Have Open World Games Lost Their Appeal?

Here is a headline that’s been floating around since the announcement of the newest Assassin’s Creed entry, Assassin's Creed: Syndicate. Has Ubisoft’s formulaic, borderline mass produced open world games driven away all of the magic that used to feel so prevalent in games before it?

I vote no and there is a very simple reason why: quality.

People argue quality over quantity all the time. Do you pay $60 for a pair of shoes that might last you two years or do you throw a little more cash towards a pair that will last you several? In the real world being frugal doesn’t always mean taking the option that is cheapest upfront.

In video games the lines are a little more blurred than that. First off, there are industry standards when it comes to pricing and a AAA title is going to run you $60 at the least. But that price tag doesn’t always mean quality and quality means something a little different for every gamer out there.

A $60 world could get you something like Los Santos, a city truly brought to life in a little game called Grand Theft Auto V. Los Santos is easily the best true-to-life representation of a city we have in a game. On the flipside, $60 could also get you access toAssassin’s Creed Unity’s version of Paris, a visually and technically impressive city that feels equally devoid of life and personality as you dribble through one copy and paste asset to the next.

Therein lies the real problem with open world games as they exist now. From 2014 to 2015 we will have seen three Assassin’s Creed games, Far Cry 4, and The Crew. That’s five games from the same publisher that follows the same open world formula. That’s an awful lot of games that feel way too similar. By comparison, I’m really struggling to come up with other examples of open world games from different developers. We have GTA V, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor and…. Well, now I’m at a loss.

Ubisoft is able to put these games on an assembly line because they’ve gotten really damn good at quickly creating variables for x and y that tricks most people into thinking they’re getting a new experience every time you pop in a new game. That is, until you’ve climbed a tower to uncover more of the map for the hundredth time across three game franchises.

And even out of the small list of “other” games I mentioned earlier, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor -- a game that almost definitively won GOTY 2014 across many mediums -- is guilty of some of the same low effort tactics Ubisoft is. And I actually liked that game.

So, no, the problem is not open world games. The problem is the amount of low quality open world games. Walking down the street in Los Santos gives the player the idea that there is more happening in the world than your silly quests. People feel like they’ve got direction, traffic follows traffic rules (to an extent), environments are diverse and rich. Sure, there aren’t any towers to climb or camps full of bandits waiting to be slaughtered, but it feels much more alive. Things seem to have a purpose separate from the player.

Worlds built by Ubisoft feel static. Sure there are random events that happen, but they’re about as exciting and predictable as rain is back in the real world. I know that if I drive down a road in Far Cry 4 long enough there will undoubtedly be a convoy of bandits that are going to start shooting at me. Those camps only exist for me to liberate. Nothing feels like it exists for itself, it all feels like it exists for me to interact with or be completely forgotten.

At least Shadow of Mordor included the Nemesis System which helped create a much more lively world than it would have been with its exclusion. Bands of orcs led by their captains roamed around fighting each other and had a real impact on how the game might play out. The further you get into the game the more interactive the world felt.

Skyrim was a game I delved head first into and didn’t come up for air for months. It’s not that the world felt particularly alive so much as it was the amazing atmosphere and the amount of things to do. Sure, I could walk around as the Arch-Mage and still have people tell me to visit the College in Winterhold, but hey, there are mods for that. It was a world that felt unique and its inhabitants made damn sure I wasn’t special, even after saving the world.

The truth of the matter is that there are tons of games I could list that are dripping with atmospheric open worlds that do feel organic. They’re just so far and few between that cookie cutter worlds completely overtake them in sheer number and give us a false sense that we’ve simply had enough.

I personally still love a good open world game and am hopeful that The Witcher 3 can deliver on this front so gamers will have a sense of revitalization in the idea. Open world games aren’t growing stale, but the return on investment Ubisoft is getting reinforces the idea that those are the worlds we want even though we’re so very tired of them.

Serious generic open world games have gotten incredibly boring. I still like my open world milsims and GTA, but I'm starting to fatigue pretty hard

Why didn't ya just title it "I want to talk about the failings of Ubisoft's open world formula"? Well, I know why you didn't, it's because there's a character limit, but some shortened, snarkier title would have worked just as well.

And Ubisoft's open world formula isn't actually a bad one, it's just one that we see in every single one of their open world games and one that isn't aging well at least partly as a result. I'm pretty sure that, to some degree, every open world game that wants to be successful can be boiled down to "go to this location and do this" - Ubisoft's formula has just been used so many times that the player almost immediately realizes that all he's doing is going to a location and performing some action as directed. From what I've heard about The Witcher 3, the biggest difference is that CDPR builds a context around all of that stuff. So does GTA V.

Dragon Age Inquisition is probably the worst offender of "go here do this" in recent memory. That doesn't necessarily bother me - that game is fantastic for podcasts - but you didn't bring it up much at all.

Here is a headline that’s been floating around since the announcement of the newest Assassin’s Creed entry, Assassin's Creed: Syndicate. Has Ubisoft’s formulaic, borderline mass produced open world games driven away all of the magic that used to feel so prevalent in games before it?

Definitely not. People need to understand the difference between a good OWG and a bad one. Good OWGs are ones that create worlds filled with freedom and curiosity. The realms in them are living, breathing places full of unique content that makes you want to continue exploring them and reward you for doing so (for example,Skyrim and GTA V.)

Bad OWGs, on the other hand, just create an illusion. The content is usually repetitive and limited, and although you may enjoy running around for the first few hours, you quickly start spotting holes and grinding (AC I'm looking at you.)

Although Ubisoft has been creating a lot of bad OWG recently, I wouldn't call the market over saturated and OWGs that are done properly will probably never die out (look at all of Wild Hunt's reviews.)

@believer258: Hah, I think started out wanting to talk more about other open world games and how they were successful where Ubisoft failed but just sort of ended up ranting about them instead.

The very first time I stepped into Assassin's Creed I enjoyed how open it was, and I even got caught up in the world of Far Cry 2 -- aimlessly driving around just to find fights. My main beef is that these games launched several years ago and Ubisoft has done very little to breath more life into them. And, like you say, we see so many iterations of the same formula so often that it's easy to become disillusioned into believing there is nothing left to gain from having a game set in an open world environment.

I believe that context is the key difference and actually pushes the player into believing there is reason for the world to exist outside of being a sandbox for raining down death and destruction on its inhabitants when we get bored tracking down the 100th chest or scenic view.

I think most games i've played on my Xbox: One have been open world games, and due to this i'm skipping Witcher 3 for a while. I'm not in the mood for another 50+ hour open world game.

I like open world games, but they need to be incredible to just be in (GTA5, Assassins Creed), or small enough that it isn't a hassle to get around (Shadow of Mordor, Dead Rising 5) or make the traversal fun (Sunset Overdrive).

I really liked Dragon Age: Inquisition but the world was huge, i ended the game not even going to like 4 major areas, and the areas i did go to weren't fully explored. Playing though FarCry 4 right now and zooming out to see 40+ outpost or radio towers!! it's too big!! The world is cool, but it's not like GTA 5 where it's fun to drive around and see the detail they've put into every location, at least for me.

I don't know that they lost their appeal - they just became like most every other genre.

You know, common.

Ubisoft didn't drive it away. It just lost appeal on it's own. Big open worlds are almost a negative in my book at this point.

I couldn't agree more.

Shadow of Mordor was the last open world game I played, and I played it in such small chunks that it never really bothered me. I can definitely see how spending large swathes of time going from one open world environment to the next could weigh on someone's patience with games like that, though.

I haven't had a chance to play DA:I yet, but after reading all of the reviews and comments it seems like I probably won't ever get around it for the same reason you'll be skipping TW3 for a while.

I think a lot of developers just don't know what to do with open worlds. There's always going to be that one big field or block of buildings with nothing going on, and that's not fun to traverse. That's when it stops being a world and becomes a backdrop for getting from point A to point B.

Sunset Overdrive has a lot of copy/paste elements, but the way you get around the world is engaging (as opposed to Assassin's Creed where you just hold a button down). You actually have to, y'know, actually play a game to get around the city.

The other element is rewarding exploration. Ubisoft does this with a bunch of worthless trinkets already marked on your minimap. Something like Skyrim gives you quests, lore, loot you can actually use, and dungeons to explore. While I have a lot of criticisms about how well they actually execute a lot of that stuff, it's what I want out of an open world game.

Just having a big world isn't enough anymore.

I feel like for many years now gamers on forums have equated open world with higher quality. I have often read what might as well have been...

"Imagine *insert game" but OPEN WORLD."

"Oh damn, that sounds orgasmically next-gen!!"

...which developers have obviously cottoned on to. There are a few open world games I really love. I can always dig deep into an Elder Scrolls game for example. But I have recently come to the realization that what most open world stuff comes down to is spending way more time walking around getting to the game rather than playing the game. It's obvious that the metric devs are tackling is maximum amount of hours they can say a game takes to beat. That's related to another set of lowest common denominator style of internet forum comments right there.

@brendan: A huge issue I see with this is that gamers also reinforce these ideas through massive threads on sites like NeoGAF. The most immediate example was the video for TW3 that popped up and showed that it took the player 35 minutes to get across the world. One poster immediately chimed in that it took over 6 hours to traverse Los Santos on foot. Sort of an apples to oranges comparison due to the way the video actually traversed the game.

There are plenty of players who just want bigger worlds even though content is more sparse or at the expense of your mini-map being totally drown in "points of interest" that are rather pointless. I'd personally rather play through a more consolidated experience, but there is an argument to be made around how much content has been chugged out for Skyrim and how much value that brought players, too.

Well said.

I agree with your blog point @grtkbrandon, in that Open World games are great... just people are tired of Assassin's Crap 7: Let's do the same shit again!. I am really shocked personally that people still buy Assassin's Creed. I haven't bought one since AC2 except for Black Flag and that was because it actually mixed up the formula for once and it wasn't just running along a roof to tick tac toe combat and you weren't some ass jack Assassin following a kiddy pool depth cult.

We just need less Assassin's Creed and more Skyrim/GTA. I even dug Dying Light despite the fact that it did reuse a lot of resources too just because the world was interesting enough and the gameplay was fun and could get reasonably varied with it's parkour elements and fairly smart/fast higher end zombies. We just need to mix it up instead of following the same tired boring formula.

They've been overused for sure. But a good open world is still a wonderful thing.

With games like the Witcher 3, Xenoblade Chronicles, Zelda, No Man's Sky, MGS5, Just Cause 3 on the way, I'm pretty sure we'll have an OK few years with them. I'm even excited for the next Assassin's Creed tbh. London looks awesome.

I still love an open world, just not when it's absolutely saturated with extremely low quality content for its own sake. Open World has somehow become the KFC Bargain Bucket of gaming.

Ubisoft's open worlds have lost a good deal of their appeal because it's the same shit across multiple games and series at this point. This shouldn't affect the appeal of open worlds in other games, with some notably great examples of late like GTA V, Forza Horizon 2, and (reportedly) The Witcher III soon.

Don't forget Watch_Dogs! I don't think open world games are dead, but I think that they have been varying in quality for a long time. The Witcher III is out next week and hopefully Fallout 4 will be released this year. Those are 2 games that will hopefully raise the bar again for open world games.

Good write up!

I agree with you. The problem is not open worlds, but just formulaic by the numbers open worlds. Like Ubisoft using the same damn mechanics in their open worlds in like every single game they make.

When I see a Rockstar open world and get blown the fuck away every time, hard to say that it doesn't work.

Hoping Witcher 3 does well with it.

Boom. Open World doesn't immediately make a game good/back or anything.. it's just another part of a game.. now, what the game does with the open world is important. That's why I was so disappointed with GTA5 because it was more of just a sandbox than content. On PC this is great because of the modding, but on consoles it became boring fast.

Open World no longer means large great game, it means you better bring you A-game innovations to the table.

Watch Dogs, Far Cry 4, DA:I, GTA 5 and Unity the problem I have is how long they are, alot of fetch quests in 10hrs with an interesting world great but 30, 50 or even 100hrs later gets really boring. Most people don't finish games despite the spiralling dev cost they keep making 30+ hour games, shorter games with more replayability would save us time and them money.

edit: grammer

Nice writeup!

and I agree Open World games themselves are still pretty great and potential to be even better than we've seen, but hyper annualized Franchises like Assassin's Creed will make anything feel stale.

In games where they make sense or when made by the right developer, they're fine. Ubisoft has driven its particular brand of open world into the ground, and as collateral damage, anything that feels remotely close to it now also feels dull. But in games like GTA, Elder Scrolls, or Zelda, it's still fine because they are much more sporadic with releases and the open worlds they have in them feel like they have a purpose.

No.

I liked GTAV for the most part. It was an alright game. What I hated about it though was the world was too big. This is a problem I noticed with a lot of open world games. They are too big. They are annoying to get around. They are too wide open or the cities are too dense and I never actually learn my way around. The fact that I never become familiar with things is what eventually robs me of any sense of exploration. I no longer can tell if something is new or if I have seen something before. It all bleeds together to form this place that have no connection with and can never naturally gain a sense of direction. Instead have to follow way points and spend all my time looking at a minimap.

How about we scale down our open worlds and trim out some of that empty space that exists just so the game can be big. A big world isn't impressive anymore. It only serves to make travel more time consuming and tedious. Filling your massive world with massive amounts of content isn't impressive or interesting if most that content is repetitive filler. Which is something that is realistically bound to happen once your world gets to large and you have to fill it with as much crap as possible so that it doesn't feel empty, but you don't have the time or resources to make all those things new and unique. So what we get is a bunch of race missions scattered all over the city. Quality over quantity.

If I ever play another game that makes me climb a stupid fucking tower to reveal part of the world map I am going to immediately turn the game off and take it back to the store. Which means what I am really saying is I'm never playing another open world game from Ubisoft ever again.