It kinda depends…? personally I play genshin and find it fun, but sometimes exploring for too long get tiring

Is the openworld meant for exploring, like pre-Starfield Bethesda game? Yeah i love those.

Is the openworld crafted only for wasting player time, like Ubisoft game? Nah.

Is the openworld crafted as a backstage for the main story but also can be explored, like GTA franchise or dying light? Yeah, those are nice.

Is the openworld only used as a backstage for the main story that doesn’t encourage exploration because it conflict with player urgency, like Metro Exodus? I’d rather not.

As long as it’s a bit of a sandbox: hell yeah. But there needs to be stuff happening, things to do. I love games like GTA, Cyberpunk, Just Cause, Stalker, because you can just go around the world and experience random stuff happening. Sometimes I don’t want a goal, but just a sandbox to create my own stories.

It depends. I like Open World games that feel like there’s a purpose to them being Open World.

Like the Elder Scrolls. The point is for you to feel like you’re living in Tamriel. There’s a point to it being Open World.

Or Far Cry (which I admittedly haven’t played), where you’re supposed to be lost in some place, deep in a place that is hostile to you.

And I might get crucified for this, but I honestly feel like the first Breath of the Wild game had no real reason to be Open World. The second one? Yeah, they figured it out. But the first one feels like it was OW just to be OW.

Tl;Dr, the game has to have a reason to be OW. Otherwise they’re just aiming for quantity of content and poitnlessly hurting the quality.

I hit a wall recently with Star Wars Outlaws. The open world is cool until you realize that every enemy base has two or three possible entry points, complete with yellow-painted paths. There’s no room for creative infiltration - either you do it Ubisoft’s way, or it isn’t possible in the game. The NPCs in the open world just drive around aimlessly. It doesn’t feel like anyone in the world is trying to achieve anything besides you. It makes me realize how far we have come with modern open world games like the recent Zelda games. Without room for emergent gameplay, an open world feels like little more than a framing device for a game that is actually linear.

Mostly nay. I am not against open-world in premise, but most open-world games do it poorly. I think that a lot of studios make their games open world because these types of games are popular, but don’t give a thought to what that means for their specific game. They want their worlds to seem expansive and think this is an easy solution but it isn’t.

If you make an open-world game, it needs at the very least two things: a compelling method of traversal (mechanics of interacting with that open world), and thoughtful, intentional design (not just large stretches of trees and rocks between towns). I think Breath of the Wild is a paragon of good open-world design.

open world is great if the world is interesting to explore

I like the idea of open world games. In practice it depends entirely on the execution, and amount of free time I have. I enjoyed the hell out of Cyberpunk 2077, but have zero desire to play GTA6 or the latest Ubisoft snoozefest.

If an open world is just there for collectibles/unlocks or just feels otherwise unnecessary to the primary selling feature of the game (like story), then yeah its a hard pass.

Otherwise, if the open world is actually a core part of the game like in most MMO’s such as Old School Runescape, then it can be quite enjoyable.

I tend to agree, open world is becoming just a box to tick off for AAA developers, which means it just gets put in as filler basically. Halo Infinite is the worst example I can think of. However I do think there are 2 ways open world can be justified: if the world is just packed so full of interesting stuff that the game just gets huge, or if the way of traversing that world is fun.

Category 1 would be games like Morrowind, Skyrim , Fallout 4, or even Mass Effect on a smaller scale. There’s just so much to do that it becomes an open world on its own. Category 2 would be games like the Arkham series , Assassins Creed, or Forza Horizon, where getting from point A to point B is fun on its own.

Open world is great when it’s done right, but since when has Ubisoft or EA made a good game in the past 10 years?

I find the opposite. I love video games, always have, but these days my time is more limited, I might go months without touching them, and I just play to relax. So over the past 10 years or whatever, things like GTAV, Fallout 4, and AC:Odyssey have worked out really well for me. I can pick them up whenever I want and either settle in for some story or just waste time exploring, doing side quests, finding collectibles.

Like what would I rather do in real life? Work toward a single goal day after day, or see what’s on top of that mountain over there just because?

I like them, I prefer sandbox games over linear ones. I think it’s the sandbox nature of the game that matters more than open world though.

Ni!

I love an open world game that is done well - Horizon: Zero Dawn, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. But so often it is just done because thats what they think is the hot thing, and it does not work

I only really like STALKER I think, because it’s generally compressed and dense rather than stretching out over nothingness. It’s technically multiple levels than being overworld I guess.

I didn’t get Breath of the Wild.