[ARTICLE] Do Open Worlds Do More Harm Than Good?

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Thought this article was worth a share. It's not strictly about The Witcher 3, but TW3 is one of the main talking points.


The issue at the heart of the article is whether open-world level design is worth the amount of effort that goes into it. The author makes the point that even The Witcher 3 and Metal Gear Solid V - two of the best open-world games to come out in recent years - are unable to escape repetitive gameplay elements.

I don't agree with everything he says. I myself am used to playing boring, repetitive games. The average amount of time I put into a game that I play past 10 hours is probably somewhere around 80 hours. So the repetitive elements in TW3 and MGSV are of no concern to me. But I know quite a few people who are tired of open-world level design. So I thought the article was discussion worthy.

So what do you think? Is TW3's open-world top notch? Or is it too big for it's own good? Should it be half the size without all the generic side content, like monster lairs and guarded treasures?

I think that open world games are either fantastic, as in 'The Witcher 3', or bad, as in 'Dragon Age: Inquisition'. There really is not much middle ground. As long as there is a good variety of things to do, I adore open world games and I always will. TW3 nails it in my opinion. Yeah, there are some repetitive elements, can't argue that, but there is so much good. The side content in TW3 is fantastic. The monster contracts are almost all very, very good, and the other side quests such as the things you do for the Baron, or Keira, or Triss, or Dandelion are all so very well done, filled with so many great choices and consequences.

On the other hand, if your game is going to be filled with endless MMO style fetch quests, you should probably stay away from making open worlds in the future.
 
if there is always something to do, open worlds are wesome
but if there is an end to the quests, activities, then, i don't think it'll be interesting or fun to be there when there is nothing to do
 
The thing I found that Bethesda got absolutely right in Skyrim were the random encounters while exploring. If TW3 had that feature exploration wouldn't get so repetitive. One minute you're leaving a dungeon to sell your loot the next you get ambushed by vampires posing as Vigilants or Stendarr. Or you finish killing a dragon only to run into a hunter that transforms into a werewolf and attacks. Or you're traveling from point a to b and you bump into a fellow NPC that informs you about one of the many sidequests in the world. Skyrim had many faults, but random encounters wasn't one of them. That is one of the few things that made Skyrim alive.

Hopefully we'll get this in patches or DLC/expansions. Doubt it, but doesn't hurt to dream.
 

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The thing I found that Bethesda got absolutely right in Skyrim were the random encounters while exploring. If TW3 had that feature exploration wouldn't get so repetitive. One minute you're leaving a dungeon to sell your loot the next you get ambushed by vampires posing as Vigilants or Stendarr. Or you finish killing a dragon only to run into a hunter that transforms into a werewolf and attacks. Or you're traveling from point a to b and you bump into a fellow NPC that informs you about one of the many sidequests in the world. Skyrim had many faults, but random encounters wasn't one of them. That is one of the few things that made Skyrim alive.

Hopefully we'll get this in patches or DLC/expansions. Doubt it, but doesn't hurt to dream.

This might be too deep for some, but the act of asking for such things reduces their power. The mind grasps for the desire for more random experiences, and that changes what the mind perceives as random. It's a bit like asking: "Please pleasantly deceive me. I'll tell you whether it worked. If it didn't, you gotta do better."
Control vs. letting be
 
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This might be too deep for some, but the act of asking for such things reduces their power. The mind grasps for the desire for more random experiences, and that changes what the mind perceives as random. It's a bit like asking: "Please pleasantly deceive me. I'll tell you whether it worked. If it didn't, you gotta do better."
Control vs. letting be

I understand what you're saying, but nonetheless it worked in Skyrim. Why won't it work in TW3 or future Witcher titles? It doesn't require a mastery of subtlety to make this work. It's basically taking the question marked points of interest which are already in game and making them proactive rather than stationary/static and attaching the possibility of starting a sidequest from a random encounter organically rather than always going up to the old notice board.

Edit: And to address your point directly. If there's a feature I like why shouldn't I nudge CDPR about it? If I don't chances of it not making it in is less than if I do regardless of whether or not it "ruins the surprise". I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than not. And to clarify I was asking for random encounters in general and only cited examples from BGS. I wasn't asking for those encounters exactly.
 
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I don't agree with the author at all. TW3 is a beautifully crafted game and brilliantly executed. Geralt is the perfect protagonist for an open world because of his profession as a witcher which makes sense that he would be going from place to place picking up jobs while searching for Ciri. The main plot is focused and the side quests, side side quests, question marks, bandit camps all work and fit in the world and within the main story. Nothing seems repetitive to me, so far on my 3rd playthough and still enjoying the game. I think if any developer is going to do an open world rpg they should look to this game as a template. So to answer your question yes, for me in this game all the effort, the immense amount of work and detail they brought into this game was well worth it. The expressions, the humor, the dialog, the finishing moves, cut scenes, world, the animals, characters, the architecture, the combat, the story, etc. so amazing so beautiful.
 
You read my mind

bruh I was just thinking that they should do that or something like add more creature to the wild. Like chorts, leshens and werewolves other than 1time quest stuff. They should make it so you can go out and set traps for specific monsters like lures (that actually work). After all he's a monster hunter.
 
Hi guys to me the witcher 3 open world dynamic just works and I have played allot of open world games and I think it is save to say that this will be the future of gaming.

What I love about the witcher 3's open world is that it's pretty immersive and believable,when I play the game it feels like you are actually in this big open world alive with possibilities.I thank the graphics for that as well cause everything from the sunsets to the weather system in the game nails it for me.I am overwhelmed at everything there is to see and do and this is what makes the game fun for me,sure games like GTA5's open world feels even more realistic but then again they have had a few years to work out the kinks in how to make the open world more interactive.I think the witcher 3 with it's open world has everything I want and more from a RPG at this stage,definitely sets the benchmark for other game developers to follow.

Look at watch dogs horrible open world dynamic felt extremely rushed and poorly thought out,traversing in the game with a car handling with no realism just made the game bad for me.The witcher 3 on the other hand has a horse you can traverse the world with which feels more realistic and you actually want to see the world instead of just rushing quests or missions.Well done CDRP I truly think they nailed this game.
 
I don't agree with the author at all. TW3 is a beautifully crafted game and brilliantly executed. Geralt is the perfect protagonist for an open world because of his profession as a witcher which makes sense that he would be going from place to place picking up jobs while searching for Ciri. The main plot is focused and the side quests, side side quests, question marks, bandit camps all work and fit in the world and within the main story. Nothing seems repetitive to me, so far on my 3rd playthough and still enjoying the game. I think if any developer is going to do an open world rpg they should look to this game as a template. So to answer your question yes, for me in this game all the effort, the immense amount of work and detail they brought into this game was well worth it. The expressions, the humor, the dialog, the finishing moves, cut scenes, world, the animals, characters, the architecture, the combat, the story, etc. so amazing so beautiful.

The question marks in the skellige sea feels repetitive. With just a few tiny changes they could make those way more fun. Add some deep-sea caves and more sunken ships. Killing those screaming sirens gets old. It was ok on my first play-through, but now Im on my 5th
 
The thing I found that Bethesda got absolutely right in Skyrim were the random encounters while exploring. If TW3 had that feature exploration wouldn't get so repetitive. One minute you're leaving a dungeon to sell your loot the next you get ambushed by vampires posing as Vigilants or Stendarr. Or you finish killing a dragon only to run into a hunter that transforms into a werewolf and attacks. Or you're traveling from point a to b and you bump into a fellow NPC that informs you about one of the many sidequests in the world. Skyrim had many faults, but random encounters wasn't one of them. That is one of the few things that made Skyrim alive.

Hopefully we'll get this in patches or DLC/expansions. Doubt it, but doesn't hurt to dream.

To be fair, the random encounter system is predictable if you study the game a lot. It is basically.. .chances... only.

The STALKER's A-Life system may assault RAM and CPU's but a modified version of it would be a FAR superior option to the way Bethesda handles it.
 
I agree with EVERYTHING Erik Kain says. I intended to write a really long ass post about this very topic about two weeks after I finished the game...maybe I still will.
 
The thing I found that Bethesda got absolutely right in Skyrim were the random encounters while exploring. If TW3 had that feature exploration wouldn't get so repetitive. One minute you're leaving a dungeon to sell your loot the next you get ambushed by vampires posing as Vigilants or Stendarr. Or you finish killing a dragon only to run into a hunter that transforms into a werewolf and attacks. Or you're traveling from point a to b and you bump into a fellow NPC that informs you about one of the many sidequests in the world. Skyrim had many faults, but random encounters wasn't one of them. That is one of the few things that made Skyrim alive.

Hopefully we'll get this in patches or DLC/expansions. Doubt it, but doesn't hurt to dream.
God, No. It's what makes the game feels soulless and without any sense of character. It's interesting at first, but when you rescue the SAME GUY who happens to be captured, freed, captured, freed...hundred times over by the Thalmor/Imperials, you realize how everything in the game is done by a predetermined formula or generated by self repeating algorythm. It's how a robot would design a video game.
No, what this game needs is the exact opposite...instead of that pointless filler like Smuggler caches in Skellige, I would rather have only five well presented unique treasure hunts, where Geralt, through quest or dialogue, learns of approx location of it, but has to discover it himself. Sort of like "Goonies" or "Key in the Mountain" mini quest where you have to find it through riddles and rely on your own environmental awareness, giving the player exactly the feeling of being '"inside" the world. Add some player dialogue and more lore about Skellige through it, as well.
Add more content into existing world, by all means, but always focus on quality, characterization or connection with existing quests and npc's, use it as tool for lore exposition...that is exactly what many open world games always fail to do.
Otherwise it's filler and only contributes by giving a sense of tedium to the game. Scale the size of the world exactly to the size of the quality content you are able to fill it with.
Played Inquisition, anyone?
 
The question marks in the skellige sea feels repetitive. With just a few tiny changes they could make those way more fun. Add some deep-sea caves and more sunken ships. Killing those screaming sirens gets old. It was ok on my first play-through, but now Im on my 5th
Deep sea caves and more sunken ships does sound fun. I can see with so many sirens it would get old, but I guess I like them. The way they hang on the boat if you let them, shooting them with the crossbow is very entertaining and sometimes I make a game out of attempting to avoid them while looting. And 5th - gosh that's great- I'll get there in time!
 
Deep sea caves and more sunken ships does sound fun. I can see with so many sirens it would get old, but I guess I like them. The way they hang on the boat if you let them, shooting them with the crossbow is very entertaining and sometimes I make a game out of attempting to avoid them while looting. And 5th - gosh that's great- I'll get there in time!

Yeah a few of those are ok. The problem is that there's WAY too many sirens in the game. Doesnt even need to be sirens/drowners in a deep-sea cave. Just make it really deep and with air-pockets that you must find to be able to survive.
 
God, No. It's what makes the game feels soulless and without any sense of character. It's interesting at first, but when you rescue the SAME GUY who happens to be captured, freed, captured, freed...hundred times over by the Thalmor/Imperials, you realize how everything in the game is done by a predetermined formula or generated by self repeating algorythm. It's how a robot would design a video game.
No, what this game needs is the exact opposite...instead of that pointless filler like Smuggler caches in Skellige, I would rather have only five well presented unique treasure hunts, where Geralt, through quest or dialogue, learns of approx location of it, but has to discover it himself. Sort of like "Goonies" or "Key in the Mountain" mini quest where you have to find it through riddles and rely on your own environmental awareness, giving the player exactly the feeling of being '"inside" the world. Add some player dialogue and more lore about Skellige through it, as well.
Add more content into existing world, by all means, but always focus on quality, characterization or connection with existing quests and npc's, use it as tool for lore exposition...that is exactly what many open world games always fail to do.
Otherwise it's filler and only contributes by giving a sense of tedium to the game. Scale the size of the world exactly to the size of the quality content you are able to fill it with.
Played Inquisition, anyone?

To answer Your last question...No, not until I can get it DRM free without pirating it....

I have to agree on the point that having to help that bandit hide from his pursuer for the seventh time in the same play through does get kind of...Silly, and by silly I mean John Cleese's goofy gait skit, and not Alan Rickman silly...

But it could easily be controlled by adjusting the frequency of events, but yeah, Skyrim is an enormous undertaken indeed, so they had to have something in which the radiant AI could base itself, and that was by and large, random events...I'm curious on how DAI sucked in comparison to other open-worlds?
 
In pretty much everything, except the "beauty" part. Lacked immersion, atmosphere, good exploration, unique quests, etc.
Problem with open world games isn't the concept...it's how pointlessly "bloated" many of them are ( I'm looking at you Phantom Pain). And the larger they are, the more narrative suffers.
That's what I love about Gothic II...it had perfect size for an open world game and...Khorinis>All the cities in Gothic III and entire Risen series put together.
 
Hey folks! What do you think about GTA V open world? Been playing it lately and it really grabbed me because of how unpretencious that game is and yet it has some of the greatest attention to detail ever.


For instance there were a bunch of ads glued to the post at some baclyard - not a great example but I was amazed nonetheless. Some other great examples (to me at least) include shooting a driver in the head makes him hit the car horn with his head; shooting the tires makes the car abruptly change its direction.


Yet the game has no illusions about itself, there are a bunch of old GTA related thingies, those yellow circles marjing the spot where you need to be to trigger the cutscene. The cars can take extreme beating and a lot of gunfire to blow up (in Mafia 2 you could just blow it up by shooting at the gas tank).


Basically the game does not try to play the "immersion" card but I can say this - it feels more real just to hop in your car and go around the whole city in GTA V (which is a true open world opposed to TW3) than it does going around the world in TW3 which is basically 5 locations spliced together with loading screens (not a true open world).
 
Hey folks! What do you think about GTA V open world? Been playing it lately and it really grabbed me because of how unpretencious that game is and yet it has some of the greatest attention to detail ever.
Basically the game does not try to play the "immersion" card but I can say this - it feels more real just to hop in your car and go around the whole city in GTA V (which is a true open world opposed to TW3) than it does going around the world in TW3 which is basically 5 locations spliced together with loading screens (not a true open world).

I really like GTAV's open world, although I consider Witcher 3 at least on par with it. (In fact, I just named my two favorite games of the year.) They both have amazing details. Naming some examples from W3: different furniture arrangements in poor/middle/rich houses; the surreal battlefields; at least four types of beggars in Novigrad etc. Also, I never considered Witcher 3's open world "not true," since one region in it is larger than Skyrim. Besides, Witcher 3's story requires it to span over several regions that, based on a predetermined geography, could not possibly have been connected in one, seamless map.

In response to the article, there is a huge function of open world that is ignored: realness. To name a comparison, in Skyrim, Whiterun is surrounded by few scattered, small farms, then the landscape immediately delves into dungeons upon dungeons. There is no way that amount of farmland could have supported the population of Whiterun. In W3, when I ride along expansive wheat fields around Novigrad or large forests in Skellige, I am a lot more convinced that I AM in a real, living land, with a believable geography and realistic production cycle. Now Witcher 2 does not have open world yet is realistic at the same time, but W2 has to be limited in its geographical or time setting to maintain that.

Of course, this is part of the age-old reality vs. fun debate, but open world is not to be blamed - it simply provides those like me who heavily lean toward the reality side of the balance with some much-needed immersion. For those who prefer fast-paced adventure, there are sign posts. As long as the parts that are supposed to be fun remain fun, and open world is not shoved down our throats, open world itself is only a plus.

When I think about the bad open world or semi-open world games (I'm thinking of AC3, AC:U and DA:I), I believe the problem with them is not that they have open worlds, but that their devs thought open world excuses bad story/character/writing. There may once be a time when the sheer fact of having an open world is so amazing that it shields other flaws, but that time is quickly passing. With games like W3 setting the bar high(-er than most other games, that is), open world may become just a part of normal game-making, and hopefully, good writing/story/character development will return as what makes a game truly great.
 
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