Since Christmastime, I've had the chance to catch up on some of the big games from last year.  Of course, there's Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, an open-world game set in Rome.  Time to time I also played Just Cause 2, an open-world game set in Southeast Asia in the present day.  And finally I finished with Red Dead Redemption, an open-world game set in the wild west. 
 
It's hard to criticize these games for "ripping off" one another (or at least ripping off of what Grand Theft Auto III did a decade ago), since despite their open-world-ness, they're all actually quite different.  Assassin's Creed is all about city building and stealth, RDR is about exploring vast deserts of the southern US, and in Just Cause, you blow things up.  Yet despite the drastic difference in gameplay styles, art styles, and general design, I still felt a constant feeling of deja vu going through each of these games one after the other.  Go to the dot on the map, talk to the guy.  Go somewhere else.  Kill somebody.  Repeat.   But they're all well-designed games with various objectives, great sense of progress and motivation for the player, and intriguing stories (Just Cause has a stupid story, that doesn't make it any less fun). 
 
So why am I so bothered by this?  It would be so much less fulfilling to play a bland shooter where you constantly run down hallways shooting guys, following a linear path until you get to the ending, with nothing else to find except to do it all again on a harder difficulty.  Open-world games tend to offer a great world to explore, more of a playground than a strict "game".  But it's weird to complain about a dearth of this kind of game, because it's hardly the kind of thing a small developer would be able to crank out to capitalize on a fad.  Big game worlds are hard to make, and even reusing art assets from Assassin's Creed II, or running the game off of GTAIV's engine is still troublesome.  Then again, it's much easier to make the game a second time around.  Fallout: New Vegas also falls into the category, and it's superficially identical to Fallout 3. 
 
It's less that I want open-world games to stop, and more that they should be spaced out a bit.  Everyone wants to make that next big hit video game, and an impressive looking world is a great way to get a bunch of Game of the Year nominations.  But even though Red Dead Redemption looked beautiful, had a great storyline, and is the first wild west game to impress people, it still just felt like I was playing Grand Theft Horse.  I found myself a lot more impressed with Super Meat Boy, or even Heavy Rain, as flawed as it was.  They gave me experiences I didn't know I wanted from games, while RDR just made me feel dull at times.  
 
In summary, smaller = better.  Find a way to innovate other than sticking GTA in the future.  Or the caveman age.  Though I might change my mind for an open-world Pokemon game...