Flaws on modern open world games

[Lightspeaker]

My major issue is basically what a lot of people above have said. They have absolutely GOT to stop just putting 'stuff' in the games for the sake of filling space. And I don't mean sidequests...I mean collectables.


I loved Skyrim because I could just wander about and sometimes find cool little things spread out all over the place. I'd often deliberately walk between towns I'd already visited but forging through the forests to see what I ran across. Finding wonderful little things hidden away. I wanted to explore and find things...not to complete a collection of packages or feathers or flags or whatever but to find the actual little settings hidden away. A wrecked cabin in the woods or a hot spring or a waterfall. Just the joy of exploration for its own sake.


But then I play an Assassin's Creed game. Find five thousand items of four different types because they're there. Or Saint's Row which, for all its fun, also suffered from "collectionism syndrome". Grand Theft Auto has suffered from it for years with hidden packages. Collect this, collect that, complete this minigame forty times for each place. This isn't exploration this is a damn fetch mission spread across the entire game.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I'm going to echo the sentiments of the people saying they're too big and empty. I think the biggest offender of this that I've played was Just Cause 2. The game world is HUGE, so huge it takes several minutes by PLANE to cross the damn thing. Problem is, it's filled with not much of anything. Once huge city, a whole bunch of samey small towns, and cut-and-paste military bases. There were no characters that I could get invested in.

 

[Saetha]

I would also like to add side quests in general. I don't know if it's just me, or if developers are getting lazy, but side quests in a lot of open world games now don't really feel satisfying. I'm not talking about "collect this or kill that" or even the payoff of the loot. I'm talking about the weight behind them, or the conclusion. In Dragon Age: Inquisition, there have been several quest that just sort of...stop. An example would be these journal entries I found. A hunter was tracking...something (I think it was a wolf) and said that he cornered it in the ruins. I go there, find his body, and that's it. No comment on what happened to him, what he was stalking, or any closure whatsoever. Just a note that said it had been torn up and then pieced back together that read, "Stay away from me or I swear I'll kill you." Um...okay, what was that all about?

Ugh, I had that same problem with a lot of the side-quests in DAI. It's, like, there was some really interesting stuff going on in that game that never GOES anywhere. I remember some quest in the Hinterlands, where some crazy chick tells me to go throw flowers in a lake and I get... a sword? Uh... okay? Like, it materializes out of a bowl on a dock. No one's going to explain where this comes from, or...?

The one that bugs me the most is a bit in the Hissing Wastes. There's that guy who's been leaving journal entries all over the map, studying most of them pertaining to the Dwarven ruins in the area, or the Venatori. Okay, cool, cool, it's a nice touch, I guess. But one of the entries, apropos of nothing, mentions an encounter the writer had with some Chantry woman who refused food and drink and spoke only in quotes from the Chant of Light. He doesn't know who she is or where she came from - she's just out in the middle of the desert, preaching at him. He meets her again, but still can't figure her out.

Immediately after getting that entry, the Inquisitor can encounter this woman themselves, randomly, kneeling in the middle of nowhere and quoting the Chant of Light. "Oh, neat!" I thought, upon seeing this. "Surely my Inquisitor will see the parallels with the journal entry and this will spoke off into some awesome side-quest about mysterious Chantry women!" Except... nope, Inquisitor and co. go "Huh, weird" and continue. Nearly the second you turn your back, she appears again, just as with the journal. The Inquisitor can even point out how explicitly impossible this is, but still doesn't resolve to do anything about it. Further entries in the journal make no more mention of the encounter, and nothing happens. It's a neat and creepy easter egg, I guess, but - shouldn't I be concerned about this? Like, screw the Venatori, I wanna know why everyone's collectively hallucinating about random desert Chantry women.

Dragon Age has got such interesting lore - I'd have done every side-quest in the game if they all expanded on it. But they raise these questions and then so rarely go anywhere with them. The plot they're framed in can sound interesting - but like you said, a lot of them just sort of end, and I wonder why I even bothered. It's so frustrating, especially since there's basically no point to do side-quests after a certain point, when you've got more power and influence then you'd ever need.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

I would also like to add side quests in general. I don't know if it's just me, or if developers are getting lazy, but side quests in a lot of open world games now don't really feel satisfying. I'm not talking about "collect this or kill that" or even the payoff of the loot. I'm talking about the weight behind them, or the conclusion. In Dragon Age: Inquisition, there have been several quest that just sort of...stop. An example would be these journal entries I found. A hunter was tracking...something (I think it was a wolf) and said that he cornered it in the ruins. I go there, find his body, and that's it. No comment on what happened to him, what he was stalking, or any closure whatsoever. Just a note that said it had been torn up and then pieced back together that read, "Stay away from me or I swear I'll kill you." Um...okay, what was that all about?

Dragon Age has got such interesting lore - I'd have done every side-quest in the game if they all expanded on it. But they raise these questions and then so rarely go anywhere with them. The plot they're framed in can sound interesting - but like you said, a lot of them just sort of end, and I wonder why I even bothered. It's so frustrating, especially since there's basically no point to do side-quests after a certain point, when you've got more power and influence then you'd ever need.

Ah yes, random Chantry lady that is somehow able to teleport around the Hissing Wastes. I had the same thought as you. "Um...shouldn't we look into this?" Also, one of the journals mentions that the dwarves were aware of Dragons, yet this made no sense since they supposedly lived under ground. "Cool! We going to look into that? Guys? Hello? No? Okay then..."

What about the daughter who fled to Fereldan, left her mother behind, and then started seeing her mother again? I assume that what was happening was that she was being possessed by a demon that eventually told her to kill herself, but still, a little comment from someone saying as much--you know, like one of my many mages or even Cole who IS a spirit--would have been nice. Instead, we just find her diary and boom! Case closed.

Dragon Age does indeed have some serious lore going for it, but for some reason it's always going on in the background. Even in the side quests, the place where they could start making it shine, it's still in the background. I'm still waiting for the final demon baddy to show up. In Dragon Age II, you find a book saying that there are four prime ruling demons (or something like that) in the Fade. Gaxkang was killed by the Warden in the first game, and Hawke slapped Xebenkeck in the face, and The Inquisitor put Imshael down. These demons are major players in Dragon Age, and yet they're just getting brushed over.
And don't even get me started on what The Band of Three finds, and apparently ends up releasing, in Dragon Age II.

So much lore that they could be using, and yet...

 

[Bob_McMillan]

Traveling I guess really sucks. In GTA or Sleeping Dogs, you have to steal a car, get chased by the police/bad guys, crash, find another car, and repeat. Games like Skyrim and Assassins Creed the traveling isn't that bad, but once you unlock fast travel, it feels a bit like cheating. Saints Row 4 is one of my favorite open world games because running and gliding around can be more fun than the rest of the game. Just Cause 2 is another example, if you really need to take a car, you don't have to drive it, just surf some civilians car to your destination. Need a chopper? Kill a couple of soldiers and wait for the helicopter to show up, then steal it. Or if you arent feeling like the vehicular type, you can slingshot all over the place.

Another would be believeability (is that a thing?) In Far Cry 3 and Skyrim, you see dead civilians EVERYWHERE. In Far Cry 3, you see normal people driving around, until they hit a pig, get out, and have their faces eaten by a tiger. In Skyrim, just few hundred meters away from a village theres a vampire den or two. And every bandit hideout, of which there are more than actual villages, has a few dead prisoners without any backstory. I want a world where people can actually live in without being in mortal danger for at least an hour.

 

[Here Comes Tomorrow]

I think for a real open world experience you've got to work on the procedural content more than the scripted content. Sure, if you had an infinite budget you could finely tune every single encounter and create a truely immersive experience, but that's a pipe-dream from a development perspective. Scripting every last detail is expensive. You're looking at unique models, unique voice-overs etc. and these aren't cheap assets. If you went purely for quality over quantity then I think you'd end up with a game so small that it'd no longer qualify as open world.

Like how Shadow of Mordor worked with its whole Nemesis system. Have to admit, I've not got round to playing it yet, but I've seen enough gameplay to understand what the game is about. And I think that's more along the lines of a real open world experience. As in, everybody has a different experience with the game, and the main game is about getting stuck in with these experiences rather than following some predetermined path to victory. And it's replayable. There's nothing replayable, actually, about having unique voice-overs and storylines for every single encounter. All you can do on the next playthrough is pick up all the side-quests you didn't do the last time. That's not replayability, and it's not open world.

So yeah, I wouldn't say quantity over quality, but I would say better quality for the more generic repeatable content rather than better quality for the scripted one-time-only content.

As has been said the Nemesis system is massivly overhyped. Its fun for a few hours but once you realize that it has no real effect on anything then it loses its appeal. Maybe if the orc captains activly tried hunting you down or getting revenge then it would be more interesting. As it is they're just XP pinatas.

You're correct about the procedurally generated thing though.
A game hugely under rated for its open world is STALKER and the A-Life system. The mods that reintroduce the AI as it was intended make the game unique. It keeps track of all the NPCs in the Zone, including random mutants. You can be on the other side of the game world and STALKERs will report deaths, mutant sightings, gunfire etc. These are a things actually happening and not just flavor text. If you have a mission to kill a certain NPC, if left long enough theres a good chance that the NPC will get killed by a mutant or bandit because such is life in The Zone.

Every journey out of the safe zones requires forward planning and a clear objective because you never know what might happen. I could recount loads of stories, all unscripted of my journies, all unique from anyone elses.

In comparison, my journeys in Skyrim will be much the same as anyone elses. "Investigated a cave, killed some drauger, got a magic knife which I didn't need so I left it there."

The big problem is handholding. (Modded) STALKER has an excellent balance of difficulty and reward. Your excursions into the wilds can be difficult but usually you come back with an artifact or a new gun. Sometimes you'll encounter a mutant pack that will kick your ass and send you running home or seeking refuge. Even then, the reward is the story of the time you fought of 3 bloodsuckers while running for shelter from a blowout and ran into a Duty patrol who helped you kill them, then you chilled in an abandoned day care with them and drank vodka till it was over.

Whereas Skyrim, even modded basically boils down to that time I quick travelled to Winterhold and a dragon was there and I killed it and that happened like 20 times. The content in Skyrim (and this applies to most open world games) never surprises you. It never throws a challenge at you or stacks the odds against you. You never go into a dungeon checking that you have enough arrows and health potions to make it through in case you encounter something unexpected. You just go in there and murder everything because you know exactly what is going to be inside from the design of the dungeon entrance usually.

Also, just dumping a load of collectables in the game world and unlocking some meager reward is an awful trend. Whenever I see "Thing collected! 1/200", I die a little inside.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I'm going to echo the sentiments of the people saying they're too big and empty. I think the biggest offender of this that I've played was Just Cause 2. The game world is HUGE, so huge it takes several minutes by PLANE to cross the damn thing. Problem is, it's filled with not much of anything. Once huge city, a whole bunch of samey small towns, and cut-and-paste military bases. There were no characters that I could get invested in.

Actually weirdly enough, it was one of the games it bothered me least, because how the gameplay was designed, making you not care about collectibles and having story missions diverse enough for it just being fun to screw around. I guess it fits the "sandbox" description best.

The gameplay was fun, but blowing shit up can only entertain for so long.