Let’s get this straight, this is almost 3 weeks overdue.
While I’ve been away, I had my whole writing experience completely, well, rewritten. But I think we can take a stab at the end of our diatribes.
It had to end somewhere, after all, I’ve created several pieces on the worlds of open worlds. In this one I’m taking a hard look at open worlds that have nothing in them. Sure, you get given a lot to do, but you’re doing nothing.
We’re looking at the bad and the good of this, not just a straight line of complaining. Mostly, we’re looking at two game series, Assassin’s Creed and Forza Horizon.
There’s an assassin in my boot, and he has a feather
I’ll be honest, Assassin’s Creed 1 is a deadly boring game. I played it weeks after it released and found it such a frustrating drag that I never reached the end. Sure, the story was amazing, but not much else.
If only a young Sock knew back then. Assassin’s Creed 2 is the game that bit me, infected my blood, and then left me out to dry like yesterday’s lettuce.
See, these games were always going to be open-world games. From the moment the core concept was created. AC2 is where we get a proper taste of it as well; each map is open to us, not from the start, but eventually. And that is A-Okay.
Brotherhood, Revelations, AC3, Black Flag, and more follow suit. They also do a few other things consistently from that point on. They keep freaking making useless collectables and side missions.
As an example, on my first Xbox account, the only game I ever 100% got all achievements in was AC2. I say that with no pride. It was a slog only made possible by a bored teenager with 3 more weeks of vacation.
I collected every single one of those damn feathers. All I got a cape that ups my difficulty for a completed game.
And this is the problem. AC games are filled to the brim with things to do. So much so that you’re running around trying to just find mission aims. This thought took a while to become clear to me and as you try to play through the games, you’ll realise the same.
See, by the time AC Unity released it became a problem. About 30 minutes into the game the map itself becomes unusable. So filled with little quest markers that you’re left frustrated, bored, confused, and a myriad of other adjectives for the word: Overwhelmed.
See, Assassins creed is the dark side of open world games. The one where the main thought seems to be “We have to give them things to do, anything”. From pigeons, mini brawls, side quests, main quests, everything is all mixed together.
Leaving you ending each session feeling like you did a lot, but not really a lot at all.
Drive faster, the coffee is getting COLD
For those of you who haven’t tried playing any of the games, Forza Horizon is basically “What if we just get a bunch of petrol heads and let them loose in a country” and it works.
It works so damn well that even the one I least enjoy, FH5, I still love it. I can and have spent hours just driving around a virtual Mexico getting lost.
See, when you open your map screen, it’s the same as any AC game, except with one fundamental twist. There’s no actual story.
It’s such a brilliant thing to do that I’m about 99% sure no other developer really understands it. I know EA and Need for Speed never truly understood it (Despite Hot Pursuit fundamentally not having it either).
You can enter a session of Forza Horizon aiming to finish a specific race, and five hours later get spat out the other side. 7 cars richer and trying to see how far you can jump over a river with a three wheeled car.
At no point during any gaming sessions does Forza Horizon pretend that it’s more than it is either. Sure, there is some kind of “Festival” storyline present, but nothing is locked. Not in the way we think about it at least.
As long as you are racing and gaining levels, the “story” unfolds. And it’s just so liberating. There are no “Oh let’s include this to keep them busy” sections. Every race, every challenge, every breakable billboard leads to a new experience.
And it’s something that so many open world games need to learn from.
Sure, you can have 1000 different tasks for me to do, but if I feel that any of them are slog, they’re not worth including.
Where do we go from here?
Open world games are these wondrous things that hit the market more than 2 decades ago like a storm. It gripped the gaming community until every AAA developer tried to create one.
They’ve undergone several changes and now that we’re approaching 2030, it’s time we accept a few things about them.
- Developers will always struggle to make them interesting
- Some games should never be open world games
- Just because there’s a lot to do, doesn’t mean there’s much you want to do
As I sign off on this, the final diatribe, I want to say thanks for sticking around. I’ve never been critical about these types of games because I hate them.
No, instead it’s because each one has so much promise that it’s frustrating when they fail. Worse, some have their potential for greatness squandered in rushed or lazy productions.
If there is any type of game that should truly feel limitless it should be open world games. Unfortunately, the industry has rarely been able to create something that does this.
Which I find ironic, considering Minecraft is probably the best open world game in existence. Given that, fundamentally, it’s never-ending, telling a million stories on a million servers.
