The Open World Is Dead, Sorry | Extra Punctuation 

There's still no captions in the latest Zero Punctuation. Also what happened to the older written Extra Punctuations?

I need to know if this rant is after he's played elden ring. I think open world is still gonna be good for it

Hearing Pauses and breaths in Yahtzees review is extremely unsettling.

You, sir. YOU. Can't argue with reason. Or just enough husky in a voice. Anyway, hardly ever "Thumbs Up" a video. Maybe ten in all. Gave this one a thumb, subscribed, clicked on the bell and am now posting a comment. Quadruple threat. Me wants more. Maketh it happen, Yahtzee, Esq.

Missed opportunity for the theme

Not only do they never learn anything, but they now complain whenever someone raises the bar, ie. Baldur's Gate 3.

@@iExploder Did they complain on their own initiative or was it in the context of being asked what they thought about Baldur's Gate 3? I didn't follow that controversy when it happened.

Let’s all laugh at an industry that never learns anything Tee Hee Hee!

Absolutely

Yeah, stuff similar to his Link Between Worlds episode but not being a bait.

He's been doing this for years in written form.

This feels like an evolution of let's all laugh at an industry...

Exactly. For example, making "profit" in GTA Online is NOT fun anymore. Oh, sure, there are over 100 ways to make money, but they are all so similar that they all make the experience of zipping across the gigantic map of that game VERY BORING. I only play that game when new STORY content gets released for it.

I think there's a concept in gourmet cooking called 'mouth fatigue' or something. It points out that even if the first bite of a dish is mind blowing, by the fifth bite you're going to start getting sick of it, especially when that kind of food is so rich and intensely seasoned. That's why taster menus have such tiny amounts of each dish. Otherwise, if you want a bigger portion it will be a much more enjoyable experience if it is all good with some special garnishes or whatever, rather than perfect but too much. I think this parallels very well to games in the way Yahtzee was talking about. Either have small-scale games that really wow the player, or pace the highs and lows and variety better if you want a larger game.

Right, developers don’t understand that I can get bored doing stuff in the same game.

@@linux750 Yeah, but most of the stems from the fact that making money in GTA online was hard capped to begin with. Started with no ways to make money in private lobbies, meaning people were always at the mercy of cheaters. The ways to make money were incredibly piss poor, creating a massive grind just to buy 1 half decent car or residence. Especially before the major heists or CEO missions came into effect. But now there is so many different things to try and collect and buy that even the new ways to earn money in GTA online still feel piss poor. GTA online always had too much to spend on and not enough in game money. Ironically, Payday 2 had the opposite problem for a while, which was too much in game money and not enough to spend it on.

They think it’s content, but we see the same gameplay repeated in a different place. Ubisoft for example, the climb the tower to unlock map and activities get old pretty quick. Even if the world is big and beautiful, the gameplay loop is just so repetitive. Open world should only serve 2 purposes, or video in general actually, to be a toy box or to be a simulation. RDR, GTA open world are rather empty but fill with repetitive activities. However, they are simulation open world. They allow you to be a cowboy in America, or be an American driving through American cities. That’s fine on its own. The toy box are MGS and BotW. MGS5 and BotW provides that playground that open world should have shot for. They provide a great amount of tools to mess around the world with, which most open world games don’t have. Hell, Deus Ex provides more approach to solve a problem than modern open world. They just give you a big world, some niche gameplay element for open world then give you the same problem to solve. If I need to steal something from an enemy camp, why can’t I sneak in if I choose to? Why must I find ways to clear it? Why can’t I put on a disguise and trick someone into giving it to me? Their open world lessen the need to design and script and the game, and more time for those important graphics. It’s our fault in the end. Most of us are suckers for pretty graphics.

Well, it can be if doing so pisses off a NPC, who then spawns their posse on top of you and start blasting due to you stealing their leader's horse.

I failed a mission in Red Dead Redemption 2 because I nudged Dutch too much with my horse while trying to hitch it. No joke

I once failed the saint denis bank heist mission for… get this… doing what he told me to do, literally. I did nothing wrong, we were approaching the door to rob the bank, and it cut to a fail screen, saying i “sabotaged the heist” and had to port backwards 10 steps and do it again.

@@HamTheBacon So it just glitched out?

@@Selrisitai i guess so, i never did figure out what i did wrong, cuz about 15 seconds later i did the exact same thing, and it didn’t fail me.

@@Shorty_Lickens but the stuff in oblivion and Skyrim are garbage compared to Morrowind.

True. That said, there's a depressing realism in that emptiness. The vast majority of the world has nothing to do with any grand epic quests - just people living their lives and trying to keep this "civilization" thing from collapsing any further. Daggerfall being a whole lot of nothing is what a "realistic" open world would be - ages of mind numbing travel time and uneventful road trips. So... yeah, Yahtzee's onto something. His point about content having a maximum point of benefit to a game is spot on. We've long since reached the point where the issue is less "how BIG can we make this?" but how can we make that bigness meaningful?

Isn't "Arena" actually bigger than "Daggerfall"?

@@PrinsaVossum no, Arena covers all of Tamriel, but Daggerfall's land area was bigger.

@@Nanook128 how?

I haven't played Knight yet, but I did think City was greatly improved over Asylum by its larger setting. Where do you fall on that one?

@@Alloveck I love both City and Knight, haven't played Asylum. Arkham Knight is a technically amazing game even in 2021. But it super padded out the game with a lot of repetitive tasks. One mission requires rescuing 15 different firefighters hidden all around the city. The DLC also repeated this with a mission to rescue 6 cops hidden in car trunks.

@@AeroGold1 Let’s not forget the goddamn riddler trophies!

@@Alloveck I think City was the best of the series as they managed to maintain that same tightness that asylum had while simply giving us more of it.

Gothic was very much like that. Gothic 1 was just big enough to make exploring it fun, and just small enough to make exploring it rewarding. Gothic 2, while universally considered the best of the series, was already a tad too big for me, especially with the expansion. And then they completely shit the bed with Gothic 3. After the franchise reboot with Risen, You would think they learn from it... Nope. Exactly the same problem. Risen 1 was small, but tight. 2 and 3 got bigger and bigger - and worse and worse.

That's pretty much why I always get so bored with Ubisoft games, they have museum worlds.

But then they either have to give you what amounts to cut-scenes of the toys working or being used, or have your character pick it up and it's just doing what it does, or you need to come up with new forms of interactivity for every object in the game.

Museum Worlds™ is a good term. That's why I like the Yakuza games. Can't move very far on the map without at least something or other to interact with.

Teardown is a good game for that. It has some big levels rather than one interconnected open world, but it is highly interactive

I can't agree with this more! Deus Ex HR/MD really got me into interactivity and smaller but denser worlds. Most of these huge open world games are so static and lifeless that it doesn't matter how big they are. NPC should have routines. More buildings should be enterable. There should also be more emergent gameplay and random moments that help keep the illusion that the world is functioning outside your influence.

Yakuza completely flipped the script for me on how I see open worlds. I'll take good old small and dense Kamurocho any day over yet another generic open world title.

@@kartikayysola oh yeah, and the fact that they found a way to reuse Kamurocho and keep it fresh for YEEEARS speaks volumes about the skill of RGG.

@@kartikayysola yakuza doesnt feel open world to me though. its kinda like saying god of war 2018 is open world. the game has side content for sure (currently trying to beat the valkyries) but you dont really transverse through the world like in gta driving a car or red dead riding a horse. or breath of the wild gliding across the map. its more of just a adventure game thats it and thats fine

@@thelel6591 that's a totally fair view. It leans a little more open world in my eyes mainly due to the sense of freedom you have in engaging with the world, but you're right. It's not all the way there and its deviations from what open worlds generally are were a breath of fresh air for me (although Elden Ring was a nice reminder for what good open worlds should be like).

I only discovered the Yakuza games like a year and a half ago and I'm glad I finally did! Every six months or so I get to go through something so deliciously ridiculous for the first time! I've finished 0, Kiwami 1 and Kiwami 2 and they've all been terrific!

I've got this stuck in my head now.

Pitty the syllables don't work. 😭Algos is too short too.

@@liquidvapour it woks if you meld algorithms into only 3 syllables.

@@martinbauclausen2914 it’s a gift and a curse.

Algorithms killed the open world game Algorithms killed the open world game Red Dead 2, and GTA I'm done with it all, it's all the same oh oh ooh oh oooooh

Hmm. I've played enough Assassin's Creed games (read: all of them) to understand when the series finally shot its creative wad and devolved into bloody-minded repetitiveness. (Hint: it was at Origins.) I built a house in Skyrim and adopted a little orphan, and it was fun for a little while until I realized that it offered no tangible rewards. I can't take my army of orphans and my invincible Daedric armor and invade Cyrodiil to take my rightful place as the Dragonborn Emperor, can I? I played Far Cry 4 and it's just a giant checklist. I can't even sample the alternative endings without playing the whole thing again. Once I have a preferred loadout and maxed all the perks, all I can do is make arbitrary moral choices that deliver chunks of the perfunctory story. While it's certainly fun to murder soldiers, I can do that in any game. We have to be able to recognize when we are immersed in a sunk cost fallacy: I've put all this time and money into a game so it needs to mean something.

Kyle might (if he surfed on the hype wave of games), but not Timmy; his brain isn't "broken" - yet. Different starting points. Also a 10yo would have NO idea what it meant living in a world of Ataris & Commodores & Amigas - hell, not even Kyle. To them, open-worlds are just status quo. Bit harder to bring people outside of the "cave". Ooooh, emojis: -

Yeah but the current open world dullard meta is stagnation at its finest. We wont get anything better if this keeps up, and the consoomers gotta understand this if they want anything good at all. But I bet they well, and when far cry 7 comes out and doesnt sell at all or something the CEOs will hurt a bit lol. Though the poor bastards being crunched to death will just be sacked.

Honestly I'm kind of on the same boat, I'm starting to get sick of every new triple A game being basically the same. I never even finish those big open world sandboxes anymore. I play them for a couple of hours and stop because they bore me. But I'll play the shit out of a game like Darkest Dungeon, for example.

@@sid6645 I Donno, tripple A's will always try to aim for the "next big thing" and for the past 5 years it's been open world so they pour 5 gagilion money regardlesss of outcome, but there will always be a market that triple A can't fullfill and as soon as they realize that, it will crumble. Until then, the open world genre will suffer for now, but change will appear!

Outer Worlds was like this. It had small segments for each planet. It was a really good game. But when I finished it I had no desire to do anything else with it. I have never stopped playing Fallout 3, NV, 4, Skyrim, and Oblivion. They aren't games, they are places I visit. When you aren't beholden to a narrative you can just wander. And wandering aimlessly is a worthwhile pastime in and of itself.

Small open worlds with inherently fun gameplay and obvious surface level goals but with additional powerups, secrets and extras tucked away is best I think.

Dragon's Dogma dark arisen!

The Yakuza/Like A Dragon games have a perfect use of an open world imo, so much so that the playerbase is pretty much fine with the games reusing the same map for a few games

Dead Rising 2 is also done very well.

It’s a shame every (including Yahtzee himself) seemed to hate that game cuz Prague still is imo the peak of open world city design

@@patricktheawesomeTV I think it's just comparison to the predecessors. Like Deus Ex games now are pretty decent, but Deus Ex original was a Juggernaut of storytelling, complex motivations, grey ethics, and a story as deep as the ocean and music that Slapped for the time. Compared to the original, Deus Ex now is wayyy less complex, the characters way less 3-dimensional and fleshed out, and the plots feel less like a Deus Ex game and more like Bond movie plots. It's like releasing something on quality level with, say, Iron Man 3 when your last creation was Lord of the Rings. Even if it's Good, it's Not gonna compare to the Big Boy.

Deus Ex is one of the most revered gaming series ever, partly for this reason. MetroidVania adapted well into 3D First-Person PC games. For console, we had Resident Evil.

Yeah I know where you're coming from, I played the game a year or two ago and it was the most amazing thing ever

@@patchwurk6652 It's funny you mention the comparison to James Bond, since the lead writer for the original Deus Ex thought that it felt more like a Bond movie when he wrote the script for it rather than the X-Files vibe that they were initially going for.

How did you get the little Yahtzee emjoi? I think that's awesome

@@zaxthedestroyer675 he has a youtube Escapist membership

It's surprising how much you have to write to fill a 7 minute video. Makes me appreciate video essayists even more.

"It took me seven minutes to write, I thought it would take seven minutes to read!"

There are already gaming auteur that are shit as the snobby higher executives, just saying. (Even New Hollywood choked on itself by being repetitive)

No, we need more dev studios like Ghost Ship Games.

Exactly we need more David Cage! /s

When I look the the current blockbusters, I can't help but think it's kind of ironic that Yatzee would mention "high-brow concepts and Auteur directors" as a sort of natural evolution of the medium. We are back to the era of gigantic epics - pehaps more so than ever, with multi-billion dollar franchises about world threating conflicts filled with hyper-detailed GCI and special effects, but very little substance.

@@joaomarcoscosta4647 that's his point though, these mega franchise offerings are so bland because they're made by committee to be inoffensive for a market of teenage boys and China (Anthony Mackie's words). An auteur film director doesn't necessarily need *that* much money, what they need is the control necessary to apply vision, and innovation. Aliens was a relatively low budget blockbuster even for the time, but with one determined director being a pain in the arse perfectionist they created something special. Or look at Wes Anderson's entire career. Far from giant budgets, but unique masterpiece after unique masterpiece. Meanwhile other than Denis Villeneuve and Iñarittu there's lately been a complete absence of highbrow concept blockbuster films. Everything is reductionist or deconstructive to try and hit as wide an audience with a simplified an overarching objective as possible. Most of the MCU is just save the world, no deep compelling character conflicts (even Civil War failed miserably in this regard despite solid source material).

I'd rather play some wacky David Cage nonsense than another generic open world game because at least wacky David Cage nonsense is interesting, if only because I'm making fun of it while I'm playing. The Breath of the Wilds and Xenoblade Chronicles X's and Far Cry 5's of the world are too bland to enjoy even ironically unless you've got some real fanboy goggles on or just don't know any better.

Auteur production just produces a bunch of pretentious, out-of-touch, and arrogant people who are convinced they're changing the world with the schlock they call art. Honestly, I think that's what's caused the glut of the moralizing corporate culture of current Hollywood.

@@yourgameisstupid Well sure, I'll take a Neil Breen or James Nguyen piece of baffling bad cinema over bland Oscar bait or generic Netflix actioner.

@@Potidaon He strikes me as very much in favor of "purity of artistic vision", which as often as not means "control freak self-indulgence". And I think it's too easy for people with Yahtzee's outlook to conflate "creation by committee" with the collaborative nature of films and games. The difference between good collaboration and "committee" is hugely subjective.

@@yourgameisstupid Breath of the Wild holds up alright as a Zelda game I guess. As an Open World game though yeah you're right. I think the open world in Link's Awakening on Game Boy Color was more interesting.

Yoko Taro has talked about exactly this in a GDC talk, where he summed up his approach as "copying Ocarina of Time". He explains that Ocarina had a perfect world size: enough space to give the feeling of grandeur and limitless adventure, but having a "perfect path" through that the player is guided towards to maintain good pacing for gameplay and narrative. And so Ocarina was used as the template for Nier Automata specifically and many of his world designs generally. A lot of his approach to game design comes directly from him copying Ocarina of Time, and that's a very good thing.

@@sEaNoYeAh I dont think I ever fully watched that talk but you can really tell from the NieR games that OoT's world was a significant guideline for their own, and I agree that it works brilliantly. Add to that that both NieR games also allow the player to run a lot faster than most games would and it makes traversing the world actually interesting, since having to go somewhere on the other side of the map doesnt become a 20+ minute wait before actually being able to resume gameplay.

I wouldn't consider Nier: Automata (didn't play the first one my bad) an open world similar to FC, AC, GTA 5 Etc. they were mostly self contained levels that were connected to each other. If anything, is closer to a Metroidvenia than an openworld.

Even with as cool and diverse as the scenery in those games were, it still involved way too much running back and forth across endless expanses for my taste. Either pack that thing so full of random encounters and engaging combat that I can’t go 30 seconds without running across something interesting, or break the cool scenery into a series of mini maps that you can either jump back and forth between like Witcher 3, or travel through linearly like Witcher 2. Of course even a linear game with a small map can seem massive in scale if done right. Case in point the og god of war games using lots of forced camera perspective to make everything seem vast and epic in proportion.

@@kyriss12 The thing about Witcher 3 is that they promised before the game launched that open world will be seamless with no loading screens. They couldn't do it due to hardware limitations, but Next Gen patch is coming and maybe, we will get what was promised. An open world with no loading screens in between. Imagine that in The Witcher 3. Perfect living Open World.

this one felt like the fastest yet

I would hit the like button on your comment but its currently at 69 and I just cant ruin that

Any% all sponsorships

@@Gahanun any% all sponsorships stutterless intro speedrun

technically they were, its more about keeping the industry moving rather than saying one particular thing is inherently worse. even yahtzee pointed out its not a problem with the openworld itself, its more so an AAA problem of doing the same thing slightly different with the same framework vaguely with the same themes over and over again.

The problem is that the industry swung too far in both directions. The map of your average late 90s/early 00s 3D game was a self contained location, with interconnected "rooms" and various paths to it. Even old 2D platformers often had a couple of paths through the 2D levels. Then in the corridor shooters era, AAA games became exactly that: corridors. No exploration, no multiple paths. Setpiece into setpiece. You play it once, you see it all. Just check any map from the 1996 Tomb Raider with any one of the modern ones. And people complained about that so the industry wen all the way the opposite direction, with miles and miles of world with repetitive filler content. The balance is in the middle, small yet nonlinear. Small so you can fill it with interesting and thought out content instead of procedurallly generated blandness, nonlinear so so your agency (or at least your illusion of agency) is stronger.

A decade ago, it would have been almost impossible to imagine how open world games were going to end up nowadays. If you'd asked anyone of the time, they likely would have said "Too big? How could that be possible without lengthy delays, dev teams crunched to the breaking point, and games releasing unfinished?" The idea that publishers would sink so much money into products with returns so diminished, that they'd stress their dev teams into mass quitting, that they'd harm their reputation by constantly releasing unfinished products - that would have been absurd to consider as the standard for the industry. Lots of us grew up during the days when video games had actual passion behind them, and if not that, then at least a publisher that understood that they had to produce quality products in the post-crash era of the industry in Western markets. Nintendo, in fact, had been so adamant about this that they gripped the industry in a stranglehold and refused to release products that weren't high quality.

really? even yahtzee explicitly said that linear games were inferior?

@@captainufo4587 / Let's all laugh / / At an industry / / That never learns anything / / Tee Hee Hee /

A map that is as big as half of the Milky Way yet as empty as a black hole

I mean, we did that literally 30 years ago. Space engine does it with accurate heightmapping. Scale has not been a barrier (or imlressive) for decades. We still havnt found anything worthwile to fill it with. Maybe megaton rainfall had some idea to use it creatively.

Don't forget doing boring and tedious side quests to grind for XP that's necessary to progress the main quest. As if the real life doesn't have enough boring and tedious chores.

Clearly you’ve never smoked crack.

Even Yahtzee brought up that issue in his Just Cause 2 review.

Ultimately, the size of an open world game is irrelevant, it is how the space is filled that truly matters. An island map equal to around 45 square miles is meaningless if the majority of it is dead space.

Just Cause 4 is fucking horrendous for a multitude of reasons. But yes, I see your point.

Just Cause 4 ditched everything that made Just Cause 3 fun for absolutely no reason I can perceive.

@@gasterblaster9817 yup especially since it can take so long getting from one point to another. it really gets exhausting

Yahtzee has already been writing more traditional, longer reviews on the Escapist for quite a while, they might even be called Extra Punctuation now that I think about it

For years, Yahtzee published Extra Punctuation articles on the Escapist website. Only now it's in video form.

@@SPM0717 The published articles don't have the same feel of Yahtzee yelling at you.

@@SPM0717 He should remake some of them for this video series.

If they desided to scale down the size of the game then the game's budget will be smaller resulting in bigger profits.

@@BigFatOfFate Most Video Game companies would just lay off their workers instead.

Corporate game developers are largely run by the same type of people that run Hollywood studios, myopic profit fixated suits. This argument has been made of recent movies as well. So many films these days have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars so they need to rake in that amount or more on opening weekend to be considered worthwhile to the suits. If you took the budget of, say, a $100M Marvel movie and split it into 20 $5M dollar movies you could have most flop and the real hits carry the rest because there's a higher profit margin. But the suits don't see it that way and thus we get movies with budgets that rival entire nation's GDPs. It's also how we ended up with the soulless Jiminy Cockthroat in gaming that cost the teams making them 100 hour work weeks.

Same. You play through enough linear story games, you've pretty much played them all. Plus I'm a huge sucker for games with high replayability and can sink lots of time into, not something I can beat in a day and never pick up again. Open world games tend to have that replayability, but of course some linears can as well. This is why I've got 7k+ hours in Path of Exile, 4.5k in Warframe, 1.6k in both Rimworld and classic Skyrim, and almost 1k in Caves of Qud. While linear games can have masterpieces like Undertale, I only end up sinking maybe 24 or 48 hours into them and never play them again once I beat them.

You mean like uncharted 4? Cause that one rocked

@@Pizzarugi I mean...why do you need to sink so much time into something to be worth it? If you personally asked me whether I wanted to watch 15 seasons of Supernatural or spend an hour and 45 minutes watching Candyman - absolutely give me Candyman. I'd pick a concise, well structured and nuanced story with themes that it deals well with over sinking 500 hours or whatever getting invested into the world of a - let's be honest here, usually shallow experience (which if you ask me, is precisely what Skyrim is - and I've probably sunk more or less the same time you did with the game). Sure, you can have your duds with linear games (as the original commenter pointed out, those David Cage games sure fucking suck) but to say "once you played enough of them, you've played them all" is really fallacious when the alternative is open-world bloat with same or similar missions and storylines game to game. I mean if it's just the time and shiny colors and items that made a game good, idle clicker or whatever games would be the crowning achievement of gaming. That's not to say I hate all of them. I love New Vegas (mostly because it had a strong, actual, honest-to-god RPG element that actually meant something, good writing and was not afraid to go places) but while I can pinpoint exactly how the first four Silent Hill games differ, if you asked me the same about last four or five Far Cry games, the answer would probably resemble the form of a blur.

@@maxthescarecrow4038 When games you buy start getting priced $60 or now $70, in my opinion, they'd better be worth the cost. When it comes to AAA games, in most of their linear games, that tends to fall flat. If you're charged that much for a game that only lasts a few hours, that feels like a waste of money. And as I said before, this doesn't apply to all linear games. Undertale is linear and it's one of my most favorite games. Given the price to buy it, it's definitely worth the money. Dust: An Elysian Tale is another good example. Ultimately, I think this is more of a matter of if the game is from a AAA developer/publisher or not. As you've pointed out with the Farcry games, open world games from these sorts of developers tend to get samey after a while. Bethesda did something innovative with the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, but their fear of innovation is making future releases more bland by the sequel. Now we have to rely on indies like Obsidian to remind us there's still ways to keep open world games fun and engaging. The same can be said of linear games. Same stories, same mechanics, same corridors to walk through and the same baddies to defeat or outlast, because AAA devs are too afraid to innovate. Then you get indie developers who give us Hollow Knight and Undertale who try and touch upon unique stories, with unique villains and mechanics.

@@Pizzarugi I agree that the AAA games are overpriced. I'd say that regardless of the length, but there have been egregious examples of $60 games lasting 4 hours without even rushing through them per-se. But I wouldn't mind paying $40-$50 dollars for a ten hour experience. Even if it's not the best. Max Payne 3 was a bit derivative and had a lot of flaws (some of those deal-breakers for quite a few people) but a lot of the ideas it executed to perfection and had style for days. I don't mind giving $30-$60 for an experience like that. I think that time can't really be quantified into monetary value when it comes to art (from the consumer side). I mean how much is a dollar worth when it comes to time spent in a video game, you know? It's not like we can reach a consensus on that and it seems like a case-by-case situation. 10 hours in Minecraft are not gonna be the same as 10 hours in World of Warcraft. All we can really judge is how the time was utilised by the developers and the game and whether or not it should've been longer or hell, even shorter. Some games do fucking drag after all. Especially in one-sitting scenarios.

And then there is the DLC which can be theoretically beaten in one cycle if you know what you are doing, spoilers for clicking "Read More" So the DLC adds a new world, a self contained miniature ring world which upon first glance looks like this massive and impressive place, but as you explore it you find out that these people had developed a technology to enter a dream world, but you discover that this dream world is actually a simulation that is projected by the lanterns. The big mystery of the DLC is what the codes are to see a prisoner trapped in the simulation of this civilization that grew to hate the Eye of the Universe. Every single time you think you can find the code to this, the code is burned. But remember how I said the prisoner was trapped in this civilization's simulation? Well, there are a few weird quirks of how the simulation works. If you die as you are entering it, or are in the simulation when you die in the real world, you are trapped in the simulation forever. Additionally if you put down your lantern and walk out of the radius of its light, you can see the code of the world around you. This would allow you to input the correct code. The problem? The alarms that go off in the real world to wake you up if you get to close to the prisoner. How do you get past them? By killing yourself in the real world while holding the lantern nearby the fires. This causes you to not hear the alarms because you don't have ears so you can go and meet the prisoner. One thing the DLC does is that the writings seem like this big mystery you need to solve, but you never learn the language of the owldeerfolk civilization. It is a big red herring, and you communicate with the prisoner through memories, who tells you he was imprisoned for freeing the Eye of the Universe after the civilization put up a barrier around it that prevented it from being heard. You tell him that after he was able to get the signal out, for even a second, that the Nomai heard it and came searching for it, inventing all sorts of technologies to try to find it, such as time travel and black/white hole technology. You tell him that because he was able to get that signal out, the universe has a chance to start anew. The birddeerfolk hated the Eye of the Universe because they thought it meant the end of all that was, but misheard the Eye's purpose, because the end of the universe was going to happen regardless, but what the Eye did was start it anew. The prisoner gave all to even have a chance for the universe to not fizzle out into nothingness, and you were the reason its actions were not in vain, and I think that is awesome.

Blame that on the original publisher. If the game and Get Rich or Die Trying had been on the .... GameCube Nintendo might have been more willing to give it a chance.

That's what I loved about Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Some quests were actually time-focussed. A village fell Ill and I felt like hunting was more fun at the moment. Came back to the quest a while later and way more villagers had died than if I had postponed my hunting for a bit. IT would've also pissed off less NPC's...

In b4 he hates it

@@prodevus yahtzee liked souls series, and this is just all of them in open world.

Elden ring is probably going to be the exception to the rule just like breath of the wild. I don't think Miyazaki is going to fill his game with needless radiant quests without any benefit like most open worlds do.

@@HaiShaman Did he like the story? I thought this video was about open world stories

@@codewizard0 I'm sure the game will be good but the story probably won't be. Breath of the wild's story was garbage.

The focused has shifted from the MMO part to the RPG part, even in the good ones

In the quest for growth, every company wants the biggest piece of the biggest pie, everything else be damned. It's quite rough, really.

The company was Ragú. There are actually two other fascinating outcomes from their case study that are worth bringing up here 1. Their initial approach had been to create boatloads of different varieties to accommodate all sorts of different user tastes. But their research found customers were actually happier with fewer choices. When there were nearly 30 of them, people frequently felt like they were missing the exact right one for them but after narrowing the choices down to 4, people wound up more satisfied overall since there wasn't the FOMO. 2. The recipes at the company had been mostly designed by gourmet chefs then adapted into something that could be mass produced cheaply then were tweaked based on market research. That created a problem when they winnowed it down to 4 varieties because one of them didn't really have a conceptual basis behind it derived from a recipe, it was just the product of market testing showing that "people like varieties with more X and less Y" Frankensteined together. The end result was a very sweet pasta sauce, something all of their gourmet chefs considered blasphemy. Turns out, it was popular with children and, in the US, kids have a lot more say in grocery shopping. So they added a 5th flavor designed by a new gourmet chef from somewhere outside of Italy.

I'd argue that it's a hub level design rather than a full on open world. The term open world implies a vast expanse that the player can traverse. Hitman is much more akin to Thief, Deus Ex and other Immersive Sims.

@@JHawke1 That's why I first called it an "open world", because you're right, it technically isn't a true open world game, but the rest of my comment still stands. Rather then give you an entire playground but force you down a specific path or give you a whole world where any method is equally valid even if it makes no sense, the hitman games give you a large and well detailed space with many options from which you can approach with the knowledge that some ways will be harder then others. The way you complete the level is truly in the hands of the player and your choices will effect how the other NPCs act. It may not be an open world, however it has all of what makes a good open world game.

@@JHawke1 Granted in the years since, Hub Levels and Open World started to combine, sooner or later there will be Hub Levels bigger than some old Open world games

Disco Elysium gg

World shattering, masterpiece works of writing such as Undertale and Disco Elysium are a great bar to strive for; But it's ultimately not realistic to expect that level of narrative quality from every narrative focused game. I can enjoy an interesting concept with well written characters as long as the gameplay is also fun: such as Hades

Thanks to being a "Nintendo-only" gamer until 2018, I was late to the open world party. And once I got there, I was immediately disappointed. That's not to say I hated open world games (Except XCX on Wii U; beautiful to look at but it is so god damned boring!). For the most part, when I sit down an play a game like Far Cry or Ghosts of Tsushima, I enjoy myself. But it's feels like busy work that happens to be fun. It lacks the sense of progress, accomplishment, and excitement of what's going to happen next as when I play linear games like Devil May Cry, Uncharted or even a Super Mario Game.

It seems Breath of the Wild 2 is going to reuse some or all of the first game’s world. I’m withholding judgement until I play the game, but many people seem concerned that exploring places they’ve already been won’t be as fun.

I wonder if they'll reuse bits of all the previous Horizon games for Fable, now that you mention it! They might as well, they keep making gorgeous landscapes just to get thrown out when the next one releases

@@Booksds Just need to do what Jak 3 did. Leave enough familiar that you're enjoying being back, while changing enough so you get that feeling of change.

Forza Horizon 5's map wasn't built from scratch though, parts of the layout and geometry are recycled from Forza Horizon 4. Many open world games do reuse their worlds, just by breaking them down into smaller parts first.

Wasn't this a point of complaint about _Saints Row 4_ ?

I think this is the future of not just games but all mediums of entertainment as a whole, whether that be books, movies, music, and art. People now have the means and platforms to produce their own entertainment and that's where genuine creativity and passion comes from. Not money driven corporate entities that only care about profit.

@@Crichjo32 Exactly :)

Reminds me of Lost Souls Aside

@@Crichjo32 For indie movies, it's still pretty hard to break through and get people watching. There's just too many entertainment options out there. Unless an indie movie gets picked up by a big distributer with the money to market it, a lot of movies won't get seen by audiences.

honestly I think the only thing that modern games have over early games is the online multiplayer aspect (which is mainly an infrastructure issue). The one thing that has been lost is the co-op stuff is because it has gone from a sit down with your mates for a lan to online randoms and also the fact that single player is an afterthought

I usually avoid linear games unless they have REALLY GOOD gameplay and story. because if it only has a decent story I might as well watch a movie. more than once I played games that had a cool story, but the game parts felt more a hassle I had to go through to reach the next story bit (Bioshock infinite, control, Alan Wake, these kinds of games).

@@danilooliveira6580 I agree with those games that I've played that you listed. Control felt like a slog and didn't feel all that rewarding (plus the map was a literal maze and was a total pain to navigate). Alternatively, I tend to like games where there's a big map with a few things dropped here and there (like Nier: Automata) or games that give you freedom of movement after a certain point and then tell you where to go for your next story bit (like Tales or classic FF games).

@@GayBearBro2 hub based games with some linear missions is my preferred format.

I'd say both can be amazing. Exploring in Breath of the Wild is great fun because the gameplay mechanics are fun..combat and traversal. And there's interesting and rewarding things to discover. Not every game needs to be a novel.

The OG bioshock is a good example of linear story telling but with good gameplay

As he stated, it's more of an AAA game problem than an Open World problem. If there's a crass disparity between what you're supposed to do and be in your game and what you're actually are able to do in the unscripted parts of the game, then it's a heterogenic mixture. You will either have a Final Fantasy XV where you can't be bothered to do anything but the main quest line or a Skyrim where it's more interesting to get sidetracked and do anything else. Good Open World games make going into the open world the beating heart of the game and polish it instead of simply abusing it like adding blobs of tissue to a crude skeleton.

Or hell, let use Rockstar as a example since he will always talk about the stories they make in a goodlight, despite in my opinion, that's is often their worst part of their games is the story, at best Generic Hollywood shit because it's just coping it, and at worst super boring string of events they do that barely connects to each other. I personally hate Rockstar's writing, especially the GTA games because it half ass two things instead of whole ass a single thing. But I love the driving in those games because it's fun to collect cars, drive around in them, listen to the radio, and get into gunfights. Now do I want a GTA with no story? No, I believe you need a story to keep players from getting bored and wanting their money back, but god I hate how people will use them as a good example of storytelling, they're not even the best example that Take Two owns, Take Two also owns Mafia

I want to see a mix of both. its something I really liked in Valheim, it has the "infinite" feeling of minecraft/NMS, but also the linear progression of difficulty. I want open world games that challenge me to dig deeper, sail farther, climb steeper mountains or fly through uncharted space, I want to be rewarded/punished for being greedy while I explore, but also feel safe and comfortable when I come back. its actually something that I found missing in NMS, specially after the biomes update made every planet feel very samey, and the lack of reward for finding exotic planets, there is no real progression in difficulty and discovery.

I think we should separate procedurally generated worlds from manually created ones. It's a completely different process and result. That said, I wonder if procedural generation methods could help fill in the gaps of a large open world. I'm not saying have every world be different, but rather generate the world between your important, manually generated areas, tweaking it where necessary. Then again, you may end up with a game that just adds stretches of boring to your landscape. Minecraft works because the content is created by the player. The world is just a source of materials for your masterpiece.

No Mans Sky is an example of AAA standards of selling rushed/incomplete games, no one should look at Hello Games approach or game as "good" anything, they deceived buyers into buying a broken/shit game.

@@Nerdnumberone They are different games, but NMS show us a window to a very very big map. Take Skyrim for example. How many Dwemmer ruins have you gone through before they became pretty similar? Or the wite gremlin caves or the Duergar ruins? If there was no story or quest behind them, they all felt pretty similar. Our brains tend to start generalizing things when they get to be too many. This is what happened to me the 100th time I stubled upon a bandit camp. When people (I think Yahtzee even) say that "People will optimize the fun out of a game" is because of this mental process. We generalize and start forgetting specifics, making them pretty samey. A good Open world that I feel breaks this is Fallout new vegas because of their very different locals (desert, casino city, rivers, etc). So maybe that might be the key to making such big open world games work.

@@TheFlameHaze1 Just that NMS had a team of 20 or so people behind them. Its an indie project judged by AAA standards.

100% Minecraft worked as an open world, because its focus was systems that were fun to play with and explore the infinite possibility. Then keep working because mods added more systems once the old one got stale.

Yahtzee made a pretty strong case for it, indeed, being the concept of open world being the issue. Gaming has lead us here, over the decades, to the modern open world; and now what? We can't make open world games much grander, because of diminishing returns. For example: Let's say a dev spends three months creating one background NPC with specific voice lines, a custom decorated apartment, a day/night cycle that includes random leisure activities on the weekend, a wardrobe that updates on the season/weather conditions, and a health tracker that makes it so that if you hit them with your car, they'll use casts and crutches for a few weeks until healed. The whole nine yards; they are as close to a real life person the rules of programming will allow. Is that time, effort, and money worth it, if most players will never even notice? You'd expect that kind of treatment from NPCs in the story, but not from some rando you fly past on the sidewalk once a playthrough at 150 mph. It's not worth going bigger/better in open worlds past where we currently are. Barring some last-minute innovation that revolutionizes the open world, we've safely peaked. Not even procedural generation to make an infinitely sized game can save the concept from being stale now. Where would we take the concept from here?

How closely does BOTW/TOTK fit this wish? Breath of the Wild, in particular, allows you to head directly to the Big Bad and take him down almost immediately after leaving the tutorial area. There’s still a path the Devs “want” you to take, but you are influenced only by various game design tricks to lure you along that path, but otherwise you don’t have to go that way, but go the opposite direction or straight to endgame.

@@Roccondil I am yet to play any Zelda game (just haven't been interested) but that concept of almost complete freedom sounds great to me

I kinda want more RPGs that design their experience to work without world map, or at least minimalistic world map. I tried playing Witcher 3 without a minimap and it was a liberating experience, you look more at the world instead of keeping your eyes glued at the mini map. and the world they crafted looks and feels AMAZING to just ride around. not forcing the player to look more at it was a huge waste. I don't mind the world being big if it feels real and going from A to B feels satisfying.

Even better when such worlds feel like actual worlds, whatever their size and however fantastical they are. A world of any size that feels like a theme park makes you feel like you're visiting a theme park, not exploring a world. As someone else said, Morrowind is a good example of a good open world, despite how static its NPCs, etc. really are.

The Yakuza series is perfect for that.

Piranha Bytes had this figured out with Gothic I and II in the early 2000s. Well, the open world design anyway. The combat is kind of wonky even by early 2000s standards.

@@danilooliveira6580 Yup, I want you to have to play the game to discover where you have to go, interact with NPCs, find actual static paper maps, read signs, take directions, etc, etc. Not some point on a dynamic, unrealistic map and then even a an arrow or dotted line that shows you where to go.

If he likes it, I'll have myself a good laugh.

I am absolutely positive he's going to be "It's mechanically great and has that Dark Souls vibe... but why did it have to be a Jiminy Cockthroat?" That was actually my exact take.

@@Potidaon not saying he'll give it a pass. But from the feel of the game so far in footage, games looking beastly.

@@IAmKnightsDawn While true.... Is any of the "Beastliness" specifically serviced by an open world? ...Or is the Open World just a needless extra "Commute" that is just an arbitrary stop-gap between you and beastliness?

@@patchwurk6652 the open world they have crafted looks phenomenal. It's not just the gameplay. The world they are creating, from what we have seen so far, is gorgeous. It seems like an actual living world for the most part. And yes, that is due to the open world aspect of it. Even more so when they swap into dungeon crawling linearity that the souls games are known for during dungeon sections. Their ability to blend their open world is reminiscent of the thrill I got from Breath of the Wild, but with a combat system that I prefer more. You don't have to agree with the opinion, just look at the world they are building. Make your own decisions ^-^

Star Citizen looks like the only thing on the horizon that is upping the scale of big. Mind you I'm talking about Star Citizen the idea, not the game as it currently stands. It also shows how completely unattainable size is. They've got the budget, have spent almost a decade on it, and yet they still have no idea how much work is left. It's hard to imagine a quality story being told with such a long development time behind it.

Elite dangerous?

@@gingerinajacket8519 eh, you cant leave the ship.

_DHL Stranding_

Yeah, I wanted to say the same. He barely mentioned it at the end of his end of year best/worst/blandest games list, and it was merely "Outer Worlds/Outer Wilds for copying on each other's homeworks" or something. Then again, doing an official review for that game long after it's launched is something that's kept for special occasions for Yathzee, and usually for older games than that.

that is pointed out in the video by saying it isnt an inherently openworld problem, its an AAA problem. and bringing up outerwilds and games like that as an example of people actually doing creative things with the idea of a sandbox. the idea isnt to kill openworld games, just that AAA industry should at least give some way for other kinds of games too. specially when practically nothing new is being done to the AAA openworld formula, its just slightly bigger, slightly more detailed every time

I'm no developer game designer, but I think there are ways of making open World games, but it depends on the focus. I could Envision a multiplayer game where the narrative is emergent from modular and interconnected game systems. The problems that are addressed early on do not become the focus later in the game, and the problems that were ignored early on grow and become the endgame problems that people have to address. This kind of game would probably have a 3-month life cycle, in order to end the story in a place that makes sense and to give players an equal chance of being the number one hero

One thing I noticed playing Breath of the Wild was that I felt more attuned to previous Zelda maps than this one. I remember in my heart almost every inch in Ocarina of Time. I thought it might be due to the density of content in each map, but if I think about it, Ocarina of Time's Hyrule could be more empty than Breath of the Wild, for in the latter you could interact more with the trees, for example. I think that games have lost their sense of mystique, and I don't know if it is because I have grown up.

@@elkinmontoya9640 "I remember in my heart almost every inch in Ocarina of Time" Yeah, I don't think that's necessarily a good thing for every game. When a game is so big that you can get lost or miss content, it creates a feeling of being in a real place and pursuing a personal *organic* adventure. That's an experience you can't get from smaller tighter games. I think a lot of people are overlooking that because they approach games with a pseudo-OCD mindset of completionism (even if they don't intend to actually 100% it) -- checking icons off a map in a mechanical and sterile way -- and then complaining about too much "filler." The original Assassin's Creed was designed to be played without a hud. It was an immersive world that used subtle cues to call your attention to important activities. You could miss some sidequests and still find your way to the end. But testers complained, so they added all those arrows and icons that Ubisoft is known for. Now people say Ubisoft games are mindless garbage. "run to map icon, kill dude, repeat" And they wonder why games have lost their mystique...

@@SubjectiveObserver I did not know that, and I find it very intriguing, because I have tried to do my Assassin's Creed replays without a HUD, I find it more immersing. Only problem is chests and collectibles, but I have done too many 100% in my life, and I have learned I get nothing from doing them, so I don't do them anymore. It is a Hit and Miss though, it fails, for example, on the Witcher games, the games are not designed with cues, so you can't know where to go without a minimap. Morrowind, on the other hand, perfectly playable without a minimap

RDR2 was so slow and had no respect for the players time either. Just let me craft 100 express bullets at once I won't be any less immersed! The fact I can shoot them all faster than I can make them is disgusting.

@Adrian Scott at least in MC it's kinda the point of the game. But in that I find I won't use a diamond tool except to mine obsidian despite it being faster because I have more iron overall and don't wanna "waste" my diamond

its the exact opposite to me. when the game world feels like the set of a low budget movie were I can't explore farther than this room because the script didn't take me to the next room yet, it just takes me out of the experience. so either you guide me to a complete linear experience with AMAZING story and gameplay or you let me freely explore everything. its one of the reasons nowadays I have a hard time playing old style wrpgs like dragon age, kotor or (as a more modern example) Spiders RPGs, its like they drop you in this shoebox where everything in it has a reason to be there because of a specific quest, so the world doesn't feel real and alive.

I disagree actually, imo the best style of open world is like in Outer Wilds. Fully cohesive worlds where every location matters to the story and understanding the world. Every location is dynamic, every location has a complete history and nowhere is filler.

@@lizardlegend42 I actually think not everything needs to matter for the story, its what makes a world real, not everything you see is important, things are just there independent of you. but on the other side its great when everything has a meaning and were put there for there for a reason. maybe you don't have a reason to explore those ruins, but if you go there you will see the remains of the fallen empire that was mentioned in a random book you found and you may even see a piece of artwork that tell you a bit about that culture just like it was said in the book. maybe you won't have any quest that involves this farm, but seeing the farms and people working on them will tell you about how is life in this city and that the people here is self sustaining, or maybe all the farms are monoculture that may tell you that they actually mostly export their produce and that is why there are so many poor people hungry.

@@danilooliveira6580 I’ll have to agree to disagree with you there. For me what I like about the hub based design is that it still encourages a strong character focus, where as if the devs are spending all their time world building to flesh out a huge open environment it is normally to the detriment of the characters you directly interact with. Although worlds like GTAV, RDR2, New Vegas and Witcher 3 show it is possible to have both they are more the exceptions than the rule. If I want good world building I can pick up a Tolkien or Jordan novel and get ten times better worldbuilding than I’ll ever get from a video game. Sure discovering things sounds great, and I get it appeals to many, but in practice it’s mostly boring to me personally.

I'd argue that, since there's really only a few specific paths you can explore on each planet, Fallen Order doesn't really "count" as open world

I'm a bit skeptic about Elden Ring's open world. One of From Software's greatest strengths has always been its tight level design and with an open world you lose that.

@@vanhoras3082 Not necessarily, you can still have the level design within individual dungeons.

or maybe what story driven open world games are needing is a way to make non-linear or semi-linear stories work. its something that Elden Ring may be trying to do, but we will have to wait and see.

The interesting thing BotW is, that despite (or maybe because of) it's lack of depth, features and narrative that other open world games offer, it still became one of the most critically acclaimed and popular open world games ever. Its clearly influenced games like Immortals: Fenyx Rising or Genshin Impact. It has a 97 on Metacritic. It's clearly a success on all fronts. Which makes me wonder what about that game makes it stand out so much. It's my favourite game of all time, yet I don't even know why.

To be fair, BotW is a harkening back to the influences of the first Legend of Zelda game. Influences such as the feeling of wonder and adventure Miyamoto felt as a child when exploring the woods near his childhood home. Would you say the original Legend of Zelda is a bad game due do its lack of story? BotW isn't a story driven game, nor does it claim to be. Not all games need to have a strong, linear story to function. What you are doing is comparable to complaining about an orchestra's lack of electric guitar.

@@gasterblaster9817 I actually don't care much for the original LoZ (it's cryptic as all hell and extremely barebones by modern standards- maybe not a fair criticism, but nonetheless true). My first was OoT, and I've enjoyed subsequent story-heavy entries. I would argue that, at best, it's more like watching a band slowly transition from folk to rock music, enjoying their various rock songs, and then being less than thrilled when they abruptly decide to jump back to folk. Doubly so when most of the fanbase and general public start clamoring for them to go all-in on folk and never touch rock again. I don't begrudge people their own tastes, but most of the rest of the series sated mine where BotW didn't, so I critique accordingly.

@@Romalac That's fair, although I was feeling that the more linear entries in the series were starting to get a bit repetitive, so I suppose it just comes down to a difference of taste.

He won't change his mind (and shouldn't), because he's right. FromSoft isn't Ubisoft or CDPR or Activision. But hopefully FromSoft have sufficiently avoided the bloat and empty spectacle of modern open world games. The recent gameplay footage looks really promising, and I'm hoping that the pace and world density keep up throughout at least the majority of the game and that exploration is actually meaningful. Fingers crossed!

@@Craftal That is some projection of intent. He never proved his statement, "Yahtzee declares that the open-world video game is dead, at least in the AAA space." Since historically open-world games have been money makers and game of the year winners and future AAA games from publishers with good track records are to be released. Just because some game companies churn out vapid cash grabs (a la Activision and Ubisoft) doesn't mean that the aspects of discovery and wonder that undergird the "open-world genre" will lose their appeal only that scale and fidelity don't make a game good and the narrative tropes in open-world games are played out and ready to be subverted.

@@michaelrobinson4266 it’s also kind of weird the serious level of stipulation in this video. “Open world games are bad… but er.. not the red deads and the gtas… except when I say they are… because the story is always focused on a single gun toting militant rebel fighting an oppressive force… but that only really describes far cry… and half life, but that’s not open world so… look I just really don’t like far cry.”

The same thing happened back in the 50s and 60s when films like the sound of music, west side story, and Mary Poppins made people think that the "big Hollywood musical" had been revived only for the industry to just collapse anyway.

Elden Ring looks like succeeding because they don’t seem to have lost their focus to accommodate the open world though.

@@ducky36F that’s kind of the problem with the argument then, isn’t it? You just gave the counterpoint that shows this video is pointless fluff. Open world games aren’t dead and they’re never going to die, but they also shouldn’t. The shift in focus needs to be in making the world be the world a great game is in, and not being the reason for existing. Open world games are already starting to do this, if this video came out 4 or 5 years ago it’d be more relevant (even if still short sighted and wrong) but after all the shifts in open world/sandbox style gameplay these days?

idk elden im mixed about. its cool that gamers like not being told where to go in the game for discovery rewards but it feels so lonely in that game. i cant help but not vibe with it cuz everythings trying to kill me. i give respect for being different and not copy paste far cry3.

Spot on. The technical leaps between consoles have been getting smaller and smaller, and it's going to reach a point where games and consoles can't be sold based on hardware or graphical performance. I for one can't wait.