Open world games scare me

The open world game epidemic keeps me up at night.

I played with quite a few games in my life and watched even more playthroughs. But open world games honestly scare me out of my pants. So I created a neat numbered list to explain why.

Disclaimer: This is an awfully personal take on open world games. I would never want to hurt anybody's feelings. With that said...

1. The Legend of Zelda - Breath of the Wild

When this game came out I was in a phase when I would watch any playthough by my favorite streamers. My mind was in a difficult place so I watched EVERYTHING, to silence my brain.

But when pepple started to play with Breat of the Wild I started to quit watching the videos. As a viewer I felt like the game had no real stucture. I know this is not true, and I understand why people love it so much.

But for me it felt like an endless to-do list, where you don't even know how to perform the tasks.

If you have a fixed amount of hours every week to play this game would take weeks if not months to actually explore. Which is amazing if you think about value. But as a casual gamer this scared and also annoyed me as a concept.

You can focus on the story beat the game, but than you missed so much from the experience that I can argue you didn't even played the same game as others who took the time to explore the open world. This thought makes me really scared of open world games and made me skipped them all most interely.

2. I hate buzzwords

If a game mostly advertises itself by being an open world game my red flad detector is already going off. It reminds me of the time when movies had 3D in their name because some executives thought people wanted a headache with their popcorn and awfully large coke.

So when a game's marketing campaign focuses on the open world part I instantly assume it'll lack depth and an actual story. These games want the player to grind and grind for endless hour because they want to be the next Minecraft. But the problem is they miss the point. Which leads us to our next point...

3. Spiderman. PlayStation. 2018. Don't act stupid, you know which one I'm talking about.

I loved this game. It was 2020 and we were sitting on our new couch with my bf, playing this all day while the world tried to learn how to work from home. I checked my emails a few times a day, but my eyes were actually locked to the TV.

We ate up the story, the graphics and the mechanics.

But after the story ended we were left hungry for more. So we started to finish up all the sidequests the open world game offered. First it was fun, but it slowly became the never ending grind that actually makes no difference.

Yes, you get some new skins. Yes, you get some extra cut scenes. But in reality nothing changes. The open world didn't offer anything new. We couldn't really spend more time in it. It was the same kind of quest over and over again.

At the end this actually tainted our perception of the game.

Conclusion

So open world games scare me because they sometimes offer to much, they offer not enough or offer actually nothing. You can say that every game in existince has the potential to be great, so why did I single out open world games?

I think my apathy comes from the endless stream of open world games AAA studios had put out in recent years. I'm not the first one to point out this phenomenon, so most likely some you feels this way too. I love to immerse myself in a game. But something about this open world trend rubs me the wrong way.

And do you want to hear the funniest thing?

After I finish writing this blog I'm going back to playing Baldur's Gate 3. The game with over 130 hours of cut scenes and thousands of endings. The game that you can never actually beat.

I'm a moron. And I stand by it.