I don't know if I can play open world games anymore

I haven't posted in a long time, but I was thinking about this a lot today and felt like writing something:

I love to explore.

Historically, I've been a giant fan of huge game worlds in RPGs and Sandbox games.

As a kid, my best memories were from the original FF, Dragon Warrior, & Ultimas. Exploring Hyrule was always my favorite part of the Zelda games. Suikoden is my favorite RPG series just because of its world, lore and the vast variety of stuff you can do in it. Dragon Quest VIII is still a game I love to just run around in for the landscape alone.

As worlds in games have gotten bigger and more open, I am running into a number of problems with them and now I'm finding myself dreading even starting on stuff like the Witcher 3 and knowing games like Fallout 4 are on the horizon.

1) The games are too damn long!

I used to feel like I'd really gotten my money's worth with a 100-hour game and would try to squeeze every last drop of value out of them, but my life has gotten pretty busy and I find it hard to spend that kind of time on anything.

Now I find myself enjoying short games I can finish quickly and move on from like Game of Thrones episodes or Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (though I did play all of the New Order and loved it) or quick arcade-like sessions with games like Rogue Legacy or Binding of Isaac.

If all I had going was a demanding Job, diving into these kinds of games in my free time as a distraction would probably be the perfect thing for me, but I've got a lot of personal goals I'm always working on and I like to spend my time away from work being productive on various projects. I seem to have less and less time for entertainment.

2) The worlds are often too big/empty/repetitive

A lot of these games offer attempts to slowly reveal new gameplay experiences throughout or have a skill tree that keeps things fresh with fun new powers but they all inevitably get to a point where I run out of steam and feel like I'm not really getting much out of the experience and may only still be playing to finish the story.

I finished Fallout 3 twice, but never even made it a third of the way through New Vegas or Skyrim. Even though Far Cry 2 is one of my favorite games, I skipped FC3 (though I managed to make it all the way through 4). I made it about half way through ACIV:Black Flag though I took a pass on everything else in the series after Brotherhood. I also passed on WatchDogs, but I did make it all the way through Shadow of Mordor (even got Platinum!) and GTAV.

I think the ones I did actually finish have something that really helped keep me going. Mordor's Nemesis system and powers kept me interested well past the halfway mark even as I felt like I was mostly grinding to find collectables toward the end and GTA's heists helped a lot to break up any monotony I was feeling.

I Know how much work goes into making these games, so I understand that it's difficult to deliver depth and lots of unique detail on top of all the breadth of experience they provide, but as these worlds get bigger, I find myself wanting a little less breadth and more depth.

3) There are too many decent large world, exploration-based games

Just making the list above seems overwhelming to me and I know I missed a bunch. If you total up the number of hours of gameplay in all of the big AAA open world-series, it's a staggering amount of time. I feel like if I spent that kind of time playing games these days, I'd never have time to watch a movie, read a book, hang out with friends & family or have any kind of time to be creative on my own.

It's not that I play big, open world games out of any obligation and I'm not totally ready to give up on them, but as time goes by I seem less able to commit the time they require and it seems to be getting difficult for me to even get excited about playing them. I understand the answer is to just play less of them overall, but it's also hard to know which ones to focus on when so many are out there and you only have so much time to devote.

If you feel the same way, feel free to vent about it below or talk about what you've had to do to deal with it.

I've been feeling this way a lot lately as well. I just recently bought The Witcher 3 and played it for maybe 3 hours before just turning it off and feeling like I wasted my money. That in no way has anything to do with the quality of the game, but with me realizing I don't want to play a game for 50-100 hours anymore.

@toisul:

That's exactly what I'm worried about happening with Witcher 3. I think it looks incredible and I've heard it's more accessible than the others, but the fact that I didn't play very far into the other 2 makes me really hesitant.

I can always wait until I feel like I have more free time or until it's so cheap I don't feel like I wasted money if I don't finish it, but by then there will be 5 or 10 other games to choose from.

don't feel like you have to play all or any of them. sounds like you're looking forward to a particular few, so maybe just get one and focus on that so it won't be so imposing. also just do the mainline quest and ignore all the side stuff. fwir witcher 3 is about 20-25 hrs just mainlining it (probably wrong though so don't bite my head off, but i know it's significantly shorter than a 100% run). it does seem like by and large most AAA games are headed the gigantic open world route.

Remember a few years ago when we were worried that games were getting too short? Careful what you wish for, I guess.

@oraknabo: The Witcher 3 seems amazing, but also kind of overwhelming. I knew what I was getting into when I bought the game, but I still bought it and a part of me wishes I didn't because I know I'll never sit down and finish it anytime soon. And even if I do finish it it will just be by me chipping away at it over time.

Not only did E3 remind me of a bunch more games coming out in the future, now Batman's out and it's getting impressive reviews. I wasn't even thinking about Batman when I wrote this.

Man, it's like you buried into my head during the night and stole my thoughts. I feel the exact same way (gave up on the same games, and spend most of my time playing the exact same games you mentioned)... Crazy!

But yeah I think it's probably a combination of fatigue, lack of time and poor game design that are the reasons you feel this way. I feel like Bethesda tend to get it right the most (I can't wait for Fallout 4), but even they can become a bit of a slog after a certain period. I think VR may give these games a little extra kick, but in the end I think there needs to be a revision in the genre. Maybe shrink the worlds but give them greater depth (not depth as in silly side missions, but depth as in flavour).

Even though it's by no means an open world game, I recently played The Unfinished Swan through for the first time, and that was the first game in a long time that gave me that same sense of excitement of uncovering new hidden areas that felt like genuinely my own discovery. I would say the last time I felt like that was in Fallout 3 when I came across a hidden vault, or when I stumbled upon the Dunwich building.

If you haven't played The Unifinished Swan yet then I would strongly recommend that you do. It's the perfect length for somebody with not much free time and I think you'll appreciate it in the same way that I did.

@kmfrob: I've played through the first couple of areas of Unfinished Swan. I liked the first part a lot. I'm not crazy about the storybook style they're using to tell the story, but the mechanics are a really interesting take on exploration and they do some really clever things with misdirection in the first area. I've also been having a good time just messing around in Hohokum.

I guess the bulk of the games I'm playing lately are PS+ instant game collection games, so I'm pretty happy I got that.

I feel like there's a decent number of open world games that aren't 50-100 hours though. For example I beat Shadow of Mordor in about 25 hours, I didn't get everything in the game but did spend hours upon hours on the side stuff.

Open world RPG's, now those are almost surprising if they don't take 75-100 hours.

I feel like that a lot these days too. My favourite games were always the fallout/oblivion/red dead style of games where you could put as long as you wanted into them. Back before I had a job, a fiancée and a degree to do I mean... Now I have a kid due in two months and I'm praying I get through the witcher before then! Loving it though, first game for ages to grab me so hard.

I usually try to avoid playing one open world game after another. You need to space them out and try to ensure they play differently. I sometimes can manage it if I interact with the world and game design in a different way but it's always good to take a break.

I too find open world games tedious these days for the reasons you described. I try to only play one every several months or so, though.

Witcher 3 is the first open world game in years that's going to take me forever to finish, and doesn't feel like it's full of tedium, so I'm probably going to play that for a long while and then play a lot more short experiences for a long while.

As weird as it sounds, these days, the shorter the game, the more exciting i am to play it. But also im mechanics heavy guy.

Op, I feel the same way. I'm dreading going back to the Witcher 3, i'm about 3-4 hours into and still in the beginning area. I've enjoyed the previous batmans and the new one comes out this week too, plus all the discounted games I just got on the steam sale. I'm debating getting wasteland 2 and/or the talos principle, but I doubt I honestly have time to play either.

Part of my problem is trying to do everything in the starting area and then not getting too farther in the game, or forget the gameplay mechanics.

I need to focus more on just main line things, I guess.

I have other things besides games that want to do like career change training, writing, playing golf, learning tennis, and spending sometime with friends. I don't know people with kids, especially young children, still find time to game.

I tried playing some more multiplayer games earlier this with battlefield and evolve, but while fun, I felt like was wasting time where I could be making progress on my single player games.

I think having the option to display side content from showing up on the map would help some. Or have a choice of what you want to d oeverything, critical path, critical path plus top 20% of side content (narrative missions, the first type of mission type and not the next 20 that are genric repeats, no or limited collectables. )

I never beat the first one (got some way into it though), and quit the second one after maybe 5 hours. I'd say The Witcher 3 is one of the top five best games I have ever played. I never expected to beat the game after I heard how long it was, but I just did, last night, and now I feel like I just want more of it.

Definitely. I haven't tried Witcher 3 yet partly because I'm still good on my open world RPG fix from Dragon Age: Inquisition. Gotta "save up" for MGSV.

I don't see this as much of aproblem.
I think the witcher was a great world. (not too explore too much seeing as a ton of the question marks were just chest with a slight twist to it. (monsters/bandits/hidden treasure)
But there is also nothing that says you have to do it. You can mainline the story most of the time. That being said a lot of the open world games don't have such a strong narrative center as the Witcher.
Just the main story quest from Skyrim? I would say that is not worth it or does not provide a terribly amazing experience. (not bad but nothing too crazy)

@cheappoison: My biggest problems with only following the main storyline are, similar to what you said about Skyrim, that most of the time the main quest is the least interesting thing in the game. I think I enjoyed the Riddler stuff in the Batman games more than the core game and I try to avoid main quest stuff in Bethesda games as much as possible.

Also following only a main quest turns a sandbox game into a linear experience and my favorite thing about these kinds of games is exploration.

Yeah, I'm tired of open world games too. They seem inherently more of a meandering form, made to squeeze hours out of the player. As I get older, my time is increasingly precious. I will play large games if they are dense and packed full of worthy content (Souls, for instance, or Witcher 2 since it was free of the meandering open world bullshit,) but I'm not going to spend 60 hours travelling between side quests. Fuck your plain ass farm fields and woods.

Weird for me to say I sorta agree, I'm getting burnt out on big open world games.

I'm with you. Especially while playing The Witcher 3 so soon after Dragon Age Inquisition. Yet I'm still more excited about Fallout 4 then anything coming out this year. MGSV looks super neat too.

Oh, I don't know. I definitely see legitimacy and value in the things everyone is saying - open-world games do seem to lack structure and are definite timesinks - but they give me a certain service outside of the usual escapism and mechanical/narrative enjoyment. I'm one of those lousy goons who everyone thought would be a huge writer or do something big and then ended up realizing that I either lack desire to create or any real substance with which to create, with all that added baggage of wondering whether I'm just finding another reason to continue not writing and so on and so on. You know, poser shit. Trying to wrestle with whether I even want to try to make anything has the added downside of leaving that imaginative, angry spark still glowing and cranking out fever dreams. Open-world games give me a set of rules and narrative function that lets me give that garbage form - a pallid, self-obsessed form, but one that sedates me nonetheless.

Gah, fuck. That was really just a bunch of self-obsessed words for, 'I see where you're coming from, I just haven't reached the same fatigue level yet.'

Ever since Red Dead I've thought open world games have been kinda overrated. Most of the time I just end up focusing on the story and upgrades(Sleeping Dogs). If the story isn't interesting enough I'll just bail on the game all together(AC:IV). My main thing is that, go to do these dozen different sidequests is super uninteresting to me and 99% of the time, I don't give a shit whats in your world .Your world has to be really cool for me to care about actually exploring it. I guess Bethesda kind of does that, but I'm not a fan because other reasons. Far Cry is kind of an exception, since that's way more about things happening in the open world than say, the collect everything mentality of Assassin's Creed.

@oraknabo: I still think it might be worthwhile to do some carefull selection instead of dropping them all together. Certainly cause I agree that some of the high points are of the laid path.
Problem is you can't have big open games with an exploration element and let them be tiny.
I would also say that there are games that really benefit. Dragon age was not compelling enough to be padded that much. The Witcher I felt happy there was that much, but then again then another painful point comes up that as soon as the story ends the world kind of dries up. This is one of the things that could of done with some more monster contracts, but then they might not be so compelling anymore. Especially if they started to be randomly generated.

I deal situation is the witcher where you have a great (or good enough story to some) at the core and more to explore if you are engaged enough. I guess that is the goal, but a lot of the times it kind of devolves into keep busy with the open world and here is a main story as an afterthought (elderscrolls, shadow of mordor, Dead island,.....) I would say stuff like just cause also falls under this, but I can't but help but consider them differently seeing as it gets so crazy.

This actualy makes me wonder about no man's sky. But that is in an other extreme of seemingly focussed on exploration without much of a throughline. There might be some randomly generated stuff, but that has the real danger of starting to feel like a cobbled together mess with a few pre-generated elements. (The feeling I somewhat got from starbound that terraria was able to avoid.)

On some level I understand the "too long" part, but I myself don't really see it like that. I don't have a need to finish long, good open world games right away.
Take Witcher 3 for instance. I love everything about it, and I constantly want to play it. I have played it since the day it launched. Yet I have just arrived in Skellige, done a few quests there. Which seems to be barely halfway. Last week I think I played it for a few hours, seeing how there were so much E3 content to consume instead. It seems some people then think "man, this is going to take ages to finish! Better not to bother with it then", while I think "great! I'll be able to 'live' in this world for a long time!". Long games are great when they are good, because it means I'll be able to be in that world for months.
That said, I did just start my three week vacation, and I aim to finish Witcher 3 this week...

I do get the part about them being repetitive. Most massive open world games tend to be similar in a lot of ways. Witcher 3 stands out because of the lore, and how great every little quest has been written. It doesn't feel like there is much filler there, which is usually the case.
Fallout 4 will have the crafting and building, aspects of games I love more than anything. Just Cause 3 will have insanity. So there are good, somewhat different, open world games coming out, which I am looking forward to. And the best part of it all is that I will have fun for a long time after starting playing them. Not just a few hours, then on to the next thing. I like that as well, but nothing beats a long game for me.

Not gonna lie, Far Cry 4 didn't catch my interest as much as I thought it would. That might be more of a Ubisoft design problem than anything else for me though. I'm really tired of climbing damn towers.

I'm still excited to give The Witcher 3 a go at some point and likely Fallout 4 as well, but as I've gotten older I've come to appreciate games that keep things tight pacing-wise. That doesn't even necessarily mean "short" either. Pillars of Eternity took me a little over 30 hours to run through doing most of the side quests and I don't feel like my time was being wasted at any point. Open world games, by their very nature, have a lot of stuff that might be considered filler.

@toisul: I had the same experience, coupled with the poor first impression that game gave due to the wonky movement. I love BIG games, but I like it when they're short and to-the-point. I'm probably going to have a blast playing the 8-10 hours of Arkham Knight even though there's probably 40 hours of game there. If open-world games are to retain their appeal for me, they should let me mainline the best content in under 20 hours.

Video games is like a box of chocolates, y'see. So you have like, all these chocolates, but they're all mostly crap. You might eventually acquire a new taste or two in your exploration, maybe you like the caramel one with a hazelnut inside. Maybe the weird fruity marzipan covered in rich, dark chocolate suddenly makes sense to you. Thing is, you eventually find your favorites since the box only contains so many variations. Sadly by then you're old and life sucks and you just don't have time anymore so you just stick to the -Souls series since you know they last forever but are also great. Or maybe that's just me.

Fallout 4 looks amazing though.

I think it's filling these worlds with "systems" or "formulas" is what creates the problems open world games have nowadays. I don't remember feeling the annoying pressure of an open world in a game like Oblivion. I enjoyed exploring that even when there was not much to do (I hadn't started the main quest so no oblivion gates, and I didn't do much looting in caves/ ruins etc either. Just the exploration was very satisfactory and fun)

Peoples tastes change. When i was younger I used to love platform games and RTS games alongside with simulations. These days I dont play those kinds of games much anymore.

It might be just a case of moving into a different genre. Maybe you have gone through changes in your life and those changes are reflecting into your gaming.

This. I think most of us are having the problem where we try to eat the whole box and feel sick after. Find your game, play the heck out of it. Leave the rest in the box for later.

The funny thing about all of this is that I used to wait years to play some games and felt fine about it. It certainly makes me feel less bad about not finishing a game when I only spend $20 on it.
Probably the best thing to do is just play the one or two that appeal to me the most and save the rest for some day down the road when there's nothing out I'm interested in.

You sound a lot like me over the last few years. I am an artist and occasionally make comics, but I always struggle with having something to say or wanting my skills to be better before I bother, especially when it comes to writing. The problem is that puts me in a loop where I'm never getting enough practice to get better because I won't risk churning out a bunch of stuff I'm not satisfied with. I read a lot of books on writing and while I've learned a lot about technical stuff from a lot of them, the one that actually got me writing was If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland. If you're into that, I'd also recommend a book called Art & Fear.

My problem with how games intersect with these issues is that they give you an artificial sense of purpose or achievable goals that satisfy you while playing them, but never really make up for the lack of a sense of purpose you're experiencing IRL. I could go on about it at length, but if you're interested in it I'll just point you to Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory which has helped me resolve a lot of my issues with all of that.

Just like there's a solution to the letdown that is Destiny (PLAY DIABLO WITH FRIENDS!), there's a solution to this too. The simple fact is that Witcher 3 is so good you don't need to play other open-world games. I'm only ten hours in and a little bit further out from White Orchard but just from what I've read on forums (reviews speak for themselves) it seems like you can just play this game without having to even think about other games for the rest of the year. Am I wrong? (No, I'm not wrong about Destiny. It sucks and I haven't even tried it!)

My problem with the games isn't the length per se, is if the mission design can hold it's end of the bargain for as long as the game takes to beat.

I still get a kick of roaming around and exploring virtual worlds though.

It's weird, cause I don't want to play anything but open world games any longer.

PC mods in open world games make them a lot better.

So in the months since I posted this, I've managed to play ONE open-world game as others start to pile up around me.

I did play the Witcher for a couple of weeks and got up to the part where you're revisiting a bunch of people just before taking on the Isle of Mists quest. I may still try to complete the game, but I'm pretty satisfied with what I played so far and did almost every question mark and board mission in the Novograd area.

I totally skipped Arkham Knight. This sort of bothers me because I really enjoyed the first two games, but I also feel like I've gotten what I wanted out of those.

I bought MGSV and haven't touched it. I am a pretty big Metal Gear fan, so this surprises me, but I still haven't even played a minute of it.

I'm almost 100% sure I don't care about Assassin's Creed anymore, so I'm mostly ignoring Syndicate, but I said the same thing after III and still really liked Black Flag.

On top of all of this, Fallout IV is out next month. Luckily, I'm probably less interested in the ones coming up next year so I should have time for at least Metal Gear and Fallout at some point.

On the other side of things, I plowed through Until Dawn in a single night and really enjoyed playing Grow Home on PS+ and I've played a few strategy games on PC here and there and didn't experience the sense of dread every one of these open-world games have started to inspire.

I may be a bit of an idiot, but I bought The Witcher 3 + Season Pass on PSN without any real knowledge of the series, it was primarily off Danny O'Dwyer's hype and this board's that I bit. I played the game pretty regularly until I had one of my "come back to me" moments with Destiny and then Arkham Knight came out and it's been a steady drip of games I want to play since, and that was also around the time we learned patches were changing character movement, improving the menus, etc.

Sometime around the release of Rocket League I just decided since I'd bought two huge expansions for the game and CD Projekt Red seemed to be making major changes to how the game functioned with each patch anyway, I decided I'd save the whole experience for the end of the Season Pass' trickle and just hope and pray there'd be enough of a vacancy in my gaming desires to hunker down and get back to it. I probably plugged about 30 hours into the game prior to that, but I can't remember exactly where I was other than I'd been able to go to Skellige for a hot minute but kept doing side quests in Novigrad.

@nodima: My momentum in Witcher 3 took a nosedive juat as I got access to Skellige and none of the quests I did there were very memorable, but I'm glad I made it through that, because I loved the stuff at Kaer Mohren with the other Witchers.-------------------------------

I was thinking about this whole issue with big exploration-heavy games and I think the core of the problem is overexposure. I really loved these kinds of games when they were a rare treat. Playing 4 or 5 of these back to back in the same year is like only reading huge, 1500-page novels or binge-watching entire TV seasons without ever watching anything short & self-contained. It's exhausting.

Still haven't touched MGSV.

I spent about a half of a day last week making a character in Fallout IV, getting through the prologue and exploring around the vault are and Concord and so far I've been bored to tears. It's been everything I was worried it would be. I'm going to give it another try soon and try to at least get to Diamond City and see if it picks up but It'll take a lot for this game to win me over at this point.

I'm still kind of excited about Just Cause 3 and glad I played Witcher, but this year has just about killed my interest in ever playing any open-world games ever again. (I will play Cyberpunk no matter what though)