All I remember feeling after playing Assassin's Creed Origins, Ghost Recon Wildlands, Fallout 4 and so many others like them is that I am stuck with an expensive, bloated “thing” where the only modern parts of it were looks and the size of their playgrounds. The insistence on prominently featuring the open world itself, and the push for bigger and bigger worlds, have left other, more crucial aspects of games ignored. If there's one thing I can point to in most open-world AAA games, it's that their massive worlds are boring, and add nothing to the game but to puff out the hour count. They were billed as the star of the show, every time, as if every game with a big open world was the first of its kind. In all but very few, rare exceptions, the sprawling levels I’ve explored went on to weigh down the entire experience. Although true, I always felt that the phrase hides a more sinister implication. They stretch well beyond what was possible a few short years ago on an older generation. These games aren’t lying about how far-reaching their worlds are. It’s true for The Witcher 3 the same way it is for Skyrim, Assassin’s Creed Origins, Far Cry or Watch Dogs. It could’ve been Bethesda with an Elder Scrolls game, but you can just as easily see how the phrase applies to every open-world game being made today. I don’t know who the first to say it was. Whether they’re giving behind-closed-doors demos or pitching their games to the wider audience in trailers, there’s one sentence that inevitably makes its way into the conversation: “See that mountain over there? You can go there!”Įvery one of them, as earnestly as the last, says these magic words to illustrate how massive the world of their game is. There’s a particular string of words uttered verbatim by developers of open-world games in the last five or so years. The hundreds of square kilometres contained within amount to nothing more than the time you'll be wasting in your treks across them, right up until you unlock fast travel and forget they were open worlds to begin with. The biggest crime modern open-world games continue to commit is that they do very little with these vast worlds. Shadow of the Colossus may not fit the modern definition of open-world, but it’s the best example of the concept in its era.Īs I played more and more of it, I couldn't stop comparing and contrasting its design with that of modern games in the back of my head, particularly the games built around the size of their worlds. Playing it in 2018 is perfect, because it comes at a time when practically every big game has an open world, whether it needs to or not. I am now halfway through it, and I couldn’t be happier to have discovered it today. Somehow, though always aware of the game’s stature, I could never find it in me to give it a go. I never played Shadow of the Colossus before starting the 2018 remake a couple of weeks ago. See that mountain way in the distance? You won’t be going there, buddy - and that’s great! Shadow of the Colossus is a great reminder of why modern open-world games suck was first published on February 20, 2018. It’s been a wild year for VG247, so to celebrate we’re going to be republishing some of our favourite work published in 2018 – opinion pieces, features, and interviews, that we’ve enjoyed writing and reading, and which we believe showcase some of our best work.
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