Big Budget AAA Open World Games Hurt the Industry

I want to make a few major arguments with this premise, but it’s my main ambition to come across as clinical rather than emotional. I am going to fail at this. Big-budget open-world games are not good for the players, the developers, or the industry as a whole. They sure do make a lot of money but I don’t use that as a scale for quality, only a scale for how much effort was put into the marketing.

I, in no way, want to huck any shade at the people pouring their passion and hundreds upon hundreds of work hours into these games. They do amazing work and have great vision. They work themselves to near death so we can fling ourselves around New York as Spider-Man or run around Tsushima as a Samurai. And these people are godly for giving this to us so a jaded cynic like myself can talk smack. At this point, though, I bet even most of them would nod along to this article. Developers suffer over these games, and as we’ve seen happen over and over, the games suffer too. Then the players have to suffer through another buggy monotonous mess.

Breathtaking view or tedious travel time?

The Players

I used to love open-world games so much. That feeling of walking out into a big open area with seemingly limitless options was breathtaking and euphoric … for like three games. Then it just happened again and again, each new game with a world bigger and more packed full of stuff than the last. Don’t get me wrong, when I get into some new big-budget AAA open world, I get just as into it as I’ve gotten into other open worlds but now I have to treat them more as an addiction than a purely fun gaming experience.

I Can Stop Anytime!

To justify having these big worlds, developers have to pack them so full of stuff that you feel like you’re getting something out of exploring them. Would you play any of these open-world games if all they were barren? That’s if you even are playing an open-world exploration game. More often, open worlds are guided open worlds. I’m finally getting to playing through Spider-Man 2 and there’s no exploration whatsoever. Instead, it tells you where to go for everything. This makes some sense, if the devs made the effort to put something in the game, they don’t want to run the risk of you missing it. They essentially trade out exploration for a ‘To Do’ list and you go around ticking things off.

it’s weird how many games are inspired by Superman 64

This is where the addiction kicks in. Each little reward you get gives you a small dose of dopamine. A minor feeling of relief for having done work. One of the biggest lies we’re ever told is “this needs to be done” and we mostly tell ourselves these lies. Sure, if your house is on fire, you need to put it out. But I have 99 platinum trophies, most of which I do not need.

These are only little digital indicators that signify the effort and emotion I’ve put into all of these games. And I need more. Pretty sure I would die if I went cold turkey at this point. So how do I justify this? What makes them worth collecting?

Is all this worth your time?

What Is Your Time Worth?

Some platinums I can feel were worth it. Sekiro, Sifu, Crash Bandicoot 4. I’m currently trying to get the Hi-Fi Rush platinum which would also count because these games actually challenged me and made me a better gamer by the end. I can look at these trophies and feel like it was an effort well spent because the talents I achieved through them not only translate to all other games but to real life. Don’t let anyone tell you that gaming skills don’t translate to real life, they’re just coping.

Hi-Fi Rush has made me a better drummer

Anyway, my Spider-Man platinum trophies feel like nothing to me because all that was asked of me was running around collecting crap. I don’t even mean to say they were bad games. But in the hierarchy of games that are worth the effort and time you put into them, I would put big-budget open-world games at the bottom of the list.

Games Need To Ask More From Their Players

At the top of the list would be something like Sifu. It’s short with only five levels but the skill ceiling is high. So the only way to progress is to get better and there’s no limit to how good you can get. The skills you obtain in Sfifu are palpable and useful in every other game.

Something like Spooder Guy doesn’t require anything of you. Or anything Assassin’s Creed or Ghost of Tsushima. All you’re required to do is follow map markers. And if you’re struggling with some battle, you just upgrade your character and make it piss easy. Hell, even in Elden Ring, which has some of the hardest bosses of any game, you can follow this article I wrote and find a grinding spot that’ll have you at a high enough level to destroy everything within a few hours.

And I get that these are very different games going for very different experiences. I’m not saying every game should be as hard as Elden Ring. All I’m trying to do is get you thinking about where the worth lies in a game because the next point is my main criticism against open worlds, and that is how they sculpt our expectations.

Psychonauts 2, a fantastic linear game

How Expensive Are Your Expectations?

These high-budget games take a lot of time and effort to make. So it’s no wonder why they can slap them with such high price tags. But your wallet isn’t the biggest victim. When Jak and Daxter for the PS2 came out a couple of decades ago, it was a triple-A game at the time. I loved it so much that I would end up playing it again annually since it came out.

Even with the added time of collecting everything in the game, I would be surprised if anyone spent over 15 hours on their first play-through. Around the same time, GTA 3 was taking the world by storm with its big map that extended the playtime significantly by making you have to commute to every mission.

By the time Jak’s sequel had come out, the mentality of ‘big = good’ had already been ingrained. Jak 2 has got to be at least three times longer than Jak 1 and over half of the playtime is spent following map markers. Since then, games have just been getting bigger which makes players demand every game be over a set number of hours long. First, it was forty hours, then sixty. Now, if a player is buying an RPG, they scoff at anything under a hundred hours.

Hi-Fi Rush, another fantastic linear game

They’re Just Too Long

I remember renting Metal Gear Solid 2 with my brother as a kid and we clocked that game overnight before having to take it back. That’s one of the best memories I have and it wouldn’t have been plausible if they developed MGS2 today. I remember gamers complaining about Kena: Bridge of Spirits when that came out, saying it was too short. If that game came out back in the 90’s, it would’ve been considered quadruple A. Hell, sextuple A. Gamers were given a choice, two games with the same price but one offers ten times the amount of game as the other. And gamers were smart, they chose the bigger one because more game meant more fun. But, like everything, there’s a balance here.

If an anime fan recommended two anime to you, one with 70 episodes and another with 1000, but then told you that the larger anime has 930 episodes of filler content, which would you choose? Let’s be frank, traveling from one spot on a map to the other is filler. Games like Tears of the Kingdom and Spider-Man dress it up nicely by making movement the core loop, but there isn’t much sense of achievement just getting to where the objective is.

FFXVI has large environments but never felt like a typical open world game

Some crazy people with too much time on their hands might choose the larger anime. They might want to be introduced to a world that has so much content in it that they can get immersed and have it become part of their life. That’s what these big games do. Sixty hours in, the world of the game starts to feel like home. Do you know what that sounds like?

Stockholm Syndrome

I don’t wanna rag too much on the idea of getting so immersed in a game that it becomes a part of your life. I feel for the people who use game worlds and in-game communities to escape the struggles of real life. This person is me. Games like these should exist, they do exist, and they’re called MMORPGs. I’m quite a solitary gamer so I don’t personally like MMOs, but I love that they’re there. I love that people get so into these games and their lore that they make whole communities. People can make friends and even find their future spouses and stuff. And the games are endless, with content coming out continuously.

Animal Well achieved a feeling of exploration better than any open world game

These are the games that should have the big maps because you can go out and meet people in them. You can run around with your friends and do missions. Take out the community aspect of an MMO and it becomes a giant empty world. That’s what these big-budget AAA open-world games are. Big worlds packed full of mundane content that pleads for your attention and hopes you spend enough time with it that you look past the game’s faults. They’re prisons that convince you to love them.

The Developers

So much money is thrown at these giant games that I’m sure they make a lot of careers possible for new inspired devs. And for a lot of the veterans, it keeps their careers alive. Because the games are so big, there’s always work that needs to be done on them. This means any developer shouldn’t have too much trouble finding a job. So it’s good for them, right? Constant work means job security and a thriving industry. Then you remember that it’s part of the entertainment industry. For the devs, I can sum up their whole struggle around open-world games with one onomatopoeia …

Crunch

We’ve all heard the horror stories of developers being forced to work hundred-hour weeks in the months leading up to a game’s release. The biggest task in any game is quality assurance. In a linear game, it’s relatively less hard of a task because players only have one direction they can go in the game. So the devs and testers only have to work on making that path as perfect as possible. Open worlds are a whole other paradigm. They not only have to make sure the main path a gamer would take is perfect, they have to make the infinite other paths a gamer might take perfect as well. Which is of course impossible. Not to mention there’s so much more ground to cover.

Jedi Survivor was the first game that I noticeably cringed at when it introduced the open-world portion

Not only do they have to make these big boring worlds, but they have to painstakingly run over every piece of geometry from every angle to make sure the player character doesn’t fall through the floor. It’s a herculean task for these poor people who got into game making because they wanted to be artists. Not torture victims. And let’s be frank, that’s exactly the right word to use. Making someone work a hundred hours a week for months is literal torture. Not only would it completely destroy their passion for gaming, they don’t even have the freedom to implement their artistic decisions.

The Dev’s Vision

In a linear game, a developer can curate every inch of the level design. Bloodborne’s maps feel so tightly wound. As you discover more of the labyrinth, you find shortcuts and interesting side paths that all layer onto each other, making all of the level design more memorable. It feels like it’s actually designed. Like I’m playing something that the developer sculpted for me.

Open worlds don’t feel designed at all. They feel like giant sandboxes with stuff randomly strewn about. Though they probably aren’t auto-generated, they might as well be. Every hill or light spattering of forest in Tsushima is barely different from any other. In a linear game, if there’s a random tree within the level boundary, it’s probably important. Elden Ring has amazing lore, bosses, weapons, and RPG mechanics, and none of that is enhanced by the fact that it’s an open world.

The only good parts in Elden Ring are the non-open world parts

Travel Is Boring

FromSoftware games are unparalleled with their environmental storytelling, and Elden Ring has more lore than any of them. But before, when the maps were linear labyrinthine-type designs, the developers could sprinkle in the environmental storytelling with the confidence that you’ll most likely see it. In Elden Ring, though, you can go anywhere. They can still sprinkle their lore but it’s very possible that you’re never going to see it.

I remember getting excited when coming across a new enemy type in Bloodborne because they would tell me so much about the area I was currently in. In Elden Ring, it was more just like “Okay, I guess these are the enemies in this area then.”

Elden Ring is the clearest to me with this point because of how masterful the level design was in previous FromSoftware games. But it’s the same with all open-world games. The city in Jak 2 is nowhere near as interesting as the levels in Jak 2. The story of Ghost of Tsushima is great. But it could’ve been so much better if the devs had complete control over the pacing by having control over the level design. Open worlds don’t help games, they take devs away from the design and create copious amounts of tedious work for them. And that’s when the work is completed.

Jak 2 is still one of my favourite games but the open world doesn’t help it

Incomplete Games

Close your eyes and think of a big open-world game that came in the last decade as an incomplete buggy mess. No doubt, you already had one before you finished reading that sentence. A lot would probably think something like Cyberpunk 2077 or Starfield. I think Baldur’s Gate 3. But I can go further than the obvious cases of games that are released unfinished.

Because these open-world games are so big, they tend to be packed full of mechanics so they can slowly introduce you to more things you can do as the game progresses. A lot of these mechanics have no space to explore them fully before the game ends. This to me is another indicator of an unfinished game.

At around the 90% mark of Ghost of Tsushima, you unlock the ability to confuse opponents so they attack each other. And there’s nothing after that point that requires you to use it. Elden Ring has an entire crafting mechanic that no one uses because who cares. These scream to me as mechanics that they just threw in there because they didn’t have enough time to fully recognize them. And they didn’t have enough time because they had to waste it all on making sure their big stupid world worked.

I’m glad I got to reuse this image because I find it hilarious

But Linear Games Are Still Coming Out

You might be thinking “But open world games are just one genre, great non-open world games are still coming out all the time”. That is true but you also might have noticed that most of those non-open world games are indie games.

I’m not arguing that great work isn’t being done. I’m saying that open worlds are the new meme in mainstream AAA games. I say ‘new’ but they’ve been pretty dominant for years now. And the fact that amazing new linear games are coming out all the time in the indie world only bolsters the argument that open worlds are unnecessary.

Open worlds only make a game bigger with more avenues to explore. But I feel like a lot of people are forgetting that most games, linear or not, have plenty of exploration in them as is. There are collectibles, side quests, secret missions, secret paths, all the same stuff open worlds pack their games with. But it doesn’t waste as much of your time going between them.

Jak and Daxter is just as good today as it was two decades ago

Hi-Fi Rush is one of the most linear games out. But there are still currencies for buying different things to upgrade yourself, secret paths and collectibles all over the place, and secrets that only unlock after you’ve beaten the game. So there’s so much replay value as you go back through the levels and explore them further to collect everything. Open worlds will downright tell you where to go. They’ll make you fight a couple of weak enemies because they don’t want to challenge you with such little reward. Then they’ll give you a piece of crafting material or upgrade currency that changes the game in the smallest way possible. They’re just too big and packed full of crap.

Metroidvanias do not count as open worlds

The Industry

One thing every capitalist needs to learn is that constant growth is unsustainable. It’s easy to think, because the industry is booming and these games make so much money, that open worlds were a necessary element for the growth of the gaming industry as a whole but I would argue the complete opposite.

The projection of gaming reaching such heights was obvious to anyone in the 90s. Games were exciting and more and more people were getting excited for them. And quality games were coming out constantly. Any new Mario or Zelda would be groundbreaking. Metal Gear Solid, Banjo Kazooie, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, DOOM, Street Fighter, Tekken, Sonic. These all got big within a decade of each other and they’re still the biggest franchises today. Except for Banjo … poor bear dog man.

Video games then hit the mainstream. investors needed incentive to pour money into a game. And the only incentive they need is assurance that they’ll make their money back with interest. So games had to start following formulas. Game companies had to concentrate on the numbers and see what people are currently enjoying. This would inform them on what to put into their next game. Have you noticed that almost every game that came out this year has a parry mechanic? This isn’t anything profound. You see it everywhere in entertainment and it can be good sometimes, I personally love parry mechanics. Where gaming went wrong, though, was when they started competing with MMOs.

Celeste, another fantastic non-open world game

MMOs can get away with having big worlds. But companies wanted players to take their eyes off their MMOs so they could concentrate on their games. Not realizing that MMO players will still play your game and just go back to their MMO afterward. If anything, they want your games to be shorter so they can get back to their MMO quicker.

Games Deserve Better

Making open worlds mainstream only made it harder, and take longer, for new games to be made. Which, in turn, made them more expensive to make. Gaming was always going to be massive. But open worlds have only made games more expensive for both the players and the companies. They’ve made the games themselves worse while torturing their developers. And they’ve artificially inflated the expectations of gamers so they find it harder to enjoy shorter games. But hey, at least you get to waste hundreds of hours of your life running around giant maps.