Why open world games are broken

I recently picked up Far Cry 6 for $5 at GameStop big budget Ubisoft game high-profile actor attached I don't need games to be perfect but sometimes underrated games like this end up being really fun so I gave it a shot well I'm about an hour in graphics look incredible weapons are fun I already have access to an unheard of amount of vehicles and weaponry and then you get that voice inside that voice that says why don't I care about anything that happens in this game World sometimes these modern AAA games feel like when you were 10 years old and visited the rich kid's house you were bored and ready to go home but he kept showing you cool stuff but what about this but what about this at some point you just go me and walk home I'm really interested in why we come to feel this way about an open world game sometimes and wanted to explore this in a video why do some open worlds grab us while other open world games are unable to get their hooks in us I thought a lot about this and came up with three overarching things that a good open world game does and I want to explain each in depth number one a good open world game makes you care about your character and care about the world they live in number two a good open world game makes player power and Game Challenge Ascend at the same time number three a good open world game is really good at distracting you oh by the way I'm Andy pants Please Subscribe if you like this content okay let's [Applause] go one of the reasons I bounced off of Far Cry 6 so quickly is because despite expensive CGI AAA storytelling and big budget Stars I found myself not really caring about the character that I played as or the world that they inhabited so what are some games that did this really well cyberpunk 2077 comes to mind cyberpunk opens with a set of tutorial missions that explain how I came to meet and become friends with easily the best character in the game Jackie Wells after completing our first mission together Jackie drives us home and on the journey subtly drops a ton of information I need to know to care about this world I learn more about night City the ncpd max Tac and various gangs I also see him interact with several people in a way that tells me about him and also tells me about the world cyberpunk takes the brilliant approach of my first few hours of the game being an ever expanding Circle the area I can play in get slowly bigger and bigger and bigger the game uses this time to slowly drip feed me information about the world introducing me to the world slowly and most importantly making me care about the world before it lets me loose in it now I'm not saying this is the only way to make a player care about an open world but this is certainly a good way to do it another thing I should acknowledge here is that your mileage with this kind of thing is going to be highly correlated to your desire to be in said world I wanted to like cyberpunk going into it I wanted to like dying light when I first played these games medieval worlds have almost no appeal to me and I struggle to care about the worlds of Skyrim The Witcher and Elden rang but that's just my personal taste another tactic a game can use to make you care about the world is to ramp up the difficulty for the player early on Dying Light 2 which came out in 2022 has a very well-designed open world and uses this to great effect in its opening hours I didn't find myself caring about the story of dying like 2 but within the first 30 minutes of the game you're engaged in pretty difficult hand-to-hand melee combat with thugs attempting to swing a weapon at these guys will cause them to immediately dive out of the way or block your attack the problem is compounded because they're all ganging up on you and hitting you from different sides the way a real fight would be so in this fairly difficult opening segment of the game you have to learn to Parry block Dodge and attack correctly otherwise the game will not let you get past it this isn't a game where you were just handed the keys to the open world from the start no the game forces you to learn some stuff before it will even let you play it and I found that this made me actually begin to care about the world more the game being difficult made me suddenly care more about the world and my character another game I'm going to talk about a lot that uses some of the mechanics in open World Games is the 2007 Masterpiece and Xbox 360 exclusive Crackdown most people don't realize just how influential this game was on open world games now your mileage may vary on how much you care about this world but I enjoyed the central premise of the police chief type character Charles Goodwin with his booming voice cheering me on as I destroyed criminals and yelling at me whenever I killed civilians you can now lift objects weighing just over half a ton and throw them roughly 130 ft agency peacekeepers are authorized to suppress agents who killed too many civilians despite the game having virtually no story I found the naration to be motivating and made me care about the world to bring back up difficulty Crackdown also uses high difficulty to ground you in this world and make you care about it right from the start Challenge and Crackdown presents itself in the form of multiple crime bosses throughout the game's map needing to be taken out the problem is that these bosses hide themselves really well in all kinds of geodesic domes stadiums hundred story skyscrapers and things like that what I enjoyed so much about Crackdown and how the game made me care about its world is that it favored emergent chaos as just as valid a solution to a problem as quick aiming and playing the game quote correctly Crackdown definitely has some roots in the immersive Sim genre in this way another game that isn't an open world game but was really good at making me care about it was prey the game has some tutorial missions and pretty quickly you have to move your way across this giant Lobby to get to your office for the first time on this journey you're going to probably have several jump scares and encounter several very powerful aliens for the first time Meanwhile your weapons at this point in the game are a joke a gun that only shoots glue and a cattle prod prey is asking you to do a task that is difficult and is going to require some improvisation the simple Act of getting to my office for the first time immediately made me begin to care about the game because it was so hard [Music] number two a good open world game makes player power and Game Challenge Ascend at the same rate another reason I completely lost interest in Far Cry 6 is because the game made me way too powerful at the start of the game player power should always be moderated slowly and gradually increase over the course of the game drip feeding me with more powerful stuff throughout the 30 hours or so of a game Ghost Recon wildlands is another ubby slop game that I actually enjoyed quite a bit over the course of the game you and a squad of three other kill will take down probably a 100 enemy bases just killing and killing and killing people over again while I enjoyed the game it had one glaring flaw it had bad player progression right at the start of the game I can go find a helicopter with a huge chain gun on it having this makes so many of the missions in the game super easy now while I will totally acknowledge this can be fun for some players I also think it's really bad game design and when you hit the 15 hour mark of the game you really start to feel it have I literally just been doing the same thing for the past 15 hours now you might make the argument that in wildlands and Far Cry 6 your player abilities are increasing over the course of the game but I would argue that nothing significant is changing in either of these games yes in wildlands I can call in a chopper later in the game but I can also go find a chopper right from the start of the game so it's not really a roadblock if you look on the screen you can see the red line is player power and the blue line is Game Challenge on the left is how far cry 6 and other poorly designed games do this the player is super powerful at the beginning of the game and not much changes over the course of the game whereas a well-designed game follows the graph on the right player power and Game Challenge Ascend and grow at the same time I become more powerful and the challenges become more difficult Dying Light 2 of course does this masterfully In Dying Light 2 the whole first half of the game I am confined to an area of the map with limited player abilities but those player abilities are meant to teach me the basics of the game before giving me more I I need to walk before I can run in the second half of the game you access a whole new map with completely different topography with that new map access I will soon acquire the glider and the grappling hook whereas in the first map of the game I could only Ascend two story buildings in the second half of the game I can Ascend 30 story skyscrapers and glide around the entire combined world now access to these new traversal tools felt like I was playing a completely new game now and gave the game a needed excitement boost at the mid way point Crackdown is a game that similarly understands the rule of gradually increasing player power and game difficulty at the same time the central conceit of Crackdown is that you're a super cop and you can throw cars and jump from building to building however the game is designed so that you can't do these things very well early on crackdowns progression follows This brilliant idea the more you do it the better you get at it acquiring agility orbs makes your character run faster and jump higher but you have to get pretty high up buildings to get those agility orbs so the game is making you do the thing to get stronger at the thing it's a beautifully simple system that I wish games did more when Crackdown starts you have a pathetic little jump and can barely pick up a go-kart by the end of the game you are leaping 50 ft in the air and throwing 18 wheelers with your bare hands unlike Far Cry 6 and wildlands and most ubis slop games this isn't some small or irrelevant progression to your player over the course of the game your player in Crackdown becomes significantly more power powerful and more agile over the course of the game what Crackdown also rightfully does is a similar shift in map topography enemy difficulty and enemy Weaponry as your player becomes more powerful and can access more of the map yes it's cool to have a 30ft jump now but the bad guys now have rockets and snipers furthermore the first boss you encountered in the game was in a five-story building while the 20th boss you fight in the game is in an 100 story building Crackdown is a game that doesn't have an ounce of fat on it because for its short 8 Hour campaign you are having a ridiculous amount of fun leveling up while your enemies become stronger and stronger Crackdown 2 wasn't nearly as good and Crackdown 3 was even worse um I would love to see another Crackdown that got back to the basics of this very pure game design philosophy the original had number three a good open world distracts you from the game really good open world games are masters of the fun distraction yes I'm doing a main mission but when something better comes along to distract me even better about an hour into Skyrim you will probably be wandering the world with your horse and notice the throat of the world an incredibly tall mountain looming to the south of you wonder if I can climb that is a natural question to have and of course you can 2009's Red Faction gorilla aside from being I think the funnest destruction game of all time is a master class in how to distract me from the main quest I'd be doing another mission and find myself thinking huh I wonder if that'll fall down down huh wonder what that would look like blown up you know an open world game is good when you're having more fun with random stuff than you are with the main missions because that was the point all along Dying Light 2 got me in this regard because I had a personal mission in the game to get to the top of every building in the game and take down every Bandit camp in the game Bandit camps you might ask that sounds like Ubisoft quite the contrary my friend unlike Ubisoft there's like a grand total of six of them in the game so they still feel weighty and important rather than being copy and paste items like in an Ubisoft game every Bandit camp in Dying Light 2 required me to strategize stock up was a brutal War of Attrition as I flung myself at the structure again and and again trying different tactics to take the difficult enemies down the really great thing though was that once you took a bandit Camp down it's down forever uh unlike division 2 or some Ubisoft game where enemies refresh the same spots constantly potentially creating endless busy work for you I love that Dying Light 2 had structures where you take it over and it's taken over forever another mechanic I really loved In Dying Light 2 was how the game would let you get to the top of every skyscraper in the game now you usually had to follow lines of intentionally designed Hooks and Ledges and hanging giring and get to the top of these but practically every enormous building in the game is climbable the game also encouraged this by putting high level loot at the top of all of these buildings also notice there wasn't a single objective marker or Mission telling me to go to the top of all these buildings I just wanted to do it cuz it was fun I had an incredible feeling of accomplishment just getting to the top of these high places and being rewarded with some kind of loot I think what open World Games ignore sometimes is it's these fun challenges that us players create for ourselves that are like the most satisfying to go after sometimes okay so just to close this video down I want to use an analogy of what I think a really great open world game does uh and think of like an old timey top and this top is held in your hand and you're spinning it up and you're spinning spinning spinning and then you spin it and you release it and it starts spinning out and going around like crazy and I think that is what a good open world game does it spins you up in a small area it makes you care about the world it makes you care about what you're doing and then it sets you free and lets you free in the world and that's the thing that I've really noticed that great open world games do the best open World Games give me a reason to care about the world they gradually increase my player power over the course of of the game and finally they surprised me all right I'm out of here

Channel: AndyPants Gaming

Views: 8,637

Keywords: open world, open world games, game design, gdc, game developers conference, zelda, dying light, dying light 2, cyberpunk, cyberpunk 2077, crack down, open world game design, ubisoft, ubislop

Id: PqtfRwKlFwQ

Length: 13min 33sec (813 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2024