In the year of our lord two thousand and fourteen it was decreed by the lord of gaming, Sir Mario Chief Drake, that all sequels released thenceforth would be open world. So it was, then, that The Witcher became open world. So it was that Zelda and Dragon Age and probably Mass Effect became open world. A good sequel, so the accepted wisdom goes, should be bigger and better than its predecessor. As such the strategy of taking a previously non-open world series and opening it up seems fairly self explanatory. Open worlds are as bigger as can be, and as games like Skyrim and World of Warcraft’s towering sales demonstrate, many would see them as better.
Having not play these games that haven’t been made yet, I can’t tell you for sure if they’ll be good. I’ve never liked Zelda (well, Link’s Awakening was passable). Dragon Age Inquisition will probably be good even if some of the changes to the combat worry me a little. Mass Effect 4 will likely be good as well, although the potential outcomes of some of your decisions in Mass Effect 3 are so far reaching that they’ll probably have to scrap half of the existing species and lore. I thought the first Witcher was alright but hated the second one, so Wild Hunt probably won’t be for me.
Still, as much as I’ve enjoyed many open world games I can’t help but worry about this trend. Maybe these games will be great, maybe they’ll be terrible, but the important point is that an open world can be a detriment to games as well as a boon. In a game like Skyrim exploration and discovery is key. The game is chocked to the brim with content, and the purpose of playing it is to find as much of that content as possible. Skyrim is an example of a great open world game. Games in which the open world proves detrimental fall into one of two categories: those without enough content and those with too much.
In this article, let’s deal with the first. L.A. Noire was a police procedural released in 2011. One of the many rebirths of the adventure genre, it managed to be worth playing despite a long and abusive development cycle. It had a large, beautiful open world that was lovingly crafted to evoke mid twentieth century Los Angeles. The time that must have been spent getting every detail right, making all the cars and buildings and foley. Time that was utterly wasted.
When you got a mission you’d walk out of the precinct to your car. On the first couple, you’d get in and drive to your destination thinking “ooh, how nice this world looks”. For every other mission you’d just hold the skip to destination button. There were a few side missions that weren’t worth the silicon they were printed on, but otherwise the open world was just space. It existed to add an arbitrary amount of travel time to your mission. Each case would then take place in a couple of tight environments that never felt like they needed to exist within an open world. I wonder how many marriages would have been saved if Team Bondi had skipped making the entire city. The ending was bollocks too, but that’s an article for another day.
Other games are guilty of this, Mafia II being a prominent example. An open world must be core to your game design for it to work, otherwise it’s just a scenic commute. As anyone who’s lived in Wales will tell you, a commute only remains scenic for as long as it takes you to notice the sheep dung.
