Open world games need to get smaller and shorter – Reader’s Feature
A reader is frustrated with overlong open world games and worries that new titles like Dying Light 2 are becoming ruined by bloat.
There’s no doubt that when done right open world games offer an immersive, absorbing, and exhilarating experience. But most just don’t know when to stop, to the detriment of those making the games and those playing them.
The genre started to collapse under its own weight when the obsessive ‘bigger is better’ trend started over a decade ago, and the perception that a new sandbox game had to be about 50 times bigger than Skyrim to be considered worthy of the open world connoisseur’s attention.
This ultimately futile race, for the largest world, might have been won by Techland, who proudly claimed their upcoming Dying Light 2 will take 500 hours to complete, before quickly backtracking after realising it’s a very sad race, not worth winning.
The main story will apparently take around 20 hours – but allowing you to take the quickest route through the bloat creates its own problems.
If you burn through the main quests, ignoring all side content, this leaves niggling doubts that you are missing out on something. Quite often some of the best moments are hidden somewhere in the side missions and that can needlessly add on a pile of extra hours. Eventually, fatigue and resentment sets in.
The irony is that the bigger the world, the more restrictive it becomes.
Looking back, does anyone seriously have the time or the will to replay Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2 or any other bloated, overblown mess from start to finish? With the same missions and landscapes copied and pasted countless times to the point of tedium, and maps saturated with hundreds of icons constantly taking you out of the immersion, the
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