A reader is frustrated with overlong open world games and worries that new titles like Dying Light 2 are becoming ruined by bloat.
There’s no doubt that when done right open world games offer an immersive, absorbing, and exhilarating experience. But most just don’t know when to stop, to the detriment of those making the games and those playing them.
The genre started to collapse under its own weight when the obsessive ‘bigger is better’ trend started over a decade ago, and the perception that a new sandbox game had to be about 50 times bigger than Skyrim to be considered worthy of the open world connoisseur’s attention.
This ultimately futile race, for the largest world, might have been won by Techland, who proudly claimed their upcoming Dying Light 2 will take 500 hours to complete, before quickly backtracking after realising it’s a very sad race, not worth winning.
The main story will apparently take around 20 hours – but allowing you to take the quickest route through the bloat creates its own problems.
If you burn through the main quests, ignoring all side content, this leaves niggling doubts that you are missing out on something. Quite often some of the best moments are hidden somewhere in the side missions and that can needlessly add on a pile of extra hours. Eventually, fatigue and resentment sets in.
The irony is that the bigger the world, the more restrictive it becomes.
Looking back, does anyone seriously have the time or the will to replay Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2 or any other bloated, overblown mess from start to finish? With the same missions and landscapes copied and pasted countless times to the point of tedium, and maps saturated with hundreds of icons constantly taking you out of the immersion, the apparent freedom these games offer turns into the realisation that you are actually working boring, unpaid full-time admin jobs.
And look at the way staff have suffered making these type of games. Years of never-ending shifts, being treated like slaves on something that would have lost nothing and gained everything by cutting it down to a tighter, more refined and superior experience.
When Grand Theft Auto 3 ushered in the sandbox area 20 years ago many gamers were young and releases were still few and far between. Players were mesmerised as gaming had realised the open world dream, but now there is more choice and value than ever before. An open world with the same formula, repeated to nauseam, will prevent you from playing far better, innovative, and shorter alternatives.
That’s not to say abandon the concept completely. It just requires discipline and an understanding that many gamers have families, actual full-time jobs in the real world, and other commitments. In other words, a bit of common sense.
Spider-Man on PlayStation 4, accused of stealing attributes from numerous other games, actually sets a good model on how to do an open world well. Despite being set in a huge sandbox city with numerous side content, it’s an illusion because the world is nowhere near as head-crushingly big as it first seems and has a manageable playthrough time of about 15 hours, with follow up Miles Morales benefitting from an even shorter length. This approach was once wrongly perceived as a weakness, but it’s very much a strength.
Insomniac’s Spider-Man titles allow you to relish the best things about the open world experience without being bogged down. The fact that its world is such an effortless joy to traverse that you’ll often avoid using fast travel – which has to be used in most other similar titles to avoid boring journeys on horseback – speaks volumes in terms of the game’s world and the gameplay mechanics within it.
Released in the same year, The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild did some genuinely amazing things. It could well be the most ambitious game in the series, but Link’s Awakening at 12 hours long is the one I’ll be going back to.
Many, of course, will have a completely different view and good luck to them, but ask yourself this: would you want the next The Legend Of Zelda game to be even bigger than the already gargantuan, Truman Show-style size of Breath Of The Wild? Or would you prefer it to be shorter with more dungeons, where most of the imagination takes place?
By reader David
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