mean by superficial and facade means? I genuinely don't understand what you mean. give examples please.
and about grinding on mobile games doesn't really bother me since currently I play 3 gacha games including GI and I'm sure other open world game has better loot reward but I bet they are not on mobile phone.
@@marcog.verbruggen674 i played genshin since release and was AR56 and good lord that game was so draining and I'm so glad I quit. I still feel exhausted when I even see genshin mentioned, but that's a me problem lol. I was entirely f2p and super invested in the world of genshin but it was wasting so much of my time and helping to deteriorate my mental health at an alarming rate!!
i don't think the genre is inherently bad. buggy, bloated messes like cyberpunk and assassin's creed just ruin everyone's perception of it
you bringing up RDR2 as an example of a barren open-world just shows to me that you didn’t engage with it’s open world. There are stories told in that world around every corner. Every location (with very few exceptions) is used for something.
yes, I loved going out and exploring the world, finding secret ruins or interesting points, looking at them and Arthur drawing a little sketch in his journal. RDR 2's open world was amazing
thank you, someone gets me here. yeah i felt this way too when he spoke about witcher 3. open world game he found million flaws with, and im still playing it in 2021. what i got from this video is that he wants all games to be like metroidvania.
@@Aqsticgod yeah I do agree with him on that open world games should be focusing on having a dense small world rather then a empty big one
Nah, witcher 3 was boring as hell, same as red dead. If most of your time in a game is spent getting from A to B then its a pretty boring game
@@jrfw96 That's kind of my point. If all you did in Red Dead 2 was go from A to B, then you didn't engage with it's open world.
This video just seems like you PREFER other game types. Open World games usually strive to do more than most that just focus on one specific feature. At times it works out and sometimes it doesn't. There are bad open world games but there's bad games of every type. Usually they're way more easy to get into and the point of wanting more realism is... Well people eat that shxt up XD. Look at Red Dead, I personally don't care for it at all but it has its audience. There's plenty of good games and open world games have definitely been good. Botw is an obvious point but I'd say Skyrim was pretty good too. Of course it's better with mods, but despite not being too crazy depth wise it's an easy jumping on point and a good RPG. Combat is simple, but enjoyable and the growth is satisfying, the power fantasy is apparent, the movement is basic but works, the world is actually pretty good but it's believability beyond simple scripts isn't there. But it can still give you those occasional moments of beauty if you get yourself immersed. Also for the record mini-maps make lots of things easier and they're not bad in the slightest. The casual audience makes use of them a lot, and it also works amazing with large scale games.
thank you for saying this. I felt this entire video that maybe this guy just doesn't enjoy that type of game instead of them being bad.
This entire comment section is butthurt open world fans getting mad that OP pointed out all the things he doesn't like about their games lol
@@Luipaard005 But he only pointed out things that makes open worlds even better
Honestly preferred Oblivion to Skyrim. The dark style of Skyrim took me a while to get used to, while Oblivion was colorful from the start. But I like both of them equally in terms of artstyle, just saying Skyrim's took me a while to adjust. And I played Skyrim before Oblivion.
Also, Oblivion forces you to be much more specialized. I feel like in Skyrim you could pretty much be all powerful and skilled in every single aspect of the game, which doesn't really appeal to me. For me, TES games put the "Role Playing" in RPG. Skyrim less so than it's predecessors. I understand it's to appease the completionists who don't role play, but it makes it so that the character creation part matters less. How I play TES (or Bethesda RPGs in general) is I don't complete everything on a single save file. I have a character in mind, with a certain personality and philosophy. I don't make choices based on what I would do, I make them based on what my character would. Kinda like video game D&D, which is what it was always meant to be.
@J Prez Honestly barely used the minimap while playing BoTW. Sometimes I feel that it's not even there. I feel like BoTW is really good at using scale to it's advantage. Unlike other open world games, it distracts you a lot. It really brings out your "ooh, shiny" instinct. Every feature of the landmass is strategically placed to pique your interest, which is, in my opinion, what an open world ought to be. Not just downtime from the main story, but something that actively distracts you and leads you on an addictive discovery trail. And the mechanics of climbing and gliding complement this perfectly. In BoTW I barely use horses simply because I'm so compelled to get off them to explore the beaten path. The story may be the same, but you mark your own path, which is the ideal spirit of an open world. In BOTW, I felt compelled to keep playing long after beating Ganon. In GTA I feel empty after the story ends.
Yeah BotW is the only open world game I ever actually finished, and it avoids almost all of the issues you laid out here. I tried playing Skyrim 3 or 4 times, and everytime the long intro, walking around forever, Inventory management, and the game not autosaving often enough always put me off after 10 hours max.
You can change autosave timing in the settings. Autosaves can often screw up RPGs too.
if you are not quicksaving every 30 seconds you are playing skyrim or any western rpg in that matter wrong
Hahah yeah no inventory management in bow at all right
@@isodoubIet There's weapon/shield/bow management, but your material storage is infinite. Also it's less management and more "This one has smaller number" *proceeds to throw sword out of atmosphere*
@@videogamemusic2962 " There's weapon/shield/bow management,"
And food.
"Also it's less management and more "This one has smaller number" proceeds to throw sword out of atmosphere"
The fact that it's so braindead, but I'm still forced to do it, is one of the biggest issues I have with it. Weapons in this game are for all intents and purposes just ammo, but unlike an FPS that has an ammo counter in the corner and then politely fucks off out of my way, with botw I'm forced to manually pick out inventory space for every single bullet.
"I just want to shoot the guy"
Yeah that's why I love Borderlands.
And then you have to sort through loot for 2 hours...
@@amysteriousviewer3772 you do ?
I don't understand why they think its a good idea to have exp systems in open world games. It is legit there to stop you from going to areas where you are "underleveled". in BOTW you can legit just run to the castle, its hard, but you can do it. The ability to do it is really important to me as a gamer.
I mean, how do you think an RPG open world would work without levels? The character would start the game with every spell and combat skill? It would be unlocked trough doing quests therefore allowing the game to lock some abilities until they want you to have it?
That makes me think of one of my favorite moments from the first Zelda: in following my curiosity and exploring, I found level 8. I hadn't completed level 3, so I was woefully underpowered. Since I had no expectations that I would stand a chance at that point, it wasn't discouraging to get killed very quickly. But the fact that I could just go to level 8 like that was incredible to me. It's not like sequence breaking, where you have to get around the design. It's just... There.
@Luis Filipe BOTW kind of proved that you don't need level up system in a open world just got find way to increase HP and STAM through exploration. In Hollow Knight you get skills through mean of exploring and finding that those skills. So it possible for open world games to do without leveling systems or skill tree.
if more open world games employ that from botw, a lot of open world games would become better imho. but at the same time i get that its something the bled over from the past. like if they make witcher 4 with the open world mentality of botw that game will surpass botw. but yeah exp could still be used just not for excluding you from areas, that we agree wholeheartedly.
The implementation of RPG mechanics in more and more games have put me off. I personally only think they makes sense in turn based and strategy games. It is easier to replace interesting game design by throwing in RPG mechanics.
Hit so many nails on so many heads that I didn’t even know existed. I’ve found myself drawn to games like resident evil and devil may cry, from the old open worlds I used to play without knowing why
You can't just drop the Outer Wilds banjo theme on me like that man. All of the feelings all at once.
One time, I was playing BotW by running around the edges of the map looking for secrets that were super out of the way, maybe even secret spots off the side of the map. I saw a big rock in a pit, walked up to it, climbed on it, and I nearly shit myself when it suddenly moved. That was my first Talos encounter. That was the best and most memorable experience I had with that game. I love that shit.
The only open world game i can do is Minecraft bc of the lack of to do's and confusing map.
I love small worlds that are "open" in that you can do whatever you want in them. Like how delfino plaza feels or a short hike.
I'd recommend Deus Ex Mankind Divided, quite a small open world but very densely packed with content and storytelling
If you love small world with a shitton of stuff to do then you would love yakuza
This is how I felt once the PS4 generation took off with basically every game becoming an open world. Felt like nothing was fun anymore, and it's how I fell so much in love with JRPGs because they don't waste my time, have so many layers to combat and storytelling, and there's constantly something interesting and new for me to do every 20 minutes for me to get engaged with instead of finding the same 1 dimensionally enjoyable thing 3 hours later.
I find that a lot of JRPGs do, indeed, waste my time, that they have garbage gameplay that feels like a chore and yet they devote 30 hours to it, and the stories are often full of filler sub-plots to squeeze in an extra dungeon with more garbage gameplay. And they never stop holding your hand, and rely on gimmicks to keep themselves even slightly interesting. But the ones I’ve found that don’t do that have gone on to become some of my favorite games of all time. I have a very love-hate relationship with the genre.
@@andytheawesome7592 I feel the exact same. Yakuza 7 was one of the few JRPG's I thoroughly enjoyed. Even that had a spike in the middle where I had to grind like no tomorrow and some of the pacing was so slow and drawn out tutorials.
My only real problem with JRPGs is that many of them don't always have the best gameplay to storytelling ratio. I enjoy the combat and like the story being told, but when the balance between the two is thrown off it can feel jarring and make me want to stop playing for a time. Everyone who has played Persona 5 knows about the part of the game towards the middle that deprives the player of choice and combat and only consists of dialogue and some walking around while character drama happens. It is not fun and just makes the player want to skip through it.
👊🏿
@@cjaymeme well, unless you're invested in the story, then yes
Ironically, my favorite part of Horizon: Zero Dawn was the Lore and the new game+ modes, both things that specifically *dont* have to do with it being an open world, new game+ is fun because I already have the tools and now just have to get through the good story.
New game+? I got so many games on backlog I don't have time to replay a game unless it's short.
Its so fun watching this after Elden Ring came out. They dun broke the mold
I feel like the best story about open world games is that of Dragon Age Inquisition. They wanted to push their limits and make this HUUUUUUGE open world…but didn’t think about how to fill it, no stories no quests nothing. So they scrambled to fill it with anything, creating this kinda expasnsively empty world
I couldn’t play that game for more than an hour. The only way I can think to explain it is Wow without multiplayer.
@@loglog7 I actually have like 100+ hours in it. But I get physically I’ll if I focus on how much I haven’t done in the game or I see the percentage markers
@@tiniestlumpia it was one of those games that I got onto with the sole focus of beating the main story to be able to enjoy it.
thinking about it that has been kinda like that for alot of openworld games, I have to actively force myself to ignore alot of side stuff so I wont get burnt out and actually get to see the main story with good set pieces.
Yep kinda agree although i didn't really see the problem until after my 2nd playthrough. On the 1st playthrough, the only part i found tedious was the hinterlands. Being my 1st dragon age game, i was amazed at the character interactions, team building and strats i could use with them. The voice acting is amazing as well as the story. And some of the romances, interactions and relationships can literally tear your heart out or make you cry in joy. The exploration was a massive chore but everything else was worth it. Then after playing Origins, you're like what's Inquisition lmao??
@@loglog7 so its good then
The Yakuza series is by far my favorite when it comes to open world game design
i think it helps that in Yakuza instead of making the open world wider, they just built more and more into smaller spaces. helps counteract a lot of the bloat that the open world genre is facing.
It helps that the world's are small and dense, you barely spend time travelling in those games, you're always doing something, and if you ever get bored of doing one thing there's always variety and depth in other things
Here's the difference: Most Jrpg's eventually let go of your hand, while open world games will try anything to make sure they dont
not all tho. and u can turn off the hand holding in most modern open world games, sooo whats ur gripe here?
can u name examples? every game i know has an option to turn off hints
@@Aqsticgod your contribution is useless as it is
@@DinfarManshad You could say the same thing about Fourkov’s comment so I don’t know why you felt the need to target Aqistics reply specifically.
I like how it took me like 5 loops to realize you only have 22 minutes in outer wilds because i kept dying
This is honestly such a breath of fresh air to find your channel omg you really get it and you’re very funny well done
It's really intersting how differently we are all wired. My monkey brain couldn't be happier when I see numbers go up, skills getting unlocked and maps getting checkmarked, and even if I get a burn-out, I reopen the game 1-2 moths later until it eventually shows that sweet 100%. To use the pie analogy: sometimes I crave nothing more than that small locally owned restaurants pie, whos family-recipie has been refined and aged by grandmas to come, and it's always the sweetest delight. On other days, I march into the closest "Cheap&Unhealty" supermarket, stock up on microwave pie, and get sick of that many I can eat in one sitting. Life is about balance.
because its entirely depends on preference.... cause for me 2d platform/metroidvania is boring af..
we all should think for ourselves and not because a youtubers says its bad then you hate it too..
@@Mc4est Lol, boring why though? You didn't reason your opinion, there is such a thing as an invalid opinion... Taste should be an informed thing, you liking or disliking something isn't rng from god, you dislike them/find them boring for a reason.
@@musicfriendly12 I state my opinion somewhere in this comment section .. TLDR environment looks similar AF with no sense of main and sub path, nothing really memorable, you dont stop for a moment and take a screenshot admiring because it looks boring...
I burst out laughing on how he introduced hollow knights map about how its important sitting with npc, talking to a big man... like how does that prove his point?? you can do that in open worlds... LOL, Im not defending open world games as I hate some of them, but dont say its bad because of a shitt ass reason..
@@Mc4est personally I don't like metroidvanias either, I believe the gameplay just really isn't for me, but I can understand why he would bring it up, because he does like them, you seem to be trying to invalidate his opinion because it doesn't match yours.
@@gapropgaming1814 LOL... wtf?? do you even understand whats going on? ... if your super smart logic is correct, then is he also invalidating my opinion cause it doesn't match his?? LOL thats hypocrisy dummy... its okay to say he likes hollow knight map or think its better... but the problem is, his reasons why its more important (him saying "you can sit with this npc", "you can talk to this big guy", bla bla bla) that reason is dogshitt... just like your logic...
Gotta say, this video is great. Having a massive open world has just become a marketing point. By far though, my favourite open world is in Shadow of the Colossus. I don't fully understand why I love it so much, but even knowing that I'm going to find nothing, I still want to explore just to see what the developers built, as the scenery is just so beautiful.
Whilst I think all of the points raised are valid, open world games definitely have a place in the industry. Sometimes when your brain is just fried from work I don’t want to try and reload that stressful save I have on floor 5 of Enter the Gungeon, but instead wanna just go round looking for some Koroks, or have a ride with Roach and listen to the gorgeous music in Skellige
The problem is that every AAA game is open world now which means people who don't want open world trash are out of options
@@Luipaard005 exactly 💯
This man spittin facts
enter the gungeon goes hard
@@Luipaard005 "out of options" seems a bit of an exaggeration.
nah... its entirely about preference, same as I hate Metroidvania style games cause I dont feel like I'm the right direction like, all the time.. I just feel lost and when reaching new area, I always feel like I haven't explored enough or I missed a lot of things...
I'd rather follow quest markers and enjoy the view travelling than going blind and accidentally beat the game and have to do multiple playthrough to fully explore everything... (plus 2d platform environments are boring to explore and feels dead than 3d mountain landscapes or city buildings full of life)..
Most open world games don't need to be open world, games like Horizon ZD could have been linear adventures and nearly nothing would be lost.
I swear, most open-world games have got to have a dedicated mod community at some point to fill in the game's empty concent.
I feel like I rarely enjoy open world games, but when I do I can't exactly pin point why. The only open world game I enjoyed quite a lot was Breath of the Wild, but most of the enjoyment was sucked out on replays. I just liked walking around and discovering things- just taking enjoyment in stopping to smell the flowers or watch the scenery around me, but once I knew all of its secrets it became more like an extended optional quest to collect all the items to upgrade all my gear because there was nothing else left for me to do.
A big thing that BOTW did differently was how it handled exploration.
there's a difference between seeing a weird mountain shape in the distance and going "I wanna climb that"
or a generic open world game that has all the markers with bars on the left saying how many you got left to do as if it was a checklist.
my kind of thinking with this is that I'd be much happier being able to buy 1 thing in a store vs having to absolutely buy 20 things off a checklist for no reason
Imagine stopping to sniff a flower in a video game
@@lukapitkanen3333 gotta immerse ourselves while snorting c- I mean you can't smell in games too?
Yeah, BOTW had its charm, for sure, but my main problem with it was that exploration never rewarded you with interesting prizes. Yes, the view is beautiful, but that really doesn't matter when I'm fighting the 100th Bokoblin camp to get average weapons that are replaceable and breakable, or I'm lifting another rock to get another seed. It gets pretty formulaic pretty fast so, unless you REALLY appreciate the aesthetic and atmosphere, you're bound to lose interest
@@victorteste5325 Seeds are pretty important (even if searching for yellow poo all over the map isn't that thrilling) and there are some cool armor to find here and there it's not just breakable shields and weapons, sometimes just finding a boss you never knew about is the reward, tho I agree in a lot of ways BOTW feels more like a proof of concept for a new Zelda formula and I hope the sequel actually rewards exploration a lot more, not necessarily with loot but at least with a lot more unique things to find
open world games are like cleaning your room: you either get lost, our you come out victorious but have the soul sucked out of you
I had to pause the video when you mentioned the Witcher 3 getting pan for old woman as an example of trivial open world quests that just keep you busy. In fact the quest is built to make you think "oh wow she's right there and she wants me to grab the thing next to her.. classic quest.." but then you go on to find that the pan's soot was used to write a letter, that letter leads you to an NPC with a whole other quest that you may have missed if you didn't stop to see what that old woman needed
This shows a problem I had with the video. I mean, the guy admitted he wasn't engaged with medieval fantasy and that's fair( I for example don't care about shooters so Fallout ain't my cup of tea design-wise) but if he actually cared about the game for five minutes at the point he did the quest, he'd know the pan quest ain't about the pan at all, but the mystery behind the guy whom used the pan to make the report. I mean, the whole thing about Witcher 3's side quests are mysteries to solve and nothing is like it is at face value and there's always something else behind the first impressions of the quest. It's not much about gameplay but find out the little stories behind each side quest. I never found a game where I cared so much about doing the side quests despite their gameplay being so repetitive, because I didn't care about gameplay at those points, only knowing what is the truth behind the story presented by the quest-giver.
Then there was the whole side critique about Genshin Impact. Just pointing it out it's a BOTW clone and critiquing the monetization ain't a critique about Open world,. I was expecting a critique about Genshin's open world design, not about the damn monetization. For example, the game is pack full of content and unlike most open worlds, it's world is quite dense, but given it's a live-service game, once you complete a region, there ain't much a reason to re-explore that part of game, so you go do your daily quests or grind some levels or do the events that come once every few weeks. So it's a game that you have to be casual about it, playing a little every day, because if you do otherwise, you won't have much to do next day. Also, there is some Ubisoft-like design regarding quests and shit.
A Perfect Open world game, at least for me, has to have the density of Genshin, the narrative and side quests of Witcher 3, the attention to detail of a Rockstar game and the freedom of choices of Baldur's Gate 3, and a very interesting combat system, and such a game ain't coming for at least half a decade.
“That’s like a recommendation for a TV show where you say it only gets good somewhere in the 3rd season”
*sweats in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure*
no?
@@ashkesslet1149 I mean he's kinda right though. it only really gets to the actual jojo experience with part 3
"lifeless breath of the wild rip off" oof that's pretty harsh. As much as i like to shit on genshin monetization system, the game lore, story, music and designes are incredibly solid and are able to stand on their own (I hate to say this too but there is virtually no reason to spend on the game either).
People really like to shit on Genshin Impact a lot these days. I guess it's trendy. And sure, Gacha bad, but I'm still not a fan of how oversimplified those arguments get.
@@Archflip I mean, it's not really trendy, it's because people often try it already thinking of the negatives. Most people wouldn't have the best first impressions about a gacha game which was said to be a "BotW rip off", and having bad first impressions is enough to ruin a game for some people. It's an incredible game but it needs to completely change most players first impressions instead of just being good.
Yeah that was kinda too harsh lol. The lore, gameplay and story are what got me hooked, i couldn't care less about the gacha
The thing is, when you only play the first few hours or so? It rly does seem like a botw ripoff. The way it introduces the mechanics and some animations in the beginning are just very similar. Ofc as the game goes on and you start to understand it more there are a lot of differences but at first glance you can't rly blame people for the assumption
I think what he meant is on the mechanical level of the game. I'm AR 57 on Genshin Impact but I quit playing months ago because it gets tad boring. The lore is there sure, but what can you do when your stamina (forgot what it is called in-game) gets depleted? Literally nothing else matters. The world is massive too but it's so bland like there's nothing to it after you get all the chests and stuff. The lack of mobs, variety and spawn rate makes the open world doesn't make sense as well. These are the reasons why I stopped playing and just follow the story/lore on Genshin Impact youtubers.
I really like open world games most of the time because of how pretty and "adventerous" they are supposed to be. Your video perfectly examined and explained a lot of problems which make me never want to actually finish them, thank you for the video.
id argue this video didnt do that. what i got from this vid is that he wants every game to be like hollow knight or metroidvanias cuz according to him they provide a better "open world" experience. two different genres cannot be compared when it comes to gameplay and emersion. u just cant do that. he even trashed on botw, the one open world game thats actually really good, because he sees the same problem that not many other people see. to me this video should be titles "why i hate open world games and love metroidvanias"
@@Aqsticgod He's talking about why he doesn't like open world games and doesn't play them, he never said he wanted to obliterate them from existence. Some people don't like your walking simulators, cope.
@@Aqsticgod He didn't say open worlds are bad he is just pointing out many of the flaws that many open world games suffer with which end up contradicting the idea of an open world. He is just comparing to games like hollow knight to illustrate the points better
This video really helped me realize why some open world games feel like a chore
You look like my classmate's mom and you are my new favourite youtuber. Your videos are great!!
While I agree with a lot of your criticisms regarding size over substance and mission or game design, I feel like your criticism is sometimes way too harsh and guided by the lack of interaction or engagement you got out of the games you mention for reasons that are completely personal for you, namely the tastes you mention about halfway through your video. Games like Skyrim or The Witcher are, for a lot of people, big juicy pies with amazing slices thanks to their beautiful landscapes and worlds. The fact you don't enjoy certain aesthetics or genres shows quite a lot, but for some players its exactly the things you don't like (medieval settings, story focus, beautiful landscapes with sidequests and side activities that stop you from finishing their main story and distract you for hours upon hours) that keep them coming back to some open world classics.
Ah that outer wilds music while zooming in on the sun, sends chills down my spine every time.
It's okay Men, you're allowed to have an opinion, and if you don't like it, that's okay. I still enjoy it a lot
But shiting on the games that actually make open world games great its not ok
The problems with New World in a nutshell
Macaroni macro
Oh hey macro
its the grubhub guy
That was exactly my fear with Elden Ring, but holy shit was I wrong
Is it's open world good? If so, why? Thinking about to buy it as i liked other FS games. But to me they all feel SO samey, is it just DS 3.5?
@@rufius4050 It is probably the best open world aside from fallout New Vegas and maybe Zelda breath of the wild. It's very atmospheric and it doesn't have the feeling of everything being the same, one of the reasons is the terrain, you'll see cliffs and structures pretty much everywhere, something that connects with another interesting thing, there's no 2d background, everything you see you can go there and explore find items and etc; it also gives the player the sensation of a massive yet not a hollow world, and although smaller than assassin's creed or other games map wise, there's enemy packs, caves, mini bosses, secret areas, ruins castles everywhere making it feel actually neverending. And my last point is that because it's a open world, if you don't like souls-like combat, (which if you never experienced is definitely something to try) you can pretty much have an easy mode by exploring getting more levels upgrading weapons and spirits, and you can summon people online to help you out.
Nope, I’m still overwhelmed.
@@PrimeiroEnjoyer Both BOTW and ER are the contenders for the worst open world ever made. The fact it tells player nothing about side quest or have markers makes both some of the worst gaming experience ever.
@@hydrocy.9165 Bait
I just recently bought Breath of the Wild and I just stopped playing Last os us 2, ghost of tsushima, horizon zero dawn, the witcher iii and just focus on what BoTW has to offer us... and it's just amazing... I can spend literally hours around a stupid mountain climbing and finding ores or kokorot seeds or shrines without actually going throughout camping. Props for your video
as someone who's played genshin since release, the world is nice and story so far is getting better and better, but I really CANNOT recommend it. even just casually exploring things, after a while you'll run out of things to do besides daily commissions and the tedious late game grind that gets more and more needed to even SURVIVE the world itself.
and as a gacha just like you said it ticks all the boxes to try and milk your money, and I myself at a few points in time have almost faltered to it. if you're still interested in the game, id advise just waiting until the main story is complete in 2075 or something
Well one could just play casually you know, late game grinding is FAR from necessary. They have the function to lower the world level specifically for that reason. And idk what you mean by milking, the game doesn't shove microtransactions in your face, battle pass is completely unecessary, and it's easy enough to get the 5 stars you want as a free to play player with the sheer amount of primogems given out for story, exploration, and events (to say nothing of how good 4 stars are comparatively). And for those that casually want to spend, that 5 buck blessing is actually quite generous (genesis crystal prices are awful though, I'll give you that).
Damn just when cyberpunk finally fixed
Man, it's still a F2P full fledged open world game with cute anime characters. I'd easily recommend it. Just watchout for the gacha, tho
Yeah, it's absolutely one of those games where if you aren't down for the grind you can't keep playing it that much after a while. It can still be nice as a "seasonal player" who basically comes back every time they update the game with new content and events. That's probably the healtheist way to experience the game, the way it's being produced right now. Waaaay down the line when the story gets finished I would probably call it an easy recommend because of how much sheer content the game will have by then.
Aether currents in FFXIV are fine. It's an MMO and they barely make you traverse the world after the stroy is done anyway, might aswell go litterally half a minute off the beaten path after *you make the decision to click your aether compass* to get all the mcguffins so you can fly in the zone later. Or just ignore them and have a friend fly you to each one after you complete the story. It's a non-issue.
delusional lol
what if you dont have friends
They're fine but honestly speaking, just unlocking flying after completing the story in the area would probably be just as fine. I don't have an issue with them though, and it gives me a reason to explore the areas
@@starbrownie scream in the nearest city _"I NEED A TAXIII"_
I get a lot of anxiety when playing open world games, I just get overwhelmed on what to do, and it feels like an endless world that I have to explore to find one specific thing.
funny, Metroidvanias and rougelikes make me overwhelmed from how intense they are at all times. i much prefer chill atmostpheres where i can chose what to do. to each his own (:
Your arguments are solid, yet we disagree on the empty space thing. I really like the exploration piece of elder scrolls games without a purpose. Just exploring IS the purpose. Getting lost in the world. I love it.
The problem of big worlds is that they seem to be designed without immersive navigation in mind. They're literally a checklist + GPS, a delivery boy simulator.
2:48, Mario Odyssey is more like a dozen good pies that are almost all alike. You finish those pies, and then someone throws a bunch more pie scraps and filling into the empty trays and asks you to eat all of that as well to reach the true ending.
10:36 the game literally keeps track of that, and technically gives you a unique item for getting all of them. Will ~less~ people attempt to 100% the korok seeds with no up-front tracker? Yes. Are there still 900 of them that many completionists will hunt down with no sense of joy? Also yes.
yeah but the point of the korroks is to be a nice surprise not something to be saught out and if you are arguing that the collectothon has too many collectables and a congratulations for finishing which has nor baring on the ending and just says thanks and congrats
The whole mario odyssey pie scrap thing is why i never got all the moons, i felt no happiness after getting the 400th Completely Identical Collectable after doing some menial task.
Though, if you just play for the main story, it’s a fine game.
I collected all korok seeds twice
@@chickennugget6684 just east as much of a pie as you want, no need to eat more when you're already full. In my feeling, it's more like "hey, I know you're done eating, but if you ever want more, there's always gonna be more pie waiting" and that's what I like.
On the korok seeds, you are missing his main point. The way they're presented as a mechanic is important and sets an expectation of how the player should interact with them. The korok seeds aren't put on some sort of checklist or a bar that fills up over time. Just a counter in your inventory that tells you how many you currently hold.
Yes, the game DOES track how many you collect total internally, and you get a unique item (with no function whatsoever), but that's not what matters. The game NEVER tells you in its design to seek these seeds out to ends of the earth. They're supposed to be a little incidental reward for doing a little puzzle you run across, or getting to a hard to reach area.
There are so many because the designers can assume you won't happen to get every seed you come across in this massive open world. It's something you pick up along the way, and eventually get enough to redeem them for upgrades. And after long enough, you can't get anymore upgrades, so they become superfluous and only collected out of the joy of finding a secret.
Anyone insane enough to go out of their way to find them all is never told by the game that they should do it, nor that there is some extrinsic reward waiting for them at the end.
When your trying to play Genshin impact in you own way, until you realize that sidemissions are tedious beating monsters to strong for you doesn't reward you and every dungeon is locked by a level border forcing you to do them in a specific order in which they are all easy. (And then you implement the worst parts of Breath of the Wilds movement mechanics, gliding literally feels like walking as slow as it is)
Not really but ok
I play Genshin bc of the botw similarity but wow did they made me want to continue playing botw and go back in time to never play that chinese game
Never played genshin and never will but I loved the gliding in Botw. In fact every game must have gliding.
@@zackmhuntr25 if every game did,then they would be called a copy
It also took away one of BotW's best elements: a lack of invasive quest markers.
When I walk into a zone with 100 different quest markers I’m like ”do I have to do all of this stuff?” rather than ”oh boy do I get to do all of this stuff?”
I hate when a game blasts me with all kinds of useless shit to do rather than letting me discover things by myself. This is why a game like Breath of the Wild is so good. It gives you a direction and you go and run into things organically.
BOTW is so good because it knows it's fanbase is full of jobless morons who find fun in running at grass aimlessly and make a 60 hour run time into 120 because they want to discover "bY tHeMsElVeS"
Ages like fine wine honestly, after playing so much of Elden Ring (best open world game next to Zelda) with the freedom of gameplay and exploration. I tried Hogwarts Legacy and quit after 1 hour, its still another ubisoft clone of a game. I'm so sick of this linear experience I've had over like 50 times
I always remember the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games fondly, especially for the way they handled fast travel. If you found a group on their way to somewhere, you could ask where they were headed and possibly join them. This was a great way to handle it since travel was very dangerous (there are actually invisible hazards, it's a whole thing) and it made you sometimes go places you may not have been planning on just to travel safely. You could always head to a settlement and hire someone to guide you someplace, too, but your money would run out fast if you did that much. It always felt good to finally see a group, and find we were headed the same way. It was an old series, and there weren't many npcs but it felt more alive because of how those few npcs were presented as friends you actually wanted to talk to because they could legitimately help.
What i realized recently is that I want to see worlds that feels lived in and purposeful. Just like in games like Monster Hunter and Breath of the Wild, I want to see that deer sleep underneath a tree when there isnt anybody actively hunting them. It's nice seeing monsters chilling around or fighting amongst themselves. Add more landmarks, interactivity, better traversal or movement mechanics, or interesting verticality.. just dont just have me slowly move about fulfilling a checklist that I can't emotionally resonate with.
Toukiden II scratches the same itch as Monster Hunter Rise, but some of the enemy placement just felt random, like set dressing to cover up the wide and mostly barren environments. Had the same issue with Gen 8 Pokemon's wild area.
the fact that i enjoyed this video even without agreeing with you is a sign of quality content
Also he treated W3 and Skyrim exactly like the new ubisoft games that is "content"
@@Archeronus saying "quest marker bad" for 25 minutes is "content"
This is why I prefer small open worlds/adventure games like Witcher 2, Shenmue and Majora's Mask over sandbox games. Large open worlds start off strong but you'll quickly realize how much repetitive side content, repetitive combat and ridiculously long traveling there is to artificially make the game longer.
They are entirely dependent on the copy paste formula and while they give you the freedom to do whatever you want other than the main story, it usually comes down to completing one quest after the other, grinding or farming. Whereas smaller open worlds have more variety in content, more focused storylines and sidequests and actually finishing the game without feeling overwhelmed by its size and repetitive design.
And Yakuza games..
I appreciate all of the effort and thought put into this. My biggest issue with linear games is that I get bored easily, and repeating the same sequence of events for the 50th time, trying to get past a certain level, before being allowed to do ANYTHING else has caused me to abandon countless games. At least in most open world games I have the ability to go attempt another quest, farm for better gear, or explore more of the map. I get it that you dont enjoy the noncombat/running aspects of games but those of us that grew up on the early days of WOW appreciate that "the grind" is not just about fighting and completing the main story line. I also appreciate the dynamic content prevelant in many open world games, especially in MMOs. Logging in on Christmas day to find a new Santa Sword of the Frost available is exciting to me. Most of all, I view open world games as the greatesst form of escapism. Got the next few hours I get to put myself in the shoes of a cowboy/orc/archer/samurai and do sh*t that cowboys/orcs/archers/samurais do (which involves more than running and fighting).
Year old comment, but besides the thing about MMOs, none of the things you mentioned are really exclusive to either linear or open world game
@@DaveUnknown I never said any of that is exclusive to that type of game. Im not talking about other genres. And what I described may not be exclusive to those genres (not sure why that matters anyway), they are characteristics of the actual game genres on topic here
A short hike does the small open world concept very well, having a whole island to explore, but never seeming too empty. You can find treasure, find people, fish, drive a boat, and just enjoy the scenery. It’s not very complex, but it is fun. It’s absolutely something I recommend.
The Uncharted series feels like the perfect blend of open-world environments and tight cinematic storytelling. Especially Uncharted 4, with occasional open-world segments, but an overarching linear story that keeps the game flowing at a solid pace.
I agree, and I Uncharted 2 and 3 also are really replayable for me, they have this blend of linear story game with very dynamic shootouts, and the games are not very long on repeat playthroughs.
Wholeheartedly agree. Set pieces are sprinkled in to keep the action going, and (in the case of Uncharted 4 mostly) the games have very quiet moments letting the characters just talk and have optional conversations, as well as react to the insanity they just survived.
It's just a shame that the core gameplay is so shallow. If the skill ceiling was higher they would be a lot more replayable for me.
Yeah as much as I wna love open world games, only one I enjoy is the insomniac Spider-Man’s and gta’s. Otherwise I’d rather play a linear game like uncharted or the gow trilogy to gow 2018. I don’t know if hitman is considered an open world or linear game with big open levels but I truly love that series too
Uncharted is as linear as it gets, though. Except for very short "open" areas in Uncharted 4, I wouldn't call any of the Uncharted anything remotely close to open world. I love those games, but they are pretty linear on-rail experiences.
“That pie’s gone before you know it”
_Shows footage of Hollow Knight, a game who’s first play through took me seventy hours_
My experience with open world games have been hating all the open world parts , but loving fighting giant robot monsters in horizon or the fantastic engaging story of Red Dead.
A great open world game that doesn't get much mention was Sleeping Dogs. It's action focus made the world fun to travel across while the map wasn't too big
Threatening people to play Outer Wilds is the correct response.
Phew! I thought it was just me. I’ve realised in recent years that for me it comes down to gameplay vs experience. A game can be the most cinematic, beautiful, large scale experience but if the gameplay isn’t there I just won’t be compelled to play.
Even though I love open worlds for various reasons, I can see your points. It's not that I'm not aware of the issues, but the things I like far outweigh the cons for me.
I think it comes down to what each person likes in a game
I like to explore different worlds with different lore and I like to collect things.
Horizon is a game that I really really like. Its lore made me really love the game, and the gameplay loop is nice .
Doesn't mean I'm not aware that things can be improved, I do not like how half of the sidequests are just use the Focus to follow footprints to a lady's water vase.
Still, that and other problems weren't deal breakers for me like it clearly were for Yakko lol
Anyway, great video :)
I think what made Skyrim so addicting is how the compass works. You're just walking from point A to B and you see a marker on the compass indicating something is nearby, you investigate, around 70% of the time it's just Draugr Crypt number 155 but sometimes there's some environmental storytelling going on. IDK why but Skyrim feels denser than most open worlds, and also, MODS.
Also one massive point this guy forgot is a games soundtrack botw, Skyrim and the Witcher are all games that are fun to explore and walk around in because the music just puts you in a trance where doing anything can be fun.
Skyrim was a good game for its time. When skyrim came out, open world was not really huge yet. Nowadays, all the games that come out are friggin open world and its very exhausting. I have to work and take care of my family and i dont have enough time for all these 20000 different open world games. I prefer playing short linear games like resident evil, and speed running through them, seeing how fast i can complete them. I can finish most resident evil games in about 2 hours. Im not stuck on one long videogame for 100-200 hours, burning myself out. Even hardcore gamers like me have their limits. We have too many games!
@@jRex918Skyrim is still an excellent game even today. But only with mods.
There's nothing wrong with having taste... It's human. But somehow some of us have blurred the line between taste and general assessment. Not a lot of people these days can say "It's amazing, but not for me". A game is not bad because I don't like it. However, if like over 50% of the fans don't like a game, then something is wrong somewhere (And you'll still find people that love it). But if you had to dawn a mighty armor and shield to criticize a game, perhaps it's just not to your taste (which is ok). I really enjoyed the video though.
Though many of your points are valid, I find the perspective you hold to be very narrow and unfair when judging the entire open world genre as a whole. You compare and contrast these open world games with other games that carry very different goals and require different mind sets to both play and create. And your bias towards certain games and gameplay design decisions also weakens some of your arguments, especially your bias towards BotW. Breath of the Wild carries many flaws that other open world games carry, like just because it innovates on one core aspect of open world design doesn't mean it's repetitive side dungeons, uneventful side quests, and underwhelming story are free from criticism. And even if they are more forgivable because of the parts done incredibly well, why doesn't this extend to the other open world games? Why are their well done aspects either ignored, mentioned dismissively, or contrasted by their faults, while BotW gets a pass? I also find some of your comparisons to other game genres unjustified, because they're part of different genres that require very different mindsets to play. For example you compare metroidvanias to open world games, and though it's a minor and short comparison, I still find the point to be null, because open world games aren't metroidvanias, they can have similarities, but they are not the same. This extends to many other points you've made, but I don't want to make this a UA-cam COMMENT a whole critique of your pretty good video. But I can't help but want to say this since the handful of your videos I've seen carry similar problems, some more than others, but still, I see this as a problem.
triple a open worlds are garbage tho, he called it out, so what's your point?
@@YWNBAW69 my point's that he's biased towards BotW's design philosophy, and saying everything in a certain group is bad (this group being open world games) just because he enjoyed the exception (BotW) is close minded and ignores other's perspectives. This is amplified even more by the fact that criticisms that are completely valid towards Breath of the Wild like any other open world game are dismissed for arbitrary reasons. For example: Repetitive dungeons, flawed combat, too many collectables, and etc. Another thing is, how can we trust his judgement of open world games, when he hasn't finished many? It's like asking someone whose only ever seen Shang Chi to accurately describe martial arts films. We're supposed to trust his judgement of "Open World Games are Boring" when he's only ever completed like two.
In the end of the day he does have a point, but it's hard to truly trust that point when it's obvious he doesn't have the information or experience to back it up any of his points.
It feels like this video is Yakko going on a 20 minute rant about how he didn't enjoy horizon
i cant imagine how good of a game genshin impact would be without the gatcha
this. the story, lore, music, and the drop-dead gorgeous environment is honestly amazing but goddamn the gacha and grinding make me wanna chew on some glass sometimes.
You redeemed yourself at the end there, I put down my master sword shaped pitchfork 😂 Joking, but I loved the video and looking forward to the BotW one!
00:00 Prologue
02:11 Chapter 1, Why Is It So Big?
12:04 Chapter 2, Outdated Game Design
15:32 Chapter 3, The World
25:02 Epilogue
I can get how some people don’t like open world games, especially if they like multiplayer which is usually an afterthought for these type of games.. but I just love the role playing capabilities that comes with it. I’ve be a Viking, I’ve been a cowboy, I’ve been an assassin, a Samurai, a knight, a gladiator, a pirate, anything you can think of I’ve experienced through these games
Yeah for some reason Nintendo youtubers can’t stand turn based RPGs.
??? This dude made a SMT review
@@tipx2master788 I was commenting on the community itself and a point that this video made
oh boy can't wait for SMT V reviews
As someone who has played Genshin Impact for over 369 days: I’m tired.
I started playing skyrim again after quite some time. This time I downloaded some mods to make it look better and more immersive, and I completely removed fast travel. The difference it makes to play an open world without fast travel is incredible. The best example i can give is I had to go to a faraway place early on, but instead of "just teleport there" or use the carriage, i slowly made my way using road signs(mod) and found myself through small towns and slowing down to take a break and talk to people or do a small quest. On my way I would delve into a dungeon if i found one and had the inventory, while slowly making my way to the main quest. It took me 4 hours to get there, but getting there was incredibly fun and immersive. It stopped being about just going to the next mission, and turned to setting of to a small 7 day journey. If you like taking it easy on games, try playing open worlds without fast travel. It's a great change.
Another example is Shadow of the Colossus, it truly feels amazing chasing the right path across the forbidden lands, finding the colossus and killing them
Exactly, the game came out in 2005 and the bossfights are still better than nearly every AAA game right now.
I've played nearly 200 hours of BOTW, all I do is explore the map and what you showed at 24:30 I've absolutely never seen before. Got me super excited