Open world fatigue is a bitch, who can relate?

[Zealuu]

I feel like it's legitimate to get tired of open worlds regardless of how good they are. Bad open worlds rapidly accelerate the fatigue though (think GR Breakpoint). Personally I'm unreasonably fond of open world games, but even I need to palate cleanse with other stuff inbetween. Two open worlds in a row or at the same time is anathema to any kind of enjoyment - I had to put down BoTW for months after playing HZD back in 2015, and I love BoTW.

 

[Mathieran]

I never really get tired of them. Of course I try to make sure that I'm not playing the same types of games back to back so maybe that's why.

 

[SuperSah]

Most open worlds simply cannot offer enough to keep them feeling fresh and unique from one another.

 

[Carn]

I barely played RDR2 and havent even installed AC:Odyssey because its just so..massive. I did play through FF7R in a good two weeks or so.

 

[Sanctuary]

Not experiencing it right at this very moment, but I'm trying my hardest to stay away from them if I can in the first place. I cannot stand most of the open-world games I've played, and I've given many a fair chance. After years of EverQuest and WoW, the way it's been done on consoles just feels way too much like playing a single-player MMO, replete with the [what mundane tasks?] that make sense in a subscription based format, but make absolutely zero sense offline and single-player.

I have yet to play a single console open-world game that justified having an open-world. Most of the time it's just these ambitiously large maps that would be completely barren without being overpopulated with "shit to do". So to justify the world size, it's filled with garbage. Meanwhile, the actual meaty aspects of the game could have been perfectly fit into more compact, "wide-linear" styled areas that supply the player with enough room for actual exploration without hampering the pacing too much.

which are far and few between

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Exactly

 

[CaptainK]

Even in linear games, it can be tedious to try to collect everything or do a complete/perfect playthrough. Simply beating a game is usually a pretty low hurdle to clear. Anything above that, if you're not enjoying it, is just wasted effort.

 

[lazygecko]

Open world design often has a real problem for me in how they really don't have any room to breathe. I've felt this kind of hegemony in the industry for years where dense world design packed with locations and activities everywhere is seen as innately superior to worlds that are more naturally spaced out, because the latter might be "boring" somehow if the player isn't constantly distracted and stimulated by finding new things to do. I just get sensory overload from that kind of design which has become the industry standard now. It's also basically counter-intuitive in how the compressed scale of the world is constantly begging for so much suspension of disbelief to the point where it just kills the immersion for me. This has pretty much led me to prefer instanced "open" worlds split into different zones because at least that level of abstraction gives your imagination something to work with, rather than the abstraction of scale compression.

 

[misho8723]

Right now I feel it pretty strongly with RDR2..
In the case of Witcher 3, I did pretty mcuh everything because I had just so much fun and I love the series and the world and lore but definitely didn't waste my time with the treasure chests - the game doesn't forced them to you to find them all, if you have turn on the question marks on your map - you should play the game without them, it's milion times a better experience that way, CD Projekt RED know about them and their problems and even the guy who had the unfortunate task to place them all over the Skellige map was sorry and he apologized for them even though it wasn't his fault - someone in CD Projekt RED was scared that there wasn't enough content on that map, so pretty much in the closing development time the decision with the treasure chests was made
BTW Hearts of Stone and Blood&Wine are well worth your time, believe me

 

[Nameless]

Not at all. The types of open world games I seek out and enjoy most use their worlds as a vector for some combination of meaningful exploration, discovery, narrative, world building, player freedom, systemic gameplay, and/or thematic expression, not bloated checklists of brain dead tasks. They don't feel samey or tedious.

-Outer Wilds
-Pathologic 2
-Witcher 3
-Kingdom Come
-RDR2
-BOTW
-SOTC
-ELEX
-Mount & Blade
-Dragons Dogma DA
-New Vegas

These kinds of experiences don't burn me out, where as your typical Ubi/WB style open worlds usually do.

 

[FarSight XR-20]

That's why I loved The Outer Worlds and the last Deus Ex. It didn't waste my time with a huge open world.

 

[julia crawford]

I like them. There are some bad ones like anything else but i like them.

Playing Spider Man now and well, swinging is fun, but the open world is kinda sucky. The buildings all look the same and you don't get to know any part of the city. You just end up remembering some spots here and there because they're notably different from everything else. Doesn't feel at all like you're a citizen of the city, just... someone who lives above street level and never walks around like someone who actually knows which streets go where.

 

[Acquiescence]

I've been experiencing open world fatigue for almost the entire gen. The urban ones I don't have much of a beef with, like Sleeping Dogs, GTAV, Watch Dogs and L.A. Noire for instance (all of which I love incidentally), but those are becoming fewer and far between. I'm starting to develop a zero tolerance for all these 60+ hour games set in huge, expansive, boring-as-fuck settings populated by fields and mountains and valleys and canyons and forests and caves and what have you. There might be the odd exception here and there, but for the most part I'm done. Especially if they're post-apocalyptic.

It's funny seeing some people complain about FFVIIR being too linear, whereas I on the other hand am like "Ahhh, perfect."

 

[Sprat]

These days I don't even explore in open world games. I just mainline it.

If a game trys to gate me from doing the main quest I sell it and move on as I did with ac origins and I won't buy any more games in the franchise

 

[Mikke]

Yes, I don't play open world games anymore for that reason. BotW worked for me but I couldn't get into RDR2 for example even though I was really looking forward to playing it.

 

[Kunjiru]

I get you OP. I had the same problem with open worlds, but it wasn't open world fatigue per se, but rather "bad open world fatigue". I loved Witcher 3 story, but I'm gonna be honest, the open-world aspect was just extremely bad. Same with Assassin's Creed games, Horizon Zero Dawn, Mad Max, Watch Dogs 2 etc. These are not bad games, but in my honest opinion their open worlds are, well, shit. Some of them look amazing, but the content is dreadful - hundreds of question marks, some lame enemy camps to make it feel like there's something going on in world and bunch of delivery side quests. Like you said, most of the time it was a chore to do stuff in them and it just wasn't fun. And it's just some kind of flawed world design choice that made it in the game industry and it's getting replicated over and over again. What helped me from hating open-world games was Breath of The Wild, there's something about it that makes it so fun - traveling through it is fun, there's lots of cool interactions and hidden things - korok seeds with little puzzles to do, lots of cool places that make you go "I wonder if that weird looking hill has something on it" and then it turns out there was something, lots of places that required some thinking in order to get to them. I thought it was genius and fun as hell and it wasn't oversaturated with content, it was just right. So far, Breath of The Wild is my ideal open-world and I hope more games will try to be ingenious instead of artificially packed with shit. So far the only game that was promising in terms of all that was surprisingly Days Gone and Death Stranding to some extent (imagine if BT territories were actually dynamic. They were changing a little bit sometimes I think, but mostly it was always the same locations). They both had some shortcoming, but i'm honestly expecting something even greater from Bend studio next time and from Kojima. So yeah, I can relate a bit, but at least I have my save space with BotW and hope thanks to Days Gone and Death Stranding

 

[Patapuf]

I have fatigue but i don't feel like it's a burden. I'm just choosy about which open world games i play.

It's not like i'm starved for other kinds of games .

 

[Evilmaus]

I personally find the way you're expected to engage with the world to make all the difference.

I haven't played an Assasins Creed game since 3, but I seem to remember (and get the impression that they still are) sprawling maps chcok full of icons telling you to collect 101 objects they've scattered, and underwhelming side quests. Usually fetch quests or something. I feel like a lot of titles followed that kind of trend and to this day I just dont have the patience for it. It feels like pointless busy work to me.

That being said, I absolutely loved Breath Of The Wild. It's another massive, sprawling open world, but I played it by putting on the pro-HUD from the off and just exploring points of interest on the horizon.
The moment to moment gameplay and exploration created organic situations that I really enjoyed, and there was nothing pointing me to "go here and do that" except for the locations I'd pinned on the map myself.
That might feel a bit aimless, and I can see why some people like to be directed more, but it just really clicked with me.

That's my take on it anyways, and it's just my opinion. Probably a bad one too, so fuck me I guess.

 

[laxu]

Open worlds would be fine if the developers would just figure out that your world map does not need to be the biggest ever and the content in that map matters more. Have more memorable locations and areas that seem planned and handcrafted.

For example in RDR2 there isn't all that much to do when traveling the world but you start to notice areas just by how the treeline looks so exploration without a map is rewarding. There are enough random events and fauna going around to keep you entertained too. Open worlds definitely need to have events unfold more organically so the player feels they have agency instead of stumbling upon a mission marker.

By comparison AC, Far Cry and Spiderman games are all about "perform activity of type X here" which ends up being just repetitive bollocks that becomes a chore to perform rather than enjoyable gameplay. Witcher 3 at least tells stories with little notes left in bandit camp chests etc. so even minor things may stick with you.

I would rather see shorter games with meaningful content than something that expects to keep the player going for hundreds of hours just by the sheer amount of collectable stuff. The only games where I have clocked several hundred hours are Soulsborne games because their replay value is so high but most open world games don't have the capacity to allow for different approaches on different playthroughs so you play them once and move on.

 

[Jiraiya]

Not me...since i know how to play other games when i tire of another. I hope open world gets even bigger next gen. Density too.

 

[Araujo]

The problem is not open world.

The problem is badly made open world.

Making a huge map is easy, making an interesting map that is also huge is not.

 

[KtotheRoc]

This is why I like to mix up the games I play. Sometimes I feel like playing an RPG, sometimes I feel like playing a platformer, sometimes I feel like playing a fighting game.

 

[Necromanti]

I had some serious open world fatigue for a while that really came to a head after playing Assassin's Creed Syndicate for a while. I couldn't take the amount of bloat and the map filled with countless icons anymore.

Strangely, BotW seems to have cured me of this fatigue, and now I've been playing some open world games that I wouldn't have touched earlier. That game was a total breath of fresh air for me and made me see what was possible without the overreliance on icons and some smart world design.

 

[HMD]

I never finish open world games, the last open world game I finished was BoTW and that was a masterclass in game design. Open world games have to really try to capture my attention.

 

[Fredrik]

Why do you feel like you need to do and explore everything? Just go about things as in real life, do what you find entertaining and ignore the rest.

 

[carl_sandland]

I takes different strokes I guess, I personally love the wide empty Egypt or Greek islands, I love just zoning out and exploring. Just finished my first run of Origins and had a blast. I'm VERY keen on being a viking this xmas for a few months and am hanging out for the next Far Cry. I think the trophy design can be a part of this; some games are just better designed and have reasonable platinums. Division 2 is great too, thats my current poison; that one is almost too complex for me lol.

 

[learning]

Stop playing open-world games for a while

 

[ShinUltramanJ]

If the gameplay loop sinks it's hooks into me, it doesn't matter if it's open world or not.

Try playing something less involved on the side like a shmup.

 

[MasaDrew]

I have severe fatigue of open world games. For the longest time I thought I was biased against them because I would lose interest so easily.

One of the problems for me is that when I'm given the opportunity I want to find everything there is to offer in between story beats. That's really simple in chill in something not open world ala FF7R. But using that methodology in Horizon or Witcher led me to growing tired, overwhelmed, or annoyed at checking everything off.

With Witcher I tried to go against that in a way that kept everything at a good pace. What I would do is explore the map via going from one altar of power to the next, amassing quests and points of interest. I'd then take care of things I knew I could handle and leave out higher level quests for another time. And once I had my fill I'd move the story along. It's made the game more cohesive and structured for me. I finished it but for whatever reason I felt burnout trying to complete hearts of stone.

I noped out of Odyssey. Eventually Ill try Horizon again, just something about the genre doesn't stick with me if I can't make order of it.

 

[Lobster Roll]

Gotta have a rotation of games to cleanse the palates of one another. My current rotation is Persona 5 Royal, COD Warzone, Civilization 5, Stardew Valley. If you don't mix up the genres, you're going to end up completely exhausted by one if that's all you focus on. The industry has never been deeper for quality games across all genres. Step in and out of open world games, and you'll appreciate them more.

 

[Camwi]

I can get fatigue from any genre, which is why I like to mix things up.

For example, I decided to finally get to some PS AAA exclusives that I've just been putting off for no good reason. Rather than go from Horizon to God of War to Spider-Man, though, I needed to mix things up and put Hellblade and Uncharted 4 in between those games, plus a few short adventure games.

I think open world games (even though I fucking love 'em) tend to feel more fatiguing because they're just so huge.

 

[Christo750]

The industry has had a problem with "make it even bigger" for a LONG time now. And open worlds are just one part of the bloat. Give me focused experiences that are over in 5-6 hours any day of the week now.

That being said...

I was gonna say

playing BotW made me realize how poorly designed most open worlds are. They just feel random. BotW felt like every bit of it was crafted with an eye towards sightlines, landmarks, points of interest, etc. I don't think any other game comes close in this particular aspect.

Click to shrink...

Totally agree with this.

 

[Matthew _J]

Agreed. Case in point, I really, REALLY wanted to love BoTW, but couldn't. The world was just so empty and I had no idea where to go. I restarted the game 6-7 times, each time going in a different direction, but that didn't even help.

 

[Joule]

I'm playing the Metro games back to back to back for the first time ever. I'm on Exodus now and I definitely miss the linear of the first 2 titles

 

[Cosmic Voyager]

I never get fatigue of anything because I don't play same-y experiences back to back.

I alternate huge, realistic AAA open worlds with a couple shorter, stylized indies. If I do play two AAAs or two indies in a row, I won't play the same genre. I might do one third person action adventure game and one FPS, or one metroidvania and one branching narrative game for example.

I recommend this strategy for anyone who feels fatigue--- lining up your back catalog so that each game serves as a palette cleanser for each other really helps keep everything feeling fresh!

 

[Elfgore]

I was planning on trying to play Assassin's Creed Odyssey later this year. After playing Death Stranding, I don't think I have another massive open-world in me this year. So yeah, I feel you.

 

[JasoNsider]

Gonna echo what a lot of other people are saying, but Breath of the Wild was a revelation in this regard. It feels different in many ways, even just in presentation. It has an emphasis on good moment-to-moment game feel. It has an emphasis on serene nature and your connection to it. But yes, I do find other games like RDR2 just feel very "samey" in their open world and it burns me out.

 

[Man Called Aerodynamics]

God I hope they slim down Dragon Age 4. So much of Inquisition just feels like chores and padding.

 

[Alienhated]

The thing is, when the novelty of feeling immersed in an amazingly looking world wears off, you can't help but notice how much these games are designed to just pad people's playtime and make them walk around empty wastelands while doing mindless busywork.
They're fine as experiences, but they can become tiring chore check lists very quickly, so you should really not play much open world games in a row, or you're really going to burn yourself out.

 

[Deleted member 50761]

I was planning on trying to play Assassin's Creed Odyssey later this year. After playing Death Stranding, I don't think I have another massive open-world in me this year. So yeah, I feel you.

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Trouble i found with AC Odyssey is a lot of side content was required to level up for the main story, could be remembering slightly wrong but my main quest went from around lvl 25 to 38 so i just turned it off and never went back.

 

[tusk]

the Witcher 3 shouldn't have been open world. Everything about that game is a step down from Witcher 2.

 

[Edgar]

the Witcher 3 shouldn't have been open world. Everything about that game is a step down from Witcher 2.

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Except for combat , presentation , quest writing , production values, art direction, atmosphere , music , the world itself , general pacing , feeling like youre an actual witcher that goes to villages and helps people instead of going from set piece to set piece , even actual boss fights are better in w3, not that its a high bar . Other than the things i mentioned, yeah i woulld agree

 

[Big G]

I've been there, probably since around 2012-13. As a result, I limit myself to only a couple open-world games per year, and generally only ones that really seem to be taking advantage of that design (many don't).

Any type of game can cause fatigue, but because open-world games are so long and often follow a very similar template, it only takes playing a few unremarkable ones to become tired of them.

 

[tusk]

Except for combat , presentation , quest writing , production values, art direction, atmosphere , music , the world itself , general pacing , feeling like youre an actual witcher that goes to villages and helps people instead of going from set piece to set piece , even actual boss fights are better in w3, not that its a high bar . Other than the things i mentioned, yeah i woulld agree

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exciting argument, hope you got paid

 

[astro]

exciting argument, hope you got paid

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Your own argument really wasn't that great mate, lol...

Everything they said was true, though. TW2 is a great game, but all those elements were improved upon... Combat is questionable, both ways.

 

[Deleted member 29280]

I've had open world fatigue since 2009 lol. The way they've designed most of these games to be played by following a marker on the map/compass defeats the purpose of open world exploration. I get more of a sense of exploration from the Souls games BECAUSE there is no map or arrow telling me where to go.

 

[Horns]

I don't get open world fatigue, but I do get fatigued playing games that feel like a chore. I adore open world games like GTA, RDR, and Witcher, but can't bring myself to 100% them. I've tried. It's boring to do all the jumps or contracts. Doing a few keeps me content. When I feel it is necessary to keep up the repetition it gets boring quick. Same with achievements.

 

[MickZan]

Im not as much fatigued by open world games as by Ubisoft formula open world. I can't be arsed to play another "clear the icons of the map" game. Had a lot of fun with breath of the wild, death stranding and lately fallout 76. An open world should be there to explore and make it rewarding, not as a means to walk between marker a and b.

 

[ghibli99]

I thought it'd be a while for me after getting the plat for AC Odyssey a couple months ago, but I'm in RDR2 now, and this game is just flooring me with its detail and such. So who knows. LOL

 

[Shodan14]

I thought it'd be a while for me after getting the plat for AC Odyssey a couple months ago, but I'm in RDR2 now, and this game is just flooring me with its detail and such. So who knows. LOL

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Wait till you get to the guns.

 

[ghibli99]

Wait till you get to the guns.

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I have no idea what this means, but OK! :)