Why I Hate the Open-world Genre

Before you get the stakes out and set off to burn the witch (me), try and hear me out. As we all know, open-world games have been getting increasingly popular lately — almost every new AAA release uses this kind of world design. That isn’t a problem, as trends have and will always exist within the gaming industry and videogames. But open-worlds just have so many aspects in which they’re inferior to almost every other form of world design, though that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy them as a player, and they do have other aspects that they’re superior in.

For starters, travelling is boring as it’s just getting from one point to the other. Everything is focused on making the world big and interesting (which it often isn’t, a big map with a lot of loot is not engaging. A tonne of things to do isn’t what makes a game interesting). There’s barely any exploring inside areas or trying to find a good route — you discover some loot in a building, kill some enemies, and leave it. The buildings are not part of the world or the world design. There are no secret routes or pathways, no finding shortcuts to your goal, just trekking through a large map to your quest without anything to keep the journey engaging except some possible exploration for extra items. Even the most popular games that use this design have this problem, such as ELDEN RING and Red Dead Redemption 2. 

Open-world also ruins the immersion and feel of the game. The world barely reacts to what the player is doing, and it’s as if the main quest is its own timeline. You can slaughter an entire village and steal all their stuff, and it doesn't impact anything except the next five minutes, then you just start the main quest, and it never matters again for the rest of the game. Even if the game has a morality system, it only matters for the ending or for some little things that happen when doing side missions and travelling through the world. An example of this is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, in which the main questline is almost never affected by what you do, and the story always stays the same regardless of your actions.

Thirdly, with this world design, people and places almost always seem out of place. Why would there be this random town here when there’s nothing else for hundreds of kilometres? How did the townspeople even get here, and how are they surviving here without a water source? There’s no logic to how the world is built, and you can have cliffs right near super flat land. Nothing in the world makes sense; you just have to accept that this is how it is because the designers said so. There might be a story or some kind of explanation, but it’s just an afterthought, and it doesn’t actually provide any kind of logic to it.

Now, I’m a gal who cares a lot about story, it’s one of the things which are most important for me in a videogame, which is why the pacing problem is so huge for me. There are so many things distracting you from the main story — side missions, exploring, gathering loot, and so many more things you can do. Sounds good, right? Except it relegates the story to second place right after hours upon hours of content. If you want to complete all side missions and explore all buildings, by the time you finish, you forget what the main quest is, and once you complete it and unlock the next one, you have tens of side quests and hundreds of buildings to explore again. You can never complete your goal because there are so many things that distract you from it, adding so much time you need to invest into the game and taking away one of the most important aspects of storytelling, which is maintaining normal pacing. The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild suffers from this massively; Hyrule has such a deep story to it, but it’s sidelined in order to allow for useless exploration that ruins how the story feels.

So, I’ve said what I had to say about open-world maps. There are many reasons for which it’s bad world design and only some of them I’ve listed. And frankly, I also think it’s lazy, just a way for companies to excite gamers and get their game hyped and bought. So what would be a better approach? Open-area design, think Dishonored. It lets you go wherever you wish inside every level. It gives you the freedom you want in a videogame but doesn’t make it boring to go from one point to the other, making obvious and less obvious routes built for different playstyles and keeping every part of the map interesting by using it for passive storytelling. It doesn’t have side missions that feel like running errands since whatever you do affects the world in real time, and every side mission has an actual purpose and story behind it and isn’t just a piece of content.