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.
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