Anyone else have Open World Fatigue?

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It is important to be specific, what we dislike in open world games. Since not all are the same.
Can dislike bleak quest "go kill 16 ogres" without any backstory, and withour twist or emotional layer.
Can dislike boring gameplay, dumb combat, very easy combat. Not versalite gameplay.
Can dislike amount of time we need to consume on traveling, crafting, collecting herbs.
Can dislike lack of design fidelity. Last gen graphic. No interesting location design. Repeating monsters.
Can dislike lack of evolution, next game being same as another. Another open world survival zombie game.

On the other side there are cool aspect:
We can reuse same location and characters for many quests.
We can look at location from far and close up.
In addition to open world goodness, we can add well writen main quest, and make collecting question marks optional.

Also Open World may mean that there is hub where we travel alot, and some mission locations which are part of open world but we visit it only once.

Sometimes even mission games like Dishonored have many paths to success in each level.
The thing with open world is that now it is possible, since there is enought memory to load whole map. (or technology to load it in dynamic way)
 
Another thing I would prefer on open worlds is a living and dynamic world where things develop or change over time and by that I don't mean some main quest progressing.

It doesn't have to be terribly complex as it usually involves lots of resources and time as you add things - it can be relatively simple, such as the civil war mod from Skyrim: Factions eventually start fighting over certain camps and territories no matter what you do. That means the world around you actively changes simply over time and you can intervene ... or not.

Things like this would be nice, different actors changing areas over time and gaining or losing ground, without necessarily changing major areas too much. If done right, it will add to the open world and make it seem more dynamic instead of locations being mostly static.
 
I like open world games, but I feel a lot of the larger game companies are moving away from intense story-telling experiences to cash in on it. I hope we see more of a variety soon.
 
metalmaniac21;n8983150 said:
I don't, since there are not much of a good open-world games, it's also pretty easy to filter out trash stuff by not playing anything ubisoft.

except Beyond Good and Evil 2
 
Open Worlds are hit or miss. I thought TW3 was a good open world, as well as GTA5. Ghost Recon Wildlands, not so much. GRW had an enormous map that was gorgeous, but it lacked personality and that "lived in" feel. With CP 2077 being in a megalopolis, there can be a great deal of personality, verticality, and that "lived in" feeling that I referenced. I don't think CDPR will disappoint.
 
WRFinger;n8987390 said:
I thought TW3 was a good open world, as well as GTA5.

Just thinking about the open world, what made it good in GTA 5 or TW3? I'm genuinely curious, people often say this or that game has "good open world" and yet all I saw was pretty but rather dull landscapes to traverse in all of which turned into a repetitive timesink quite fast as you got familiar with the map.
 
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No. However, "open world" can be done well, or relatively poorly, and it can certainly be done better than it ever has been done, so far.

Usually, what people dislike when they talk about this is unnecessary and tedious travel, simply to advance their current goal; I like being able to set out on foot and head for a distant landmark, and find that I eventually get there, potentially discovering new things along the way, but when I don't want to take in the scenery, it's nice to be able to just "travel" and arrive, so that I can get on with what I want. Some sandbox games have made the mistake of forcing players to basically walk everywhere, like some sort of incredibly rich and powerful hobo. Others, even when they avoid this, still make travel take entirely too much PLAYER time, for no real benefit. In practice, this is not a hard problem to solve, by simply allowing players to travel from a known location to another known location, with some in-game time passing, and a "random encounter" chance, if it really must.

Another failing in a lot of the implementations of "open world" and "sandbox" games is there is just too little in the world. This is understandable, filling it out properly takes development time that is not spent on other aspects of the game, which they consider more important. However, you cannot simultaneously sell your title on its "open world" nature and also relegate it to an afterthought in the development.

Fallout 4 seems to be a whipping boy for this, and not without reason; it's a great game, and it is certainly "open world" and "sandbox", in that you can basically walk to wherever you want, if you really want to, and you can completely ignore all of the "quested" story, too (side-plots included). You can even, if you are canny, avoid combat encounters along the way, and simply turn it into a walking simulator. However, aside from the odd abandoned building, with old world relics, there is largely nothing out there, anyway. For the Fallout universe, this is somewhat defensible, since it's a post-nuclear-holocaust world, and logically there should probably be even fewer things and people to run into in the wilds, actually. Nevertheless, as a model to aspire to, it's probably a poor choice, especially for a game like, for example, Cyberpunk 2077, where we're talking about a vibrant, living, densely populated, industrialized and highly evolved location in a setting that teems with people who cannot afford proper housing, and where real estate is valuable and fiercely guarded/disputed.

Another thing that is missing from Fallout 4, and would be critical, in my opinion, to a realistic open world version of Cyberpunk, is independent actors. In Fallout 4 nobody seems to really do much on their own, aside from the Raiders (who just attack you, and later your settlements, which is logical, but hardly impressive), but in a realistic, well-populated world, people should go about their business regardless of what your character is doing, unless you directly interact with or disrupt them. At 8 in the morning, people should be well on their commutes, from suburbs to wherever they have to physically be that, day, bums should be finding places to hide from the corp-cops, said cops should be changing shifts and the dayshift coming on, patrolling the streets to make sure good corporate citizens are going about their business in a safe, and orderly manner, etc, etc. Equally, by 11 at night, the streets should be filled with people out for a good time, street criminals should be plying their trades, the nightshift cops should out and about running down the usual suspects and harassing the scum, and so on. Fallout 4 never really had anything like this, to make it feel like a real living world, and in many ways that wasn't too bad, because the whole setup was that it was basically a broken world, and you were ultimately going to make big changes as you popped out of your vault on a crusade to set things right (however you chose to do so).

For me, if CyberPunk 2077 wants to work, this last part is more important even than being open world, but if it does do open world, it absolutely must carry this through into all of the open world; I am not saying that every square inch must be filled with incredible NPCs waiting to give me sidequests, although every square inch should be doing something - even if it's just a corporate wasteland, where they store their trash - and it's not enough to just have a main "hub" which is very detailed and than a bleak but pretty nothingness everywhere else. That would destroy immersion for me, because it makes no sense, and it would be a wasted opportunity.

In many ways, I am echoing what has already been said, in that all of the game world needs to have gameplay and ambiance appropriate to the game mood, not simply be a few spots where the game happens, and then wilderness, whether wild or urban, where nothing happens, excepts perhaps repeating spawns of enemies.
 
Ubisoft should be blamed for the open world "fatigue" if that's a thing. It's not the world, it's game design. Bethesda vanilla worlds are boring but modding made them great. GTA and Saints Row both made good use of the open world design, granted neither studios has made anything really new in ages. Nintendo also just took open world to a new level with Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
 
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