Does anyone else have Open World Fatigue?

So I'm currently playing through Far Cry 4 and collecting most of the items and completing all side missions.

However after playing through Watch Dogs, Destiny, Shadow of Mordor and Sunset Overdrive I feel like I'm not really enjoying an experience I would normally love.

I love side missions, collectibles and exploring and I know it may seem a little whiney to complain about games having lots of content, but I'm starting to feel burnt out on open worlds.

To be honest, even though I knew exactly what to expect from the MC collection and COD:AW I was so relieved to play a game this year that didn't make me climb towers or offer me so much to collect.

Now I'm looking towards next years games like Batman and Metal Gear (two of my all time favourite franchises) along with Dead Island, The Witcher and I feel like I'm less hyped going into these games because of what I've been playing over the last 6 months.

And I know what's you're thinking "You don't have to do the side missions and 100% the game" but unfortunately I'm one of "those" gamers.

Anyone else feel similar about all this?

Yep, and you'll probably hate me for saying this but it was when I started ignoring a bunch of the side content and started focusing in on doing the main campaign. I can definitely feel your pain with ubisoft open world games as there is literally too much stuff to do that it can kinda get overwhelming to a point.

From my view point it looks like the Metal Gear open world is in place but more of as an open sandbox to test crazy stuff in. I probably wouldn't be too concerned about MGS unless you're planning to go for "S" Rankings and beat the games 4-5 times to unlock all the secret endings.

I used to, but I started taking meds for it.

I lost interest in The Witcher 3 after finding out it was taking a more open world approach. I liked that there were sectioned off areas because it made things tighter. And that game's side content suuuuuucks, its all ingredient collection. So I imagine a more "open" Witcher to be less of what I come there for, the tight interesting narrative based on choices I take and alliances I made, and more of that "find some lizardman tongues in the swamp" bullshit I have no interest in at all.

Mordor has that busywork too but if it didn't, it would be the kind of open world game I want. A game where the main conceit, the thing that's the most fun to do, is what's open-ended. Not an endless supply of chores. Which yes you can ignore, but that still involves me going "oh is this a real sidequest or some bullshit- oh its more bullshit let me hide the icons for this". I find myself doing that more and more based on the kind of content open world games seems to be filling with. I ended up turning off like 70% of the icons in Far Cry 4 cus it was just "find a thing" or "you took this base already do it again (really?)" things like that. Things that are easy to program into a game where it doesn't seem like quality of experience is a factor at all so much as "hey this part of the map doesnt have a quest icon so put a thing there"

I certainly have Ubisoft open world fatigue, but that's more to do with the shitty way they structure all their open world games. I just put over a hundred hours in Dragon Age and enjoyed the hell out of it.

Not me. I can enjoy a good linear game nearly as much but a well done open world is where it's at for me.

I love open world games. I almost always finish them 100%. I'm not burnt out on them because I don't really play a lot of them. GTAV, Sleeping Dogs, Vice City, Terraria, VVVVVV, Minecraft, Dark Souls II, and GTA Liberty City Stories are the ones I've played this year and there is a good amount of variety there.

I'm sure if I had played Watch Dogs and Destiny I'd be down on open world games too.

Open World Fatigue sounds like the sibling of agoraphobia.

You have to be careful about what games you buy when you start seeing this pattern. I often times find myself playing through similar genres all in one go. Recently I played through a hefty chunk of Halo MCC but then switched to Wolfenstein. I was in a FPS frame of mind and wanted a game I could listen to podcasts to. Though now the last thing I want to do is start up yet another FPS. Maybe I'll burn some time getting collectibles but another 6-8 hour campaign is out of the question.

You have to give yourself some variety and breaks between big open world games. With side content and exploration usually at the crux of these games you have to realize how much time you'll be spending with each.

But I think you bring up another point where more and more games seem to stray away from linearity and choose an open world. Maybe WatchDogs would have been better if they had scraped the open world design and focused on the story and gameplay. If they had given you smaller levels where you could control and hack your way around the environment and enemies then perhaps the game would have been received more warmly.

Also Ubisoft needs to just stop.

I've never been a huge fan of open-world games, because often those games seem to sacrifice quality for quantity, but when done right I'll still play the hell out of it.

I have no interest in the likes of GTA or AssCreed style open-world, but give me more Dragon Age Inquisition or Fallout New Vegas and I'll play it in a heartbeat.

i never get tired of open world games.there my fave type of games and the main type of game i play the most.the day i get tired of open world games is the day i stop playing video games completely.

It depends on the game. I've never been able to finish a GTA game (only one I haven't payed is 5) but I played the shit out of Saints Row 3&4. I enjoyed my time with Assassins Creed 2 and Brohood, but didn't get very far in Rev and 4.

I love the Fallout games, but got to a point where I had to almost force myself to just focus on the main story to get through Skyrim. You could say I don't like doing side stuff, but I love doing absolutely everything in Dragon Age Inquisition, as well as in the previous DA and Mass Effect games.

I think maybe it comes down to how the game controls. There's a certain amount of frustration I get form a lot of open world games that just makes me not want to play them (looking at you AssCreed controls). When given a huge world to mess around in, frustrating controls probably puts too big of a dampener on the perceived freedom I think.

It's more padding fatigue than open-world fatigue for me. The further down this road games get the more I appreciate how the Mafia games used an open-world setting, ie.purely to ground and give context to the story, rather than as an excuse to fill the game up with lazy, tedious content.

I have shitty by the numbers open world fatigue.

I thought I might be over open world after Watch Dogs and Mordor (Mordor was a great game but the open world didn't add to it) then I played sunset overdrive and GTA and realised that its not open world games that bore me, its open world games that are just open world because that's what's standard now. Make the worlds interesting put nooks and crannies in them, make the side quests more than simple pick three flowers bullshit I still really love open world.

I've actually kept myself in a very good spot in that regard. I have never played any of the Assassin's Creed games, the last Far Cry I played was Far Cry 1, and I didn't play Watch_Dogs. The only open world games I have really put any significant amount of hours into in the last few years were Elder Scrolls, Just Cause 2 and Mount&Blade. I actually really miss playing open world stuff...

With AC:Unity, Far Cry 4, Destiny, Shadows of Mordor and DA:Inquisition. Yes I am starting to get open world fatigue. Unless the Crew get top notch reviews, there's no way I'm picking that one up.

I think for me, it has to do more with consistency. It's difficult to find open world games that have a good blend of meaningful story and side missions. For instance I thought most of the side stuff in GTA5, save a few activities was generally not very interesting and found the story missions fun through-out. I'm currently playing Far Cry 4 and just dealt with De Pleur in the story and could not give two shits about what is going on and find the missions associated with the story merely serviceable. While doing outposts, hunting, assassination etc. side missions are way more interesting and fun.

Some one above me mentioned padding and this is very true. If less open world games just stopped throwing everything and the kitchen sink because "that's just what you do now" I think a lot of them would be more interesting. I'd be okay with having less side stuff, but if all of if being of a reasonably high quality and interesting to do.

I'm having bad-open-world game fatigue, yes.

Depends on the type of open world game. I'm done with the Ubisoft ones, but I still really like the Mass Effect style ones. Totally ready for the next Mass Effect game.

I think yahtzee said it best

Maybe sometimes I don't want to create my own experience maybe I want an experience thats been carefully crafted by professional designers and artists

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsY7vLqIi-c#t=232

I have trouble playing two games with an open world per year. Finished Mordor and want to get on Sunset Overdrive, but I just can't do it.

Yes. The new Zelda isn't appealing to me that much because of it.

Nope, if you have open world fatigue then play CoD or some corridor shooter

I guess OP would rather go back to corridors and rails? But......WHY.

I think I get what OP is feeling though. That is why I have other genres to break up any oncoming
burn-outs like puzzle games, racing games, strategy games, ect.

I think Ubisoft open world games sharing design ideas like a McDonalds product line are quickly becoming tiresome.

Yet I still rather play something like FC4 than the COD campaign, I still rather play a open world multiplayer shooter like DayZ or BF4 than COD or CS:GO.

It seems like I've had open world fatigue for the past year now. Especially with every Ubisoft game being a "open world, tower game" and other major open world games like Shadow of Mordor or even Dragon Age Inquisition (to a certain) extent, it seems like devs are more and more keen to make their games less linear which works for some games (ala GTA or Dark Souls) but not necessarily others (ala Dragon Age). Maybe it's because I have a full time job now and am no longer a student so I don't have as much free time as I used to but I just feel like sometimes I just prefer to sit down have a nice 10-15 hour linear experience instead of some sprawling 50+ hour open world experience. This is actually one of the reasons I really enjoyed The Evil Within despite it having all its technical problems on the PC (and why to a certain extent I'm looking forward to Uncharted 4). There's something to be said for a game that focuses on telling an impactful, compelling story rather than one that relies on the player to create their own narratives. In the same vein, I also think that the trend of games having multiple endings or going down multiple paths (often exclusionary ones) is a little overrated. I didn't have a problem with it in Dragon Age Inquisitions, but I could have done without it too. There's nothing wrong with telling the story that the creators wanted to tell, you don't always have to make the player decide what happens in the game just to make it seem more interactive.

Everyone needs a pallet cleanser game, mine is Injustice: Gods Among Us

@juggertrainuk:

I love these games too and suffer this problem from time to time.

It sounds to me like you basically just overdid it. Destiny (early Sept), Mordor (late Sept), Sunset Overdrive (Oct), FC4 (Nov) all came out within a few months of each other. That is a short amount of time for some really huge games man.

Follow @finaldasa's advice and space these kinds of games a bit more with more variety in between and I think you'll be fine.

Don't play them for awhile.

I completely get the open world fatigue. But for me i has a lot to do with the type of open world. With Ubisoft games It can be the beginning of the game and, I look at the map an get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of icons on the map, because they are just a handful of the same type of content repeated over and over and over.

This is why I like the type of worlds Todd Howard's team at Bethesda make. When you start out, it's just a huge map with no icons or locations known to you, and the only way to find things is to explore. So you head off in a direction and really have no idea what you will find out there. Also they do way better than most at putting actual authored content into the little corners of the game world, knowing full well that you may never even find them.

The really cool thing is that when you actually stumble across some really involved side quest that has nothing to do with the main quest. Or just some little room in an abandoned house that tells a story just by what the people left behind or the positioning of the corpses, and it's not even on the map until you discover it. It makes it way better because it feels like something that you actually found. Dragon Age Inquisition does a decent job in this regard.

It reminds me of the original Legend of Zelda game where you are just exploring the world and finding things that you may or may even know what they are. It goes a long way in making a world feel unexplored where there are undiscovered things waiting for you.

For me it brings a sense of wonder to a game world that I want to discover instead just feeling like a series of series of icons to be crossed off a map.

I still go back to Fallout 3 and occasionally the other Bethesda games instead of playing most of the newer open world games simply they are the ones that gave me a sense of wonder that I just don't get from the new games.

I can basically play one open world game a year.. Anything more than that and I burn out on the stop-n-go, distractable's nature of the pacing.

But yea Far Cry 2 is still the fuckin' best. Playing Far Cry 4 (which I'm really quite enjoying) I CRAVE for a remake of Far Cry 2 with today's tech.

It would have to slow the hell down and take back so many of the fun/easy to use tools that let you kill lots of people incredibly quickly (and throw out all the 'towers' stuff) and boil it down to something more basic and human. It would piss people off, but it would also be a MUCH cooler game. Obviously fix the checkpoint re-spawning though. Which they did on PC I hear.

<3

But yea, linear games kick ass. Best thing I've played this year was the Metro Redux... :/ :)

I think my curse is that in open world games I almost have to obsessively collect every collectable item that there is out there. Usually I tend to skip doing the main questline until I can progress no further in the game.

Ubisoft games are filled with collectable stuff. Though I think that Assasins Creed: Unity is the worst example of this. In the beginning of the game the map of Paris is so filled with "stuff" that you have a hard time even seeing where the missions are or where you are supposed to go.

As someone said on the forums I think that Ubisoft should start concentrating on quality of content in their games instead of quantity of content. Though I quess that I should try to kick the habit of collecting every possible item out there. It would make playing these games much more relaxing.

I see you come from the @vinny school of open world completionism.

Nope, I'll happily take an open world over an overly linear one.

After seeing the new video, I realized Epona was one of the worst additions to the series. I want an overworld filled with stuff to do. Not big open spaces.

I try to combat that by playing both an open world game and a linear game at the same time. I think a bit of the problem this year specifically is that there were far fewer AAA games released than most year's and Ubisoft managed to get like four or five games out there. Normally you'd have a bunch of other games to play in addition to those but so many games got delayed that people who want to play AAA stuff really have very little choice outside of Ubisoft games. And sadly (in a way) the few other games that made it out this year also had either a partially open world structure(like Destiny) or happened to be major open worlds themselves(Infamous, Dragon Age, Sunset Overdrive, Shadows of Mordor). Part of the problem is that a lot of developers had to work with such crazy RAM constrictions last generation that they jumped at the chance to make something more open. But that ended up being the strategy everyone used which obviously made it hard to find quality linear games this year.

Yeah, the whole "...and it's going to be OPEN WORLD." Has been a bit overdone in the past few years. You know what did their open world really well, so it could be played as a tight linear game? Tomb Raider. I never went after any collectibles or backtracked and I remember very little retreading through the same areas or traveling through vast useless empty spaces. This probably sounds hypocritical since The Elder Scrolls games are some of my favourites but in terms of recent open world fatigue caused by every company jumping on that bandwagon I'm glad the Tomb Raider team is doing it right.

Yes and no. I'm tired of Ubisoft open worlds and the same tower-climbing, icons-all-over-the-map bullshit. I'm not tired of all open worlds. I'm loving GTAV right now, Forza Horizon 2's open world is awesomeballs, I've always liked games like the Hitman series where you can do a lot different things, etc. In general, I definitely prefer open world to linear games. And honestly, even Ubisoft's actual worlds are typically the best parts of those games with the art they use for the environments; it's just that the tedious crap like collectibles and uninspired side missions ruin it. I think it's what they do with the open-world that makes a game great or shitty.

Part of that comes down to design. For example, Rockstar tends to be pretty great at stuff like "let's put a busted-out section of this overpass so you can drive the fuck off and fly through the air", which makes for stupid fun. Burnout Paradise was great at this as well. Also, I absolutely hate when areas in an open-world look similar or aren't varied. Half the reason I didn't enjoy GTAIV that much was because much of the map was the same style, with the only real difference being business or ghetto areas. And a huge problem some open world games have is that they're inexplicably made linear. If the characters aren't good or the story isn't engaging, the game quickly becomes tiresome "go here, do a thing" garbage. That's where Watch_Dogs stumbled big-time.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention follow/chase missions. I've hated every one I've ever had to do. Actually, let me clarify. I don't mind car chase missions much. That is, provided they don't feature a bullshit rubberbanding system where it's utterly meaningless how well/poorly you drive because you're basically just driving to the next scripted event. Fuck those. On-foot chase missions are also awful, with scripted on-foot chase missions being the absolute worst. The last mission of ACIII was incredibly terrible. Finally, no "tail this guy that's walking around" or "listen to this conversation" mission has EVER been fun, to ANYONE. For the love of God, devs, please stop putting those in games. It is a complete waste of everyone's time.

There's still a lot to like in open-world games, though. There can be some truly great open-world moments like freely blazing through a pristine vineyard in a Bowler, stealing a jet from a military base, throwing a body off a ledge down in front of a group of guys so they'll freak the fuck out and run over by where your bomb awaits, et al. The best thing about them to me is that you can make your own fun if the game itself isn't that great (see: Watch_Dogs). I like having the option of "well, what if I did this dumb thing?" There's something to be said for that, because a shitty linear game can't be made entertaining. So, yeah, give me the open world.

This recently stopped me from making my next game Far Cry 4. For me, the more I play open world games, the more I can detect the sacrifices to the story mode of those games. Dragon Age Inquisition's story was extremely thin, accounting for maybe 10% at most of that game's total runtime (and mostly connecting the obvious dots while it's at it). Once you get sick of doing needless sidequests, this becomes apparent, and I think running open world games back to back puts you at a very high risk of that.

I remember writing a silly little Game of the Decade type list back in 2010, when I was about 16 or 17 and distinctly remember having "sand box games" on top of my "shit that I'm tired of"-list at the very top already back then. And yeah Ubisoft has pretty much ruined open world design, I mean they did it with AC2, which started this whole awful, "I don't know just fill the map with crap" design concept.

Of course since I'm of the Vinny Carevella school of 'fuck about and collect everything' I've still managed to play all of the AC games (at least up until Black Flag), all of the Far Cry games, a shit ton of Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas and a bunch of other open world stuff. It pretty much fatigued me on the whole medium though, so I think I'm done, at least for a couple more years.

I'm not burnt out on open world games, it really just varies from game to game. I've been loving Assassin's Creed Unity's open world for instance and yet earlier in November I hadn't really been liking Shadow of Mordor's open world much at all.

You should be more selective with the games you play. Out of the four you listed, I've only played Mordor. The other three experiences range from downright bad to pretty OK, imo. I'm not sure why people get caught up in the hype and feel the need to buy every new release. You don't watch every movie that comes out in a year, right?

They did a great job portraying Mordor as the barren shithole it's supposed to be, that's for sure.

I've had open world fatigue since GTA 3.

I'm getting it a bit with Dragon Age: Inquisition and I'm having a hard time putting my finger on it. I think it made a smart choice of sectioning off the world into smaller "open worlds". I dig some side stuff like the astariums and forts, but stuff like the shards and mosaic pieces I've started to completely ignore. It's a shame, I wish they would've done a little more with the paper treasure maps (like Red Dead Redemption). They aren't really a marked side quest. I'm closing in on finishing the main story, with Far Cry 4 waiting for me. I'm not sure I should follow up with that if I'm feeling the fatigue. I think for me it's really coming down to quality side content over quantity. This is why I'm glad I skipped Assassin's Creed: Unity. Making an Assassin's Creed game with discreet levels or a semi-open world would get me more jazzed about that series than any change of setting/time-period would. I think Jeff suggested as much in a recent Bombcast.

I've always thought an Assassin's Creed game done in the style of a Hitman game would be incredible. Hell, going back to AC1, that's kind of what I wanted. I enjoyed Assassin's Creed for what it was through Brotherhood, and then AC3 turned me off of the series completely. I thought that Hitman Absolution, while not perfect, was enjoyable - and an Assassin's Creed game with a linear progression of levels/missions/objectives would get me right back on board.

I'm not there yet, but I am getting there. Mordor tested my patience, but strangely enough I'm having fun with Unity. :/

Ok Ubisoft at some point a few months ago sort of confirmed Beyond Good and Evil 2, if they put this open world tower discovery bullshit into that game I will be so angry but still play that game. lol. Seriously though Ubisoft don't fuck up BG&E 2 by forcing it to be open world, please.