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Back in June, I flew to North America to see my partner (who lives on the other side of the world), and when I was there I had the opportunity to try out some Nintendo games on his Switch. My opinion was fairly lukewarm, and I came away with the impression that the high esteem in which many of their games are held seems to be driven primarily by legacy clout. Breath of the Wild was hands-down the Nintendo game that I enjoyed the most (I put a good few hours into exploring the world and experiencing the main story), and it's a game that has been hailed as a shining example of open-world done right and has been placed on many peoples' lists of best video games of all time. I thought it was good, but don't believe it's nearly good enough so as to warrant inclusion as one of my favourite video games.
The game is fun, and the fact that you can climb and scale basically everything in game and explore the world in a variety of different ways imparts a feeling of freedom that's quite addicting, an aspect in which the game excels - but in practice that all amounts to getting from A to B in a subtly different way. The game doesn't really justify its (extremely large) open world, and in order to progress the main story you're mostly going from one very clearly spelled-out quest marker to another. Now, these quest markers are necessary because of how sprawling the world is - the player would easily get lost without some form of guidance - but the game explicitly tells you where you are supposed to go, and doesn't really give you incentive to explore out of bounds. If you are making an open world game you need to capitalise on the open world part as a core aspect of the game.
Technically, you don't need to progress through the game using the path set out for you, and you can take it as fast or as slow as you want, you can even skip straight to Ganon after the tutorial. One of the most exhilarating parts in my playthrough was sneaking past a bevy of guardians on the way to Hyrule Castle, a place where I was certainly too underpowered and under-skilled to be at that point. From a game design standpoint, this was certainly meant to dissuade beginner players from trying to go straight for Hyrule Castle immediately and trying to skip past the main game's content, and it felt like I was exploring outside of the manicured, well-trodden path the game had laid for me. This felt great, and I did make it past all of the guardians, but eventually turned back since I was essentially forfeiting main game content by trying to cut straight to Hyrule Castle without much reason to try and do so.
Trying to explore for additional, optional content isn't particularly enticing either, since the world is kind of a content desert with large areas of dead air in between points of interest, and there are only so many shrines and Bokoblin outposts you can explore before the cost/benefit of exploration starts looking very unfavourable. As a result, I never really felt the urge to explore outside of the bounds of the game, and was pretty much always shoehorned into doing everything the game set out for me. It's effectively an open world game that doesn't actually really make use of its (all too large) open world.
To be fair to BoTW, this criticism can also be levelled against most open-world games - the idea of an open world is generally much more enticing than how it actually plays in practice. So far, the only game I've seen do it right is A Short Hike, which succeeds primarily because of the fact that it has a fairly small, condensed "open world" packed full of content relative to its size and an extremely simple objective which you can easily complete and that doesn't require a huge amount of trekking through empty terrain. Once you start trying to expand the game's scope, when you're trying to make a 10-15 hour game with a coherent throughline set in a large, sprawling open world, making your way through the world starts to feel very tiring, and content deserts are all but guaranteed unless you want development time to inflate hugely.
It should be noted that I am someone who does value plot fairly heavily in games, something that's generally not a focus of Nintendo's. BoTW appealed to me more than, say, any mainline Mario game because of its relatively consistent worldbuilding and the fact that it had a story that wasn't an extremely marginal part of the game. The seamless incorporation of compelling narratives into a game format is an important part of the medium for me. But even excluding the general weakness and inoffensiveness of Nintendo's stories and worlds, and just focusing on gameplay, their games have some issues that I find quite difficult to brush past, and I don't agree with how highly their games are generally ranked.
Change my mind.
I have a weird love/apathy relationship with open world games. I generally analogize them to a Golden Corral Buffet vs. a six course gourmet meal that is most AAA scripted games.
The buffet just has cheap, rapidly prepared food available in quantity, you pick and choose what you want, and gorge yourself on desserts if you so desire. Just don't expect high quality, and don't complain if you don't like what you eat, you picked it from the available options! That's open world games. A gourmet meal prepared by a chef will strictly control the presentation and actual preparation of the food you eat, and forces you to consume it in a particular order, but is generally crafted specifically to create the most delicious experience such that the meal itself is memorable to you.
I love a well-crafted story in a single-player game even if it is just a railroad that takes me from set-piece to set-piece (in the Uncharted series, sometimes the railroad IS the set piece) but sometimes I'd rather just watch a movie.
Open world games at least allow me to try things out that the game designer didn't knowingly program in so I feel less like I'm a slave to someone else's whims (shoutout to Bioshock 1). But the game worlds inevitably feel like they're miles and miles wide but barely ankle deep. Oh sure its cool that I CAN climb/fly/grapple hook my way up that mountain in the distance, but there's no compelling reason to GO up there. No, finding some random collectible isn't a strong impetus. "Because its there" really only works for real life summits. I can cheat-code my way to the top of an in-game mountain which takes most meaning from the 'achievement' of climbing it.
Batman: Arkham City was probably my favorite Hybrid of the two. Plenty to do in the 'overworld,' no 'hard' railroading but the story progresses in a direct linear fashion by imposing subtle restraints on your ability to explore. Ample surprises to find if you explore, and seriously well-crafted set-pieces at deliberate intervals. You WANT to explore, and exploring gives you useful rewards, and most of the 'random' encounters were actually fun and challenging, and the story wasn't an afterthought.
I realized the one experience I crave from open-world games is the feeling of being stalked implacably across the landscape by an enemy that is more dangerous than I am but also slightly slower so that if I concentrate on covering distance I can outpace them but every time I rest or get delayed I risk them catching and killing me.
As in, being the 'prey' in The Most Dangerous Game, and genuinely having to survive on wits and scavenged weapons as I try to find a way to bring the pursuer down.
Not many single-player open-world games provide this experience, especially in a mostly dynamic/unscripted way where I can keep on running for hours on end and have close encounters with the pursuer that don't have a predetermined outcome.
Getting in a running gun battle with a squad of trained killers who I have to slowly whittle down with traps, extremely limited ammunition, and improvised weapons in a geographically interesting locale would be an enjoyable challenge to me. Lol, I just realized that a game where you play as a random thug or henchman being hunted through the streets of Gotham by Batman and Co. would be AMAZING.
Far Cry 2 was able to do a pretty good job on this front, since enemies had impressive AI and the game mechanics constantly put you at a disadvantage, so it was possible to be caught off guard by an enemy squad and have to flee into the jungle and have them continue stalking you persistently while you maneuver around trying to score a kill and then run for cover as they return fire. The newer games in that series made the enemies too impotent to inspire the same fear, and also they're generally too dumb to actually chase you far.
It sounds like Breath of the Wild is the equivalent of a child's playground with lots of points of interests to play on and various toys which you can implement interesting strategies with, but no real risk inherent to the game and a very static, unresponsive world that doesn't necessarily invite different approaches. Can't speak to the story, which has historically ALSO been a strength of the series (don't care what anybody says, I enjoyed Twilight princess).
I guess I remain very hopeful that generative AI will allow open worlds to get a lot more dynamic and gain some depth that makes them more fun to play around in for longer, and can create a more complete illusion of a lived-in world where you are a smaller part of the whole.
In my opinion, Far Cry 2 is the best Far Cry game by a long shot. It’s the only one that actually delivered on the premise of being stranded in a hostile remote land and having to fight tooth and nail to survive. You have to be careful and think strategically. Especially when you’re playing on console and don’t have the ability to save anywhere. It also did the morally ambiguous premise a lot better than any of the others.
Strong agree.
"You're stranded, you're sick, almost everyone will try to kill you on sight, except a handful of companions who are reliable but have dubious loyalties. Oh and your weapons will break without warning. Try not to die."
I won't say I hated the following entries' gimmick of "Young American guy visits foreign country and becomes skilled badass" but it didn't have the same feel.
Playing as a morally ambiguous mercenary in a story with no obvious heroes and accepting missions from BOTH sides of a civil war and killing people who aren't framed as soulless henchmen to an evil regime is much better at conveying a sense of isolation and detachment from civilized society. You're not fighting to save your friends or, even, to get back home.
Hell, even the ambient audio from enemies made it feel like they ALSO got trapped in this shithole country because they wanted to earn a quick buck and had to fall in with one side or the other of the war. They have no allegiance to the nation and they're trying to kill the protagonist solely so he doesn't kill them first.
I keep praying for a remaster/remake that changes up the wonky weapon inventory system, fixes the respawning checkpoints, adds in predatory wildlife, and leaves EVERYTHING ELSE the same.
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