Why Do Open World Games Feel Exhausting?

[Music] some of my favorite video games of all time are open world there's something magical about booting these up for the first time i get to explore this huge map and get lost in the experience every now and then i get to play this incredible open world game that lives in my imagination but lately that magic seems to wear off the thought of open world games and what they could be ends up being more exciting than what they turn out to be so why do open world games feel exhausting i asked you guys this question and i got a ton of great answers but one idea seems to come up the most open world games tend to go for quantity over quality as maps get bigger they tend to feel more empty we get more quests in order to fill these big maps but it feels like filler or busy work it makes us wonder things like why is the map so big and is this game respecting my time i think open world games pull a lot of the same tricks but some games do it better than others emergent moments are becoming more and more popular these are random events that feel unexpected and natural to find out in the world red dead redemption 2 does these very well you never know when you're gonna find a damsel in distress or someone pretending to need your help only to turn around and rob you these are believable things that could happen in the wild west for someone who hasn't played the game before discovering these events can be more memorable than the story itself and the element of surprise is huge as long as these moments are unique and they don't happen too often this is a great way to keep things exciting but if you're doing the same thing over and over again it gets exhausting fallout 4 was a huge successful game but it still couldn't escape preston garvey as usual i have something else for you to look into i'll mark it on your map the problem with these settlement missions is we see them too much it's the same quest every time and it yanks us away from whatever we were doing for a game that takes dozens of hours to finish this gets old fast but it did make for a pretty good meme open world games are about exploring places that feel alive and one way that developers convince us is by making their game systemic the legend of zelda breath of the wild is just the best example this game has a bunch of systems that react to each other and react to me if i set grass on fire it burns if it rains outside the water puts out the fire if i drop an apple in front of my horse it walks forward and eats it breath of the wild is full of these moments and while they seem random and inconsequential they really make the world feel real in a way that non-systemic games don't when a world doesn't react to me it feels like i'm walking through a gallery i'm moving from point a to point b and i'm admiring the scenery but i can't reach out and touch the art i know bethesda games are very easy to make fun of but skyrim lets me touch the art you can pick up all of those wooden bowls in the dungeons of helgen if you want to it's not about whether you should it's the fact that it's possible that's why when todd howard says starfield will let me play in first person and touch all of the things i can't help but get excited interacting with the environment is one of those things that helps me slow down to get immersed in open world video games open world games are getting bigger and sometimes maps justify their size they find this magical balance between quality and quantity we don't get exhausted and best case scenario when the credits roll it leaves us wanting more but how do games manage to pull this off i think it's natural to say things like just make a better map or make better content those things can work but some of the most beloved open world games of all time don't really reinvent the wheel there's only so many ways you can make a map or a side quest what is different is how you find the content when i started writing this script i had a big realization a lot of open world games suck at discovery they hold your hand they tell you where to go and they tell you why you should go there they use mini-maps compasses waypoints and magic wind to guide you towards the content if there's a problem when you get there they tell you exactly how to solve it they give us huge wonderful worlds that are pretty to look at but they don't really let us exist in them mark brown of game makers toolkit has a great episode on this topic and i think it's at the core of why open world games feel exhausting we don't get tools to experiment with so we can't figure things out we can't make mistakes so we don't learn we don't get lost so we never have to think about where we are what if open world games feel exhausting because they don't let us use our brains one of my favorite open world games of this year is actually a survival game valheim made me realize survival games do a lot of what i look for in open world games this game gives me broad objectives but lets me figure out how to solve them it gives me tools to experiment and a reactive world that responds to my actions it lets me discover its world and all of its secrets for myself on my own terms and it honors player choice above all else the fact is a lot of open world games just don't feel that open to me because of discovery and that inability to just let go and let the player be and form their own adventure is why they feel exhausting one of my favorite series growing up was assassin's creed i love the setting the tone the atmosphere i love the fantasy of being an assassin and i loved parkour it felt like playing a 2d platformer in a 3d space navigating the world felt like a real-life puzzle to me i wasn't just going to the next destination i was climbing avoiding guards and looking really cool while doing it assassin's creed came out in 2007 and it's changed so much since then but navigating its world feels way more satisfying than the recent assassin's creed games ubisoft just had something more creative in mind than this when i think of games with great traversal i think of the new spider-man series i get to run along buildings point launch to gain momentum dive to pick up velocity and jump at just the right angle like a pendulum it's fluid it's dynamic it lets me make decisions and rewards me for creativity sometimes i boot up my ps5 just so i can swing around in miles morales i realize the spider-man games have the perfect excuse for this kind of gameplay but i wish other games made more of an effort for all the mistakes bioware made with anthem that game actually has interesting flight mechanics one of the reasons assassin's creed black flag became such a big hit is the sailing if you're gonna make me travel through a big open world it should be fun otherwise i'm gonna switch off my brain and check my phone or worse i'm gonna fast travel now i know what you're thinking right now another video complaining about fast travel but seriously this makes open worlds feel exhausting what does it say if moving through a world is so boring that i can't be bothered to do it i get it maybe i'm a new parent or i work a lot and i have limited time to play games there is a happy medium and nobody forces you to use fast travel valheim has a great solution by making you construct portals that way you have to earn the right to use fast travel but even still i don't love doing it to me fast travel is the enemy of discovery you miss out on everything that you could see when you use it i shouldn't have to fast travel to get to the good stuff and it shouldn't feel like a convenience either there's no better way to crumble the fantasy of the open world than by skipping it entirely open world games can feel exhausting when we don't connect with the story it's hard to justify spending 50 maybe 100 hours playing a game when i don't actually care what happens to be fair the wide open format of these games makes it tricky you have to let players go off and explore when they want to so with the nature of open world games being that way how do you tell a great story when you don't have deliberate pacing to hook the player and push them forward red dead redemption 2 does a good job by placing big narrative beats in each chapter to drive the story forward but it also sends you on smaller arcs that focus on character development or fun and exciting plots because of the great writing and performance capture this works pretty well it's easy to get attached to arthur and the gang because they are compelling characters i care about them but this ends up coming at a cost because red dead 2 turns into a completely different game when you're on a mission it's no longer the reactive open world environment where anything can happen you're locked in and if you make any sort of mistake outside of the path that the game's decided for you it's mission over this rigid design does allow the game to tell its story it does a good job at that but it feels like it's at odds with the rest of the game freedom to do whatever you want is important in open world games but what happens when a story gives you a big cliffhanger or creates a false sense of urgency assassin's creed does this when a major character gets kidnapped in the story this person disappears and it becomes a mystery instead of spending the next few hours searching for that person the game sends us off for a dozen or so hours of unrelated story content that doesn't feel nearly as important if my character is not worried about that person then why should i be even if i wanted to rush to find them i can't ghost of sushima does something similar but it actually shows us cut scenes of the character that is captured we know what they're doing and why we can't find them so it doesn't create a false sense of urgency breath of the wild probably isn't known for its story but i think its narrative structure makes the most sense for an open world video game it truly gives me the freedom to do what i want and in any order that i want to do it conquer the divine beasts explore the world have fun you lose out on the strengths of a linear single-player game you don't have any sort of pacing but it's just not nearly as exhausting almost every open world game has side quests that feel like busy work or filler content you guys know the type fetch quests checklists clear the map areas collectibles if your objective looks like a shopping list it's gonna feel like doing chores i know that some people are completionists and they like this kind of stuff but this content doesn't motivate me opening a chest that's already marked on my map is not my definition of fun it feels like a participation medal it feels like i didn't earn it a lot of this content is tied to things like crafting and resource gathering i like progression systems because it's cool to see my character grow stronger over time but tying that progression to something as meaningless as opening chests it just feels cheap my favorite kind of optional content is when a game tells me a story that means something to the player something that fills in the gaps on a character that we already know or sends us on a memorable adventure ghost of tsushima does this with its tales of tsushima these are side stories focusing on a single character and they play out over several missions not just one it makes great sense for jyn to help out these people and each of them are related to the main conflict in some way they also give meaningful rewards like new weapons and abilities i get to spend a couple of hours with these characters and i end up loving them by the end because of the writing and the performances this is the side content that feels worth it to me i get rewarded for my time and yeah it doesn't end up feeling exhausting at the same time does everything have to be worth it does it have to be productive and serious no i actually like it when open world games give us you know room to breathe rasputin has a great video about moments of reflection he calls them vibe checks these are opportunities games give us to let us appreciate the game and why we're enjoying it instead of focusing on the next task and putting these at key moments like bookending an intense battle gives you a second to just enjoy it that's why i really don't get annoyed when a game has large open spaces a lot of the times it makes sense for the world but it also gives me that time to exist rather than rushing off to the next thing it's only when a game doesn't have interesting traversal or doesn't deliver those emergent moments that capture your attention that this becomes trivial and those moments lose their meaning when people talk about open world games some of the biggest talking points are not about the quality of the content it's about whether they're trying to sell you something or how many bugs there are games are a business but i like to think that there's still art and nothing corrupts art quite like greed there's just too many open world games that release with bugs and that in and of itself is exhausting as technology advances games are growing more complex i won't sit here and tell you that developers aren't working their hardest to release a polished bug-free experience or that they're not working as hard as they can to fix things that are broken nobody spends that much time working on something that wants it to fail but the people polishing our games don't decide when they're ready to come out at the same time not all open world games are a buggy mess when they come out after everything that happened in 2020 it seems like more executives and people that are pulling those strings are willing to delay games that aren't ready but some of them still aren't and we all know who they are it feels like somebody wants to sell me something this is what a lot of open world games feel like these days assassin's creed has turned into this live product that inserts a cash shop into the experience i can't tell you how frustrating it is to see this tiny devil child who's like immortal or something trying to sell me something in my camp i could not care less about what fake product with better stats than anything else i can find in the game is for sale today we all know what this is this is a grift no longer are we concerned with immersing me in these worlds you'd rather sell me things than sell me on the quality of the experience man this is so so exhausting if you made it this far you might think i hate open world video games but the truth is despite my exhaustion i know myself too well i have a romantic view of video games and i always have and i'll continue to get sucked into the fantasies in my head the limitless massive open world that completely immerses me is something i still hope for i call it a fantasy but many games do surpass my imagination developers are just so talented they come up with so many creative ways to hook me and i love when i can't stop thinking about a game some of you are also probably thinking this guy just needs to calm down and move on open world games have become something that you don't like but others do like them and you should let them like what they like if you ask me what we have right now feels like a blend of the action rpg mixed with the linear single player game but in an open world environment but i think too many of these open world games feel samey they borrow too many ideas from each other and that makes this genre feel stagnant and exhausting there's a reason that ubisoft games feel the same it's hard not to look at a new open world game and think it's just going gonna be another big empty map with boring fetch quests i don't feel that kind of cynicism but i see it everywhere there's a reason people feel this way and that's because open world games are exhausting that is it for me guys i've been wanting to make a video like this for a while we talk about open world games quite a bit here on the channel but it's usually focused on reviewing one single game so let me know what you think about more broad topics like this i hope you enjoyed the video and if you did please let me know by clicking that like button my next video should be another assassin's creed in 2021 review i'm thinking about unity right now i haven't decided yet but if that sounds like something you want to watch go ahead and hit the subscribe button and ring the bell so you don't miss it huge thanks to all of my youtube members you guys are awesome and you make videos like these possible so thank you so much for supporting the channel thank you guys so much for watching and i'll talk to you next time you

Channel: jayvee

Views: 412,457

Keywords: JV2017, JV2017gameplay, jayvee, open world games, best open world games, open world games feel exhausting, ac valhalla, ac valhalla jayvee, open world games 2021, open world games exhausting, jayvee open world games, botw review, zelda botw, the legend of zelda botw, botw in 2021, breath of the wild in 2021, red dead redemption 2 in 2021, red dead redemption 2 review

Id: XeEMHS-3gPg

Length: 18min 38sec (1118 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 17 2021