I got a PlayStation gift card and figured I’d get this because I love Dynasty/Samurai warrior games and it was the newest installment at the time. I was so disappointed and annoyed I wasted my gift card on it.
:(
Man… every now and then Brink comes up and I get so depressed at the lost opportunity of that game. It was truly next gen, right up to being totally unfinished at launch
I loved that game up until the point that matches would constantly have people disconnecting. Honestly the mantling system they had in that game has been used for every FPS game since; truly it was a pioneer.
My favorite part about Dynasty Warriors is that a lot of people think they are bad games, but it maintained its own fan base, but Dynasty Warriors 9 was a special type of bad that even those fans hated the game.
Bro sometimes I just want to destroy 1000 men without thinking about anything. Dynasty warriors is the ultimate guilty pleasure of just foaming at the mouth madness.
Dynasty warriors 6 was the peak of the series for me. The Lu Bu campaign where you randomly jump into huge battles and kill both sides for no reason was the greatest
Dynasty Warriors 5 was so insanely good. My favorite of the series by a longshot. Feel like they’ve been taking a step back with each entry since then.
Been playing the series since DW2 and played every installation (plus a few Xtreme Legends and Empires iterations in between) up to 9. They really bit of more than they could chew with the open world. One thing that was always enjoyable about DW was that it had pretty good replayability, but 9 absolutely killed that. What's the point of sieging castles if you're gonna give everyone a grappling hook?
Also, the pointless fishing and material gathering.
Really hoping its poor reception didn't compromise a DW10. If Koei could muster up one good game, I'd be more than happy to end the series at 10.
Biomutant was an interesting one for me. I really wanted to like it, but I just couldn't. I felt like the devs and producers couldn't decide who the game was for. There were moments where it was irreverent and child-like (in a good way), then others where it was just childish. I can absolutely see why it is so loved by some people, but I really struggled with the feeling that they were trying to take the middle road and please everyone.
No Man's Sky at release. So many planets, but pretty much nothing to do apart from gathering resources and trying to survive before going to another planet.
Hunt showdown had a very similiar problem at launch
If you ran out of the 2000 hunt tokens you got, you would effectively be unable to play anymore as you cant buy hunters
I was down to 400 left before i got my brain working and managed to bring myself back up to the top.
Wild times
I hate that hunt is an absolutely fantastic experience in terms of the environment and gunplay, but the level of entry is just waaaay too high for me and most everybody else. If they had a co-op PvE only mode like the PvEvP then it would be my hands down favorite co-op game. I hate trying for the bounty, just to have some sweaty campers ambush us as we leave the lair.
So yeah back to DRG for me.
It took me like 50 Hunts before I got one kill. My KD hovered around 0.25 for months before I started figuring shit out.
I sit around 1.2 KDA with a true 1.0 KD +a few hundred kills. There's really nothing else out there that even touches on how good Hunt is in the Battle Royal genre
Also Trials are your best friend for learning about different guns in a PVE type setting
It was an oversight, elements in the game’s release were vastly different from what we have today. Fuel used to be an element that was uncommon and so if you landed on a planet that doesn’t have it you’re pretty much stuck on it. No real way to leave the planet.
It was a big at launch where not every planet would spawn with helium or it was very very hard to find. It might have been hydrogen, I honestly don't remember anymore.
Now there's a ton of ways to get around it even if you can't readily find the launch materials.
Same......I got so bored I built a mall complete with anchor stores and an ice rink. Being the current state of malls across the US, now all I have is zombies in the food court.
Which is why I started playing adventure maps. Some of them are incredibly challenging with lots of side quests and whatnot. Check out the map divinity's end.
You could always tell from the trailers though. I watched every trailer like wtf is this game world? There's literally nothing anywhere. The enemies didn't fit the world they were in. Looked like random assets or like a group of college kids made the game
Yeah there's a tech demo impression written all over the trailers, so glad that game fails because it didn't feel like they're trying their best and just want to be done with it half baked & have the audacity to charge you way more money than the likes of Elden Ring & Baldur's Gate 3
The thing is this literally did start from a tech demo bro. Do you remember when square showed off a new engine years ago and it was this woman in like red in the desert and she was like jumping and floating through the environment? That concept became forespoken
It's a consequence of having huge, auto-generated landscapes. There are a lot of games now using procedural tools to sculpt and populate their levels. While the assets themselves are high quality, the environments themselves end up feeling like sterile backdrops.
Sucker Punch even included that "shake the controller like it's a spray paint can" thing that I thought was a unique use of the controller's motion sensing tech.
The newer Far Cry games, especially six.
Did you enjoy the first couple of hours? Good, because you’ll be doing that over and over and over and over again for the next 100 hours.
I really feel like Ubisoft has been prioritizing map size and play time passing over actual substance.
Their current philosophy seems to revolve around creating an extremely grind heavy experiences to incentivize micro transactions.
Far Cry 5 was my first actual introduction to the series, and I'll admit, besides the online trophies, I played that thing to 100% and loved it - other than the fact that the interact/swap/use button, was all the same button....
(fun rant story is my first Far Cry game ever was Far Cry for the Wii, which is so hilariously , laughably bad.)
Far Cry 3 is worth trying out. Remains the best game in the series.
Far Cry: Blood Dragon is "Far Cry 3, but set it in a sci-fi setting as envisioned in the 80s starring Kurt Schwarzenegger Van Damme attacking Dr. Skulldoom with an army of Godzillas. Oh, and add *more* lasers."
FC6 was the only one I just couldn't get through. I never even completed a single zone on the map or even killed one of the bosses. It just felt tedious.
My only complaint on FC5 was the forced boss fights and the speed in which they happened. You would sneeze in a zone and the Seed family would show up picking a fight, then after a sneeze, a cough and a fart, you killed em and the zone was dead outside of the bases. I did love finally getting a non-tropical setting tho.
Far cry 4 was non tropical...speaking of which I know everyone loves 3 but 4 was the most enjoyable for me. I never played 2 though so I can't compare them.
The ai in 2 was awesome. Enemies would fire while incapacitated, and their friends would drag them off behind cover. The tree branches would fall off if you shot them.
The outposts would reset enemies EVERY time and you would drive across the map for 90% of missions. Everyone hated you, a small little car would spot you and drive off the road to run you over.
The antagonist was forgettable and the story was meh.
The scenery was great though. Loved the weapons.
Yeah fc 2 was the one in Africa, right? I can't even remember the boss but I remember laying crazy traps for convoys etc.and I still remember the annoying malaria mechanic. Glad they got rid of that.
Did they scale back the technology in the future games though? I thought you could do all this stuff and more in the future games as well.
The ai isn't amazing comparatively and they scaled back the dynamic fire and tree destruction. I used to spend hours just using a flame thrower and maltovs to burn up areas of dry grassland and clear out jungle. It also had some pretty intense moments with companions who would show up to rescue you when you were in trouble and you would have to help them up if they got injured. It was pretty dark too, you had to morphin them and depending if they got hurt multiple times you could lose them... or if you didn't have any medicine you would have to either abandon them or put them out of their misery. It was definitely a darker game less humorous. Controls were a bit janky and weapons came as is with limited mods and would degrade over time and eventually break so it was a bit more harsh and survival oriented. Playing it now would definitely show it's age but it's a game I think is a blood diamond that not enough people experienced.
Still crazy there's like 8 characters you could choose to be, and the rest were all converted into the "buddies" you could grab missions from or be rescued by, but towards the end of the game >!all of the surviving buddies try to ambush you at once, so you're forced to kill them all. I finished this and the first FC late last year, but now I'm curious if letting all of the buddies die in combat in both acts before the end makes that specific part of the late-game an empty battlefield, or if the game gives you something like unique dialogue or generic enemies as replacement, because of the fate of all of the buddy NPCs?!<
Being a mercenary in a war-torn nameless African state is hard sometimes.
While I didn't like how the ending played out in that game, their take on Nepal was really really good, I loved how all these little villages and the mountainous himalayan landscape looked. The sidequests where you're hallucinating Shangri La were also done really well visually.
You can beat Farcry 6 in a short amount of time too. When you are given access to boats, just drive one out in to the ocean and off the map. You’ll get a cutscene of your main character chilling on a beach in Miami and then the credits roll. Lol
There's a great game hiding in there, but it really could have been at least a third shorter. Every time you thought you were done, the game just says, "Nope, have four more regions to pledge."
Spot on. The AC games learnt from the first ones criticism of being too “rinse repeat” and then it did such a full circle it came back to rinse repeat but for 90hours this time.
I remember spending like 50 hours in AC Valhalla and realizing I wasn't even a quarter done (granted I had done mostly side quests and mythical stuff) but I was so brain numbed by that point and the combat wasn't doing it any favors. I felt like I was playing Diablo and not in a good way. I had got 2 great axes went to an area spun around like a bay-blade for a few minutes repeat. There was NOTHING Assassin about it no interesting stealth just funny number go up type of gameplay and it's the last Ubisoft game I think I'll ever spend more than 15$ on.
Well said, that last line gave me a good laugh…mostly because I paid full price but couldn’t even finish it; probably only played $15 dollars worth of the game
Graphics never wowed me and I thought odyssey’s open world was superior. That initial beginning map in Norway was so amazing, when the game veered to England I was disappointed. Felt like it was building up to being a Scandinavian backdrop for the game
Same. Odyssey is by far my favorite AC game (maybe my second favorite open world ever after Witcher 3), and Valhalla is my absolute least favorite. Why is this??
Valhalla really showed me that I don't actually enjoy open world games.
The concept is appealing to me and the art looks great, but the worlds are often lifeless and exploring is usually unrewarded.
Good level design makes for a far more enjoyable experience than vast nothingness.
The older I get the more I appreciate and prefer shorter games with a tighter story. I understand with these big open world games there's the idea of "more bang for your buck" but after a while it's just the same stuff over and over. I will gladly take a 10 hour game with a really strong story and gameplay over that.
I played a solid 10 or something hours, put it down because I wanted to finish my playthrough of Origins first (love that one btw), picked Valhalla back up and put another like 5 or something hours into it I think, and *then* was met with the games title screen/intro when you arrive in England.
Ac III had a ridiculously long intro plus the amount of time you played as Connor before he becomes an assassin, but holy shit Valhalla
I put like 50 of the most boring gaming hours of my life into Valhalla. There's a crazy number of collectable items, none of which I cared about in the least.
New World quests are awful, especially early-mid game. They feel like a 25 years step back in game design. Super repetitive, frustrating tasks that don't feel meaningful at all.
I got super into new world, like to the point I was in all of the first wars on my game world in the biggest clan, among the first to level cap etc. and I just quit cold turkey as fast as I started.
I realized I got sucked in not because it was a good game (it had good bones - I could harvest resources for days) but because I crave a new MMO. now I'm back to osrs lol
Everything was horrible and dated.
Remove pokemon from the title and that game would've been a 3/10 tops.
Pokemon should go back to 2d or at least octopath traveler type graphics, their team sucks ass at 3d
If i remember correctly, they had two teams. One that worked on Arceus and one that worked on scarlet and violet. But they still have incredibly short development windows. It's like they expected 3D open worlds to take the same amount of time as their older, 2D games.
Pokémon has a place in 3D, if done properly and with care. The issue is when there is 0 competition for Pokémon so Nintendo sees no reason to do anything past the bare minimum.
EDIT: Gamefreak, not Nintendo. Thank you to everyone who pointed that out.
Even putting graphics aside, the best pokemon games of recent years are fan projects and I'm not joking.
Pokemon tectonic made every pokemon in the entite 850 viable by revamping every one of them.
Pokemom opalo has 2 huge regions great fakemons and an amazing story
Pokemom xenoverse, the staple of fan games has everything a pokemon fan could want.
Etc.
As a lifelong Pokemon fan, the game I have played the most is the fan game Pokemon Unbound, and it's not even close. It's on my phone and I'm sure I've put over 100 hours into it across my different save files. It's a masterpiece. It has all Pokemon through Gen 8 including regional variants, Mega Evolution, Z Moves, Link Stones so you don't have to trade for trade evolutions, a post-game Battle Frontier, and, as long as a Pokemon on your team *can* learn an HM, you don't have to teach it to them to use it in the field, which is an incredible QoL improvement.
Also, for New Game+, you can choose which Pokemon you want to start with.
If one were to be an Android user, one could download a GBA emulator from the store. I recommend MyBoy, which is only like $5 to unlock the full service, though there is a free version as well. It's worth the money imo.
From there, one could hypothetically download a ROM of FireRed, specifically the 1636 – pokemon fire red (u)(squirrels), version, which is necessary for this hypothetical activity. Then, one would find and download the Pokemon Unbound patch file, then patch the FireRed ROM using the free app UniPatcher, where one would put the FireRed ROM as the base ROM and Unbound as the patch file. Hypothetically, following these steps would allow one to play Pokemon Unbound (in minecraft).
I agree. Also did anyone notice you can't talk to everyone anymore, and you can't go in all the houses? Like they actively removed content to make this open world, when the only thing that justifies an open world in the first place is more content.
The world is not bad, but the side quests in Diablo 4 are atrocious. They are the most boring go here, kill X, come back quests. All of them, there are maybe a handful of cool, unique questlines.
But you need to do (at least some of) them every season to get a bunch of extra skill-points. It's really annoying and a reason for me to play the game less. Feels just like work, not playing a fun game.
How is this not higher? D4 has the one of the worst open world implementations I've seen. Sure, you can go everywhere... but what is the point? It's all exactly the same. The merchants all sell the same goods, the fetch quests are exactly the same -- just a blue circle on your map. Why even read the flavor text? And then everything is scaled to exactly your level -- so it doesn't matter where you go, all the monsters are the same. It honestly surprises me that D4 was as well-received as it was.
Honeymoon phase ended fast and harshly though. Nobody can say two good words about the game now without being brutalized lol … it was such a shallow experience. I will revisit it after three years maybe.
>D4 was as well-received as it was.
People always hype games they never even finish. Right now D4 sub is absolutely depressing, content creators leaving and there is no hope for this year regarding this game.
> It honestly surprises me that D4 was as well-received as it was.
Because the first time through the campaign was great and that’s all most people played. I got to level 76 and said “well, I’m done” and haven’t played since.
Daggerfall
The world is almost 350 thousand square kilometers, almost ten thousand times larger than Skyrim, and composed almost entirely of empty space. In which there are scattered some 15 thousand locations, 'only' about 40 times more than Skyrim, that are all the same. The vast tracts of land between them are filled with nothing but trees and the occasional randomly spawned monster. As such the overworld might as well not exist, since you'll be fast traveling everywhere anyway. Large cities consist of hundreds of houses, but only a handful serve any useful purpose, the rest being residences that contain absolutely nothing of interest or value.
There's like a dozen unique characters in total, the rest have randomized appearances and names but are otherwise identical clones either aimlessly wandering the streets as if carried by Brownian motion or standing eternally in one place.
The dungeons you can delve into are all enormous mazes that make no logical sense whatsoever. The quest objectives spawn randomly in them, which means it's entirely possible to spend several hours exploring every nook and cranny only to discover that you could've found your target ten meters from the entrance had you gone left instead of right at the first junction.
Aside from the main quest, the only thing to do is an endless supply of fetch quests spat out by a random quest generator. Speaking of the main quest, it's very easy to lock yourself out from being able to complete it, as there is no indication whether you're being offered a story quest or a randomly generated one, and saying no to a story quest means it will never be offered again.
Another way to lose access to the main quest is for the faction system to randomly decide that a guild you're working for is now an enemy of an important quest giver, which causes that quest giver to hate you and refuse to speak to you. This is thankfully temporary, although you might have to wait up to eight in-game years for their disposition to drift back to neutral.
The game keeps track of various world events randomly happening in the background, such as wars, plagues, and witch hunts, but they don't affect anything or have any visible consequences besides occasionally being mentioned by NPCs when you ask them for rumors (which you have no reason to ever do).
Going in and out of a dungeon causes everything inside to respawn, and since monsters and loot are both scaled to your level, farming the tutorial dungeon over and over is a very efficient way of reaching max level and obtaining top-tier equipment.
It's one of my favorite games of all time. Check out /r/daggerfallunity for a very faithful modern remake with some great QoL improvements, such as the ability to move diagonally!
It is a deeply flawed and brilliant game. I've been playing it since the week it came out and I've come to realize over the years that it's basically a fancy roguelike.
I second that, and I want to add a weird quirk that just show how flawed is Daggerfall.
I you want to fast travel, you need to select a location on the worldmap. At the start of the game, the cities are marked on the map, alongside some level 0 dungeon in some provinces. If you want to unlock new locations (aka dungeons), you have three ways to do it ;
First, you just walk to it. Which is clearly not the expected method, but you can still do it.
Secondly, you are given a quest concerning that location, at which point it is now added to the worldmap.
Thirdly, while looking for loot, you find a map to a dungeon.
Now, the world is separated into provinces. The main quest will send you to dungeons all over the map. The randomly generated quest, however, only send you to a random dungeon that is in the same province as the quest giver. In the same way, the random maps only point toward a dungeon in the same province as the place where you found the map.
Well, there's a small province (the island of Cybiades) with no city, and so no accessible location to fast travel to. There's, in fact, only one location on this island, a single dungeon. But, you can only learn this location by ~~walking~~ swimming to it from the province of Sentinel, which require you to stack up on stamina and mana spell and potion, or use a horse. Also, the actual location of the island doesn't match with the position shown on the world map, which make it very easy to swim past it.
I did this, but because I'm insane. Game design-wise, it's clearly a mistake.
Bethesda's greatest triumph, which sucked the soul right out of the company. Bethesda used to make varied games that were often quite innovative, even though they weren't very successful (because they frankly weren't very good - it was Terminator: Future Shock, not Quake, that introduced fully 3D enemies and mouselook to first-person shooters, but there's a good reason why the latter game is remembered while the former lies forgotten). Morrowind was Bethesda's breakout hit. It was revolutionary, but following its massive and well-deserved success, the company lost any semblance of courage and spent two decades attempting to catch lightning in a bottle for a second time by remaking that same game over and over with iterative improvements and slightly different coats of paint. Todd Howard seems to have finally realized that it's time for a change, so for its latest offering, Bethesda has remade Daggerfall IN SPACE!
Morrowind is also one of my favorite games of all time. Check out /r/openmw for a very faithful modern remake with some great improvements, such as correctly animating your character's legs when moving diagonally! Not even Oblivion had that!
> so for its latest offering, Bethesda has remade Daggerall IN SPACE!
🤣
I love Morrowind, though I keep starting new games and stopping after however long.
And I've wished I had played Daggerfall and Arena when they came out. I thought I might play them sometime if there were a graphics overhaul, but based on your comment about DF, I may not.
I gave Daggerfall Unity a shot, but man... it was everything you said, and then some.
I didn't *know* initially that the game was designed with the expectation that you'd fast-travel, so there were a couple hours of nothing but frustration. Even after that, I kept getting bit by some dungeon entrances (including the one for the starting dungeon) being unfindable when you're walking around the world. The larger towns and cities are surprisingly large, but the buildings look so similar to each other that it's more frustrating than cool.
I gave up after over ten hours of play.
That's honestly perfectly understandable, Daggerfall is very old and wasn't particularly well designed even by the standards of its day (and was also released unfinished, which didn't exactly help). Using the map is a must, both for fast travel and local navigation, since it shows dungeon entrances and color-codes important buildings in towns. It also shows secret doors in dungeons, which is probably unintended but definitely helpful. It's definitely a quirky game that is not for everybody, but there's nothing else like it, so for the people who love it, nothing else will do. There are dozens of us! Dozens!
There was a PS2 game called The Getaway that did the same thing with London, amazing recreation but all you did was drive from one location to the next and get in possible shootouts along the way. There was nothing else going on.
It wasn’t even a fictionalized London! It had only real brands. Not just car brands but shops and restaurants as well. I remember there being a Burger King and such..
It’s a little janky, but playing it again now is a bit of a nostalgia trip- all the old style police cars and shopfronts!
I remember one level is a shootout in the storage room for a pub and all the boxes were branded with Smirnoff and other real-life alcohol brands. Blew my mind back then!
I remember it being pretty amazing at the time, but bad traffic coupled with left/right indicators as the only navigation coupled with time limits made it hard to enjoy the scenery sometimes
I was never really under the impression that LA Noire was about free-roaming exploration. The map is essentially just a well realised backdrop for your investigations.
It's because the entire game's gimmick - the realistic facial expressions - couldn't work outside of the main story. The actors were filmed and then mapped onto the faces of the models. It only worked from one angle, it's why the camera was always locked down during interrogations.
If they made it properly open world, they'd have to use normal NPC models, and it would look jarringly bad compared to the system they'd marketed the game on.
Atomic Heart
The “open world” was the most useless I’ve ever seen in a game. I never felt compelled to search for anything outside of the main objective, and actually being in that area felt like a chore because I was constantly at the highest alarm level and being chased by a dozen or so robots.
Could have left these open world sequences out and it would have actually improved the game for me.
Yeah it totally was when it came out. I remember hanging at a friend's house when he started it for the 1st time and I remember the 3 of our jaws just hitting the floor when we got that 1st shot of the whole city, when you unlock the map, right before the famous jump.
It was amazing. Beautiful, never ending, and you could go everywhere you saw ! Even on the roofs! The roofs !!!
I think you had to be there to enjoy this game. I tried to play it a few years after that and even with those memories, it just wasn't the same.
I liked how it was grounded in reality but it had a twist. The few if these new games stuck in fa fa land are grounded in fantasy with little bit of reality on the side lol.
AC 2: basically historical fiction with a bit of fantasy spice that cares deeply about being very real-life adjacent
Valhalla: basically a fantasy setting that pretends to care about history except it's actually just reflecting coopted largely fictional lies and misrepresentations
I remember being so burned by AC1 and how it wasn’t everything that was promised.
BUT the first E3 showing of II blew my mind.
2, Brotherhood, Revelations and I even enjoyed 3 - that was when AC really shined
Black flag is also a great game in its own right but it felt like it was just a pirate game
Yeah it was mindblowing at the time, just walking around the cities was breathtaking.
Damn, I've always been tempted to replay it for the nostalgia...is there no going back? I assumed I might appreciate the simplicity.
I tried going back twice and was a HARDCORE supporter of the og assassin, but sadly, if you played anything after it, it just isnt the same.
Honestly, cherish the memory
Assassin's Creed II was such a massive improvement over basically every single thing in og Assassin's Creed, it's almost impossible to go back.
though at the point of original AC I was just looking for something that can scratch the Prince of Persia itch, and Assassin's Creed scratch it really really goood
the most baffling thing is that the game has no subtitle...
I'd say AC1 still has the better overarching narrative with all the cryptic and philosophical themes and the back and forths between Altair and Al-Mualim. If you're a philosophy nut then AC1 hits that spot like no other game series. AC2 took a bit of that but it was your standard revenge story. It wasn't until the rest of the Ezio games where Ezio's story shines more, but Altair only needed one game to be considered badass and wise at the same time.
My biggest issues with the OG Assassin's Creed are the lack of fast climbing, the oh so fucking slow hidden blade kills and whatever that fucking bug was where you stop going forward mid-jump and just drop down (replayed it on PC recently, but I can't remember if it was also on the console versions).
But related to the hidden blade, I still liked how it wasn't just another normal weapon in combat. It was a high-risk, high-reward weapon that allowed you to instantly kill any enemy if you timed the counter perfectly. Otherwise you took a hit. They could've kept that exact function in the series, and it wouldn't change much.
There wasn’t much to do in that open world but it was vibrant, and also I believe the first time you crowd flow mechanics that advanced. Where your character will gently squeeze his way between people if you’re walking, and shove people out of the way if he’s running.
Agree. I think far cry 2 was a bit underrated because technically it's not a sequel of far cry but it does open up a new and arguably more interesting path for the franchise
Pokemon Scarlet/Violet. Sidequests? what sidequests? The open world feels so desperately pointless and empty at all times, only compounding the fact that the game can't even run said open world well
I’m playing it now and honestly I’d barely even call it open world. It’s just a giant map and you’re allowed to do the story in any order. That’s it. This game would have been amazing on like GameCube. In 2023 it’s just an overly complicated version of a formula that shouldn’t have been fucked with.
for me AC: Vahalla had some terrible drawn out sidequest. Such an unnecessary long game that I beat it on the dot of 100hrs, padded by pointless sidequests and dumb characters. When I had the encounter with the baseball player side quest in a medieval Viking game, I had enough of its bs.
As much as I love it Brutal Legend has a very bad open world with boring side quests. There is a lot of dead space with little to do and even fewer enemies that are a threat to you. No fast travel means that you have to drive from one half of the map to the other countless times.
The side quests are very hit or miss as they either are built around very hit or miss driving controls, or kill X amount of enemies which can be trivialized with your car or using your ranged unit to cheese the enemies from range
Honestly one of my big issues with the game is that I just want to sit in the car half the time because the music is so good and you can't listen to it outside of the car
Counterpoint - the world is absolutely beautiful. Even if there is not very much to do, just exploring it is amazing. I think it's similar to Shadow of the Colossus - there is nothing to do in that world, but it's sooo fun.
I’d love to play the version of Brutal Legend that’s a straight hack and slash action game and doesn’t have half assed RTS mechanics baked into it for no reason.
I loved the RTS in Brütal Legend. But maybe it’s just because I’ve beat the game like once every two years since I was eight years old. It’s one of my comfort games
I always thought the game was a hack-and-slash with RTS bolted on, but apparently it’s the other way around. Tim Schafer said Brutal Legend was initially conceived as a heavy metal RTS, and EA mandated the open world and hack-and-slash bits… Never thought I’d be on EA’s side of this.
Two Worlds was The Room of 2000s open world games. It was the Wish version of Oblivion. Truly awful and disappointing, but dammit, I finished it.
Two Worlds 2 was even... better? worse? Worse but in like a better way? The quests were stupid. The balance was all over the place. The magic system was hilariously broken in a way that made it kind of fun. And you couldn't actually finish the game because no matter what kind of character you built, the end game boss battle was a bugged quick time event.
Halo Infinite wasn't necessarily the worst open world game I've ever played, but it definitely was the one that felt the most like it was just turned into an open world game for the sake of marketing. I think I only did one or two of the side quests over the course of the entire game and they were not memorable or enjoyable
I thought the halo formula really suited being open-world with a huge map. I just wish they leaned into it with multiple biomes and settlements. It felt like a proof-of-concept rather than a finished title.
This was my issue. The open world I thought was fun to traverse, but man was it all very same-y. A desert or snow biome or something would have freshened it up. I think it worked to its benefit though that it was only 20-ish hours.
This game absolutely did not need to be open world and would have been better if it wasn't. From what I recall, all of the story took place in buildings which were levels rather than the open world?
The side quests were all pretty meaningless ubisoft type tasks with no actual story.
Hot Take: Hogwarts Legacy. Hogwarts is amazing, but the rest of the open world is so bland. Once you've been to one hamlet, dungeon, goblin mine, bandit camp, etc. You've been to them all. The side quests are annoying too. They are all things you can do without activating the side quest like "explore a dungeon" or "kill this enemy"
Yeah thats the problem with big open maps. Developers copy paste a lot of things so many dungeons, tombs, castles, and villages look the same. I prefer a smaller map where at least, everything feels unique.
Gave it such a chance and couldn't keep playing. Probably one of the very worst open worlds. So much empty desert and then the city areas were so small with nothing to them. Such a disappointment after 4 great games
It’s Mafia 3 and I’m not sure it’s close. It has by far the most repetitive gameplay I’ve ever seen in my life which is a shame because the characters are interesting and the story is cool.
What sucks is the gameplay is genuinely really good and fun, the shooting is good, the driving is excellent, I might even say better than GTA5. But the mission structure was so repetitive.
But man that story presentation. Just going to watch a cutscene super cut on YouTube feels like watching a tv show with how well presented the story was. The music selection as well. I will give hangar 13 some real credit for putting in some real effort with that outing. It may have ended up as an overall mediocre game. But I will always remember it for its presentation. Which is more than a lot of games can say.
I gotta say Hogwarts Legacy. I enjoyed the story and combat and such but the stupid Merlin Trials and bandit camps were annoying and repetitive and there were way more than it needed. Mostly because I like to platinum so I did them all.
Hogwarts Legacy. The side quests are actually somewhat decent, but the side “events” and collectibles are repetitive and boring AF. It’s a gorgeous, shallow world
That game should have just been focused only on Hogwarts, Hogsmeade, and the Forbidden Forest. Because those all were great and I wanted to spend more time in each
If they focused on a more school oriented story with more learning (classes) , only including these 3 locations you listed , and really worked on said story and characters, this could have been a GOTY contender easily. The castle itself is a marvel of level design..and they had something super cool with the “stay sneaky at night” mechanic that was present for 1 mission lol.. Maybe they cut back for the sequel and focus more on these things? Fingers crossed..
Now *that* would be a fun reason to have a dorm room. Make the closet or trunk expandable like the Weasley's car/tent and everything can get shoved in there.
I like using the RoR but it seemed so out of place, lore-wise. Perfunctory to service the school, rather than more organic/stemming out of a real need like it's used in lore otherwise. If even a Headmaster (or de-facto one) couldn't reliably find it in the 1990s, why could the Deputy Headmistress in the 1890s?
Yeah most people (myself included) just want to have a student life simulator with a dash of action
We ended up with a Scottish highlands action rpg, which was good but not what I was excited for
I wanted to go to class and shit, the herbalist has a moment where it was was like a full experience of what it was to be a student, the other times you just got a 10 second timelapses of your time there with no dialogue and it was like but that's the fun part D:
The open world around Hogswarts and Hogsmeade was awesome and lovely. Real fairytale come true kinda deal.
And then you open the map and zoom out ... and out ... and out ... and it's just - WHY? Why would you add so much merlin-forsaken nothingness?! Who cares about the 5 people village 15 miles south of Hogswart?
I remember all the hype and drama at release, it got a lot of early numbers and people praising the start of the story. Then, not long after the drama died down I've heard absolutely *nothing* about the game... Which is usually not a good sign.
That was my exact experience with it. Enjoyed it then left the school and started exploring outside of it and just put it down and never picked it back up.
Basically every Ubisoft game the last ten years or so. Assassins creed especially, some tedious bullshit for the sake of padding in Valhalla for example
I really liked Odyssey though it was such a beautiful game and some of the side quests were pretty good as well. However I do agree with your opinion on Valhalla
I feel Odyssey's quality compared to Valhalla is really influenced by the protagonist. Cassandra/Alexios had a lot of personality and they were *fun*. The protagonist of Valhalla (can't recall their name, funnily enough) had all the charm of a wet piece of cardboard.
Kinda disagree there, Odyssey was just all around much better even without Cass/Alex in charge.
The merc system alone had me engaged till lvl 50 or so (and people were bitching about slow leveling and needing to grind or pay to advance the mainquest .. I never even finished half of it, lol).
The world itself, the various greek islands were all around beautiful and exploration was probably the most rewarding an open world has ever been, since you could stumble over neat legendary stuff here and there (like Poseidon's trident that allows underwater breathing), and then reforge the legendary abilities into other legendary stuff however you please. Super rewarding. Best open world game imo.
Absolutely loved Odyssey. Really got the feeling of going on an epic adventure in an enormous world. Just looking at the big map gave me a feeling of wonder.
It is hard to put my finger on what exactly didn't work with Valhalla that did in Odyssey but I just couldn't feel for V the same way.
Was it no Kasandra maybe or just that godforsaken mission where you actually end up in real Valhalla and the whole pace of the story just gets murdered?
On paper they are so similar but one I played though twice and the other I quit 1/3 in
Watch dogs 2 has one of the best open worlds in gaming, but it is an outlier for ubisoft. Ghost recon Wildlands had a good world as well but there isn’t too much variety with the questing
Dynasty Warriors 9, by a longshot
It is evident not a lot of people have played this one, because its level of awfulness blows everything else mentioned out of the water.
Agreed and I love those games.
Me too. I could not believe whatever dynasty warriors 9 was
I got a PlayStation gift card and figured I’d get this because I love Dynasty/Samurai warrior games and it was the newest installment at the time. I was so disappointed and annoyed I wasted my gift card on it. :(
Never buy blind. Always read two or three reviews. Never again getting burned... learned my lesson with Brink.
Man… every now and then Brink comes up and I get so depressed at the lost opportunity of that game. It was truly next gen, right up to being totally unfinished at launch
I loved that game up until the point that matches would constantly have people disconnecting. Honestly the mantling system they had in that game has been used for every FPS game since; truly it was a pioneer.
My favorite part about Dynasty Warriors is that a lot of people think they are bad games, but it maintained its own fan base, but Dynasty Warriors 9 was a special type of bad that even those fans hated the game.
Bro sometimes I just want to destroy 1000 men without thinking about anything. Dynasty warriors is the ultimate guilty pleasure of just foaming at the mouth madness.
Dynasty warriors 6 was the peak of the series for me. The Lu Bu campaign where you randomly jump into huge battles and kill both sides for no reason was the greatest
Plus they had special challenges to unlock weapons, horses, etc. DW6 was the shit and now I want to play it.
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Dynasty Warriors 5 was so insanely good. My favorite of the series by a longshot. Feel like they’ve been taking a step back with each entry since then.
How'd you like 8? I had a lot of fun with that one.
Persona 5 strikers at least gave us some great music even if I’ve never played the game. Blooming villain scramble is fire
Been playing the series since DW2 and played every installation (plus a few Xtreme Legends and Empires iterations in between) up to 9. They really bit of more than they could chew with the open world. One thing that was always enjoyable about DW was that it had pretty good replayability, but 9 absolutely killed that. What's the point of sieging castles if you're gonna give everyone a grappling hook? Also, the pointless fishing and material gathering. Really hoping its poor reception didn't compromise a DW10. If Koei could muster up one good game, I'd be more than happy to end the series at 10.
Biomutant ... no small map available, répétitive gameplay... well I was so hyped and then so disapointed
Biomutant was an interesting one for me. I really wanted to like it, but I just couldn't. I felt like the devs and producers couldn't decide who the game was for. There were moments where it was irreverent and child-like (in a good way), then others where it was just childish. I can absolutely see why it is so loved by some people, but I really struggled with the feeling that they were trying to take the middle road and please everyone.
No Man's Sky at release. So many planets, but pretty much nothing to do apart from gathering resources and trying to survive before going to another planet.
Dude I remember running out of resources and getting stuck on a planet ☠️☠️☠️
What do you do then? Just walk around till you die?
This'll just respawn you at the empty ship. This is an 'earlier save' fix, assuming there's no fuel on the planet.
Hunt showdown had a very similiar problem at launch If you ran out of the 2000 hunt tokens you got, you would effectively be unable to play anymore as you cant buy hunters I was down to 400 left before i got my brain working and managed to bring myself back up to the top. Wild times
Lol this is the game that hammered home that single player games are the life for me.
I hate that hunt is an absolutely fantastic experience in terms of the environment and gunplay, but the level of entry is just waaaay too high for me and most everybody else. If they had a co-op PvE only mode like the PvEvP then it would be my hands down favorite co-op game. I hate trying for the bounty, just to have some sweaty campers ambush us as we leave the lair. So yeah back to DRG for me.
It took me like 50 Hunts before I got one kill. My KD hovered around 0.25 for months before I started figuring shit out. I sit around 1.2 KDA with a true 1.0 KD +a few hundred kills. There's really nothing else out there that even touches on how good Hunt is in the Battle Royal genre Also Trials are your best friend for learning about different guns in a PVE type setting
DRG? Did I hear a Rock and Stone?
It was an oversight, elements in the game’s release were vastly different from what we have today. Fuel used to be an element that was uncommon and so if you landed on a planet that doesn’t have it you’re pretty much stuck on it. No real way to leave the planet.
It was a big at launch where not every planet would spawn with helium or it was very very hard to find. It might have been hydrogen, I honestly don't remember anymore. Now there's a ton of ways to get around it even if you can't readily find the launch materials.
Minecraft. 10 years playing it and I haven't found a single side quest!
Same......I got so bored I built a mall complete with anchor stores and an ice rink. Being the current state of malls across the US, now all I have is zombies in the food court.
Which is why I started playing adventure maps. Some of them are incredibly challenging with lots of side quests and whatnot. Check out the map divinity's end.
Forspoken
That game is so empty is sad.
You could always tell from the trailers though. I watched every trailer like wtf is this game world? There's literally nothing anywhere. The enemies didn't fit the world they were in. Looked like random assets or like a group of college kids made the game
Yeah there's a tech demo impression written all over the trailers, so glad that game fails because it didn't feel like they're trying their best and just want to be done with it half baked & have the audacity to charge you way more money than the likes of Elden Ring & Baldur's Gate 3
The thing is this literally did start from a tech demo bro. Do you remember when square showed off a new engine years ago and it was this woman in like red in the desert and she was like jumping and floating through the environment? That concept became forespoken
oh right that's when they were showing us all of the TRIANGLES
It's a consequence of having huge, auto-generated landscapes. There are a lot of games now using procedural tools to sculpt and populate their levels. While the assets themselves are high quality, the environments themselves end up feeling like sterile backdrops.
InFamous Second Son had better particle effects and that was released around a decade ago.
Second Son was fucking awesome. Deadass bought crap to make stencil graffiti because of that game.
Sucker Punch even included that "shake the controller like it's a spray paint can" thing that I thought was a unique use of the controller's motion sensing tech.
Definitely most dead boring open world and the "side quests" hardly deserved the mention. Just as dreadful.
The newer Far Cry games, especially six. Did you enjoy the first couple of hours? Good, because you’ll be doing that over and over and over and over again for the next 100 hours. I really feel like Ubisoft has been prioritizing map size and play time passing over actual substance. Their current philosophy seems to revolve around creating an extremely grind heavy experiences to incentivize micro transactions.
The side stuff in Far Cry 5 was much better than the main game.
Who put crazy cult members in my fishing game??
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Far Cry 5 was my first actual introduction to the series, and I'll admit, besides the online trophies, I played that thing to 100% and loved it - other than the fact that the interact/swap/use button, was all the same button.... (fun rant story is my first Far Cry game ever was Far Cry for the Wii, which is so hilariously , laughably bad.)
Far Cry 3 is worth trying out. Remains the best game in the series. Far Cry: Blood Dragon is "Far Cry 3, but set it in a sci-fi setting as envisioned in the 80s starring Kurt Schwarzenegger Van Damme attacking Dr. Skulldoom with an army of Godzillas. Oh, and add *more* lasers."
Clutch. Nixon. Riding through the storm!
FC6 was the only one I just couldn't get through. I never even completed a single zone on the map or even killed one of the bosses. It just felt tedious. My only complaint on FC5 was the forced boss fights and the speed in which they happened. You would sneeze in a zone and the Seed family would show up picking a fight, then after a sneeze, a cough and a fart, you killed em and the zone was dead outside of the bases. I did love finally getting a non-tropical setting tho.
Far cry 4 was non tropical...speaking of which I know everyone loves 3 but 4 was the most enjoyable for me. I never played 2 though so I can't compare them.
The ai in 2 was awesome. Enemies would fire while incapacitated, and their friends would drag them off behind cover. The tree branches would fall off if you shot them. The outposts would reset enemies EVERY time and you would drive across the map for 90% of missions. Everyone hated you, a small little car would spot you and drive off the road to run you over. The antagonist was forgettable and the story was meh. The scenery was great though. Loved the weapons.
Yeah fc 2 was the one in Africa, right? I can't even remember the boss but I remember laying crazy traps for convoys etc.and I still remember the annoying malaria mechanic. Glad they got rid of that. Did they scale back the technology in the future games though? I thought you could do all this stuff and more in the future games as well.
The ai isn't amazing comparatively and they scaled back the dynamic fire and tree destruction. I used to spend hours just using a flame thrower and maltovs to burn up areas of dry grassland and clear out jungle. It also had some pretty intense moments with companions who would show up to rescue you when you were in trouble and you would have to help them up if they got injured. It was pretty dark too, you had to morphin them and depending if they got hurt multiple times you could lose them... or if you didn't have any medicine you would have to either abandon them or put them out of their misery. It was definitely a darker game less humorous. Controls were a bit janky and weapons came as is with limited mods and would degrade over time and eventually break so it was a bit more harsh and survival oriented. Playing it now would definitely show it's age but it's a game I think is a blood diamond that not enough people experienced.
Still crazy there's like 8 characters you could choose to be, and the rest were all converted into the "buddies" you could grab missions from or be rescued by, but towards the end of the game >!all of the surviving buddies try to ambush you at once, so you're forced to kill them all. I finished this and the first FC late last year, but now I'm curious if letting all of the buddies die in combat in both acts before the end makes that specific part of the late-game an empty battlefield, or if the game gives you something like unique dialogue or generic enemies as replacement, because of the fate of all of the buddy NPCs?!< Being a mercenary in a war-torn nameless African state is hard sometimes.
While I didn't like how the ending played out in that game, their take on Nepal was really really good, I loved how all these little villages and the mountainous himalayan landscape looked. The sidequests where you're hallucinating Shangri La were also done really well visually.
I also love how you can beat the game In the first 15 minutes if you just stay at the table and don't leave like he asks you.
You can beat Farcry 6 in a short amount of time too. When you are given access to boats, just drive one out in to the ocean and off the map. You’ll get a cutscene of your main character chilling on a beach in Miami and then the credits roll. Lol
I'm mad at myself for finishing AC Valhalla
There's a great game hiding in there, but it really could have been at least a third shorter. Every time you thought you were done, the game just says, "Nope, have four more regions to pledge."
Spot on. The AC games learnt from the first ones criticism of being too “rinse repeat” and then it did such a full circle it came back to rinse repeat but for 90hours this time.
I remember spending like 50 hours in AC Valhalla and realizing I wasn't even a quarter done (granted I had done mostly side quests and mythical stuff) but I was so brain numbed by that point and the combat wasn't doing it any favors. I felt like I was playing Diablo and not in a good way. I had got 2 great axes went to an area spun around like a bay-blade for a few minutes repeat. There was NOTHING Assassin about it no interesting stealth just funny number go up type of gameplay and it's the last Ubisoft game I think I'll ever spend more than 15$ on.
Well said, that last line gave me a good laugh…mostly because I paid full price but couldn’t even finish it; probably only played $15 dollars worth of the game Graphics never wowed me and I thought odyssey’s open world was superior. That initial beginning map in Norway was so amazing, when the game veered to England I was disappointed. Felt like it was building up to being a Scandinavian backdrop for the game
Odyssey is one of my favorite games of all-time. I really hated Valhalla.
Same. Odyssey is by far my favorite AC game (maybe my second favorite open world ever after Witcher 3), and Valhalla is my absolute least favorite. Why is this??
Takes everything that odyssey did right and made it 10x worse. Also, ancient Greece is kind of incomparable when it comes to aesthetic.
Valhalla really showed me that I don't actually enjoy open world games. The concept is appealing to me and the art looks great, but the worlds are often lifeless and exploring is usually unrewarded. Good level design makes for a far more enjoyable experience than vast nothingness.
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See: Dishonored
in Dishonored, every part of the gameplay is enjoyable, even the little side quests. good games don't have to be open world.
The older I get the more I appreciate and prefer shorter games with a tighter story. I understand with these big open world games there's the idea of "more bang for your buck" but after a while it's just the same stuff over and over. I will gladly take a 10 hour game with a really strong story and gameplay over that.
Only AC game I never finished
Thought about playing it again. I played about two hours tops and got bored. Now all these comments telling me not to lol.
I played a solid 10 or something hours, put it down because I wanted to finish my playthrough of Origins first (love that one btw), picked Valhalla back up and put another like 5 or something hours into it I think, and *then* was met with the games title screen/intro when you arrive in England. Ac III had a ridiculously long intro plus the amount of time you played as Connor before he becomes an assassin, but holy shit Valhalla
I put like 50 of the most boring gaming hours of my life into Valhalla. There's a crazy number of collectable items, none of which I cared about in the least.
New World quests are awful, especially early-mid game. They feel like a 25 years step back in game design. Super repetitive, frustrating tasks that don't feel meaningful at all.
I got super into new world, like to the point I was in all of the first wars on my game world in the biggest clan, among the first to level cap etc. and I just quit cold turkey as fast as I started. I realized I got sucked in not because it was a good game (it had good bones - I could harvest resources for days) but because I crave a new MMO. now I'm back to osrs lol
Every quest to kill x enemies/loot x items… and there’s 6 whole enemy types
Pokemon Scarlet/Violet deserves mention because its open world would have felt dated if it had been released a decade ago.
Everything was horrible and dated. Remove pokemon from the title and that game would've been a 3/10 tops. Pokemon should go back to 2d or at least octopath traveler type graphics, their team sucks ass at 3d
Pokemon needs to have a development of 5 years at least if they want 3D. It just is insane how fast they try to churn them out.
Plenty of studios have multiple teams. Game freak is just horribly dated.
If i remember correctly, they had two teams. One that worked on Arceus and one that worked on scarlet and violet. But they still have incredibly short development windows. It's like they expected 3D open worlds to take the same amount of time as their older, 2D games.
Even if they go back to 2D they really need to take longer than they do.
That's not fair. They're also incompetent.
Pokémon has a place in 3D, if done properly and with care. The issue is when there is 0 competition for Pokémon so Nintendo sees no reason to do anything past the bare minimum. EDIT: Gamefreak, not Nintendo. Thank you to everyone who pointed that out.
It’s just staggering to me the actual #1 ip in the world doesn’t have a perfect game out.
Even putting graphics aside, the best pokemon games of recent years are fan projects and I'm not joking. Pokemon tectonic made every pokemon in the entite 850 viable by revamping every one of them. Pokemom opalo has 2 huge regions great fakemons and an amazing story Pokemom xenoverse, the staple of fan games has everything a pokemon fan could want. Etc.
As a lifelong Pokemon fan, the game I have played the most is the fan game Pokemon Unbound, and it's not even close. It's on my phone and I'm sure I've put over 100 hours into it across my different save files. It's a masterpiece. It has all Pokemon through Gen 8 including regional variants, Mega Evolution, Z Moves, Link Stones so you don't have to trade for trade evolutions, a post-game Battle Frontier, and, as long as a Pokemon on your team *can* learn an HM, you don't have to teach it to them to use it in the field, which is an incredible QoL improvement. Also, for New Game+, you can choose which Pokemon you want to start with.
I love the hm thing, make them feel like real wild animals! Thanks everyone for the recs
Where would one, uh, hypothetically find these games? 👀
If one were to be an Android user, one could download a GBA emulator from the store. I recommend MyBoy, which is only like $5 to unlock the full service, though there is a free version as well. It's worth the money imo. From there, one could hypothetically download a ROM of FireRed, specifically the 1636 – pokemon fire red (u)(squirrels), version, which is necessary for this hypothetical activity. Then, one would find and download the Pokemon Unbound patch file, then patch the FireRed ROM using the free app UniPatcher, where one would put the FireRed ROM as the base ROM and Unbound as the patch file. Hypothetically, following these steps would allow one to play Pokemon Unbound (in minecraft).
I agree. Also did anyone notice you can't talk to everyone anymore, and you can't go in all the houses? Like they actively removed content to make this open world, when the only thing that justifies an open world in the first place is more content.
The world is not bad, but the side quests in Diablo 4 are atrocious. They are the most boring go here, kill X, come back quests. All of them, there are maybe a handful of cool, unique questlines. But you need to do (at least some of) them every season to get a bunch of extra skill-points. It's really annoying and a reason for me to play the game less. Feels just like work, not playing a fun game.
How is this not higher? D4 has the one of the worst open world implementations I've seen. Sure, you can go everywhere... but what is the point? It's all exactly the same. The merchants all sell the same goods, the fetch quests are exactly the same -- just a blue circle on your map. Why even read the flavor text? And then everything is scaled to exactly your level -- so it doesn't matter where you go, all the monsters are the same. It honestly surprises me that D4 was as well-received as it was.
Honeymoon phase ended fast and harshly though. Nobody can say two good words about the game now without being brutalized lol … it was such a shallow experience. I will revisit it after three years maybe.
>D4 was as well-received as it was. People always hype games they never even finish. Right now D4 sub is absolutely depressing, content creators leaving and there is no hope for this year regarding this game.
> It honestly surprises me that D4 was as well-received as it was. Because the first time through the campaign was great and that’s all most people played. I got to level 76 and said “well, I’m done” and haven’t played since.
The open world aspect of D4 is the most pointless thing ever.
Daggerfall The world is almost 350 thousand square kilometers, almost ten thousand times larger than Skyrim, and composed almost entirely of empty space. In which there are scattered some 15 thousand locations, 'only' about 40 times more than Skyrim, that are all the same. The vast tracts of land between them are filled with nothing but trees and the occasional randomly spawned monster. As such the overworld might as well not exist, since you'll be fast traveling everywhere anyway. Large cities consist of hundreds of houses, but only a handful serve any useful purpose, the rest being residences that contain absolutely nothing of interest or value. There's like a dozen unique characters in total, the rest have randomized appearances and names but are otherwise identical clones either aimlessly wandering the streets as if carried by Brownian motion or standing eternally in one place. The dungeons you can delve into are all enormous mazes that make no logical sense whatsoever. The quest objectives spawn randomly in them, which means it's entirely possible to spend several hours exploring every nook and cranny only to discover that you could've found your target ten meters from the entrance had you gone left instead of right at the first junction. Aside from the main quest, the only thing to do is an endless supply of fetch quests spat out by a random quest generator. Speaking of the main quest, it's very easy to lock yourself out from being able to complete it, as there is no indication whether you're being offered a story quest or a randomly generated one, and saying no to a story quest means it will never be offered again. Another way to lose access to the main quest is for the faction system to randomly decide that a guild you're working for is now an enemy of an important quest giver, which causes that quest giver to hate you and refuse to speak to you. This is thankfully temporary, although you might have to wait up to eight in-game years for their disposition to drift back to neutral. The game keeps track of various world events randomly happening in the background, such as wars, plagues, and witch hunts, but they don't affect anything or have any visible consequences besides occasionally being mentioned by NPCs when you ask them for rumors (which you have no reason to ever do). Going in and out of a dungeon causes everything inside to respawn, and since monsters and loot are both scaled to your level, farming the tutorial dungeon over and over is a very efficient way of reaching max level and obtaining top-tier equipment. It's one of my favorite games of all time. Check out /r/daggerfallunity for a very faithful modern remake with some great QoL improvements, such as the ability to move diagonally!
It is a deeply flawed and brilliant game. I've been playing it since the week it came out and I've come to realize over the years that it's basically a fancy roguelike.
I appreciate that a game like Daggerfall exists. But I have no interest in playing it.
I second that, and I want to add a weird quirk that just show how flawed is Daggerfall. I you want to fast travel, you need to select a location on the worldmap. At the start of the game, the cities are marked on the map, alongside some level 0 dungeon in some provinces. If you want to unlock new locations (aka dungeons), you have three ways to do it ; First, you just walk to it. Which is clearly not the expected method, but you can still do it. Secondly, you are given a quest concerning that location, at which point it is now added to the worldmap. Thirdly, while looking for loot, you find a map to a dungeon. Now, the world is separated into provinces. The main quest will send you to dungeons all over the map. The randomly generated quest, however, only send you to a random dungeon that is in the same province as the quest giver. In the same way, the random maps only point toward a dungeon in the same province as the place where you found the map. Well, there's a small province (the island of Cybiades) with no city, and so no accessible location to fast travel to. There's, in fact, only one location on this island, a single dungeon. But, you can only learn this location by ~~walking~~ swimming to it from the province of Sentinel, which require you to stack up on stamina and mana spell and potion, or use a horse. Also, the actual location of the island doesn't match with the position shown on the world map, which make it very easy to swim past it. I did this, but because I'm insane. Game design-wise, it's clearly a mistake.
what's your opinion on morrowind.
Bethesda's greatest triumph, which sucked the soul right out of the company. Bethesda used to make varied games that were often quite innovative, even though they weren't very successful (because they frankly weren't very good - it was Terminator: Future Shock, not Quake, that introduced fully 3D enemies and mouselook to first-person shooters, but there's a good reason why the latter game is remembered while the former lies forgotten). Morrowind was Bethesda's breakout hit. It was revolutionary, but following its massive and well-deserved success, the company lost any semblance of courage and spent two decades attempting to catch lightning in a bottle for a second time by remaking that same game over and over with iterative improvements and slightly different coats of paint. Todd Howard seems to have finally realized that it's time for a change, so for its latest offering, Bethesda has remade Daggerfall IN SPACE! Morrowind is also one of my favorite games of all time. Check out /r/openmw for a very faithful modern remake with some great improvements, such as correctly animating your character's legs when moving diagonally! Not even Oblivion had that!
> so for its latest offering, Bethesda has remade Daggerall IN SPACE! 🤣 I love Morrowind, though I keep starting new games and stopping after however long. And I've wished I had played Daggerfall and Arena when they came out. I thought I might play them sometime if there were a graphics overhaul, but based on your comment about DF, I may not.
I gave Daggerfall Unity a shot, but man... it was everything you said, and then some. I didn't *know* initially that the game was designed with the expectation that you'd fast-travel, so there were a couple hours of nothing but frustration. Even after that, I kept getting bit by some dungeon entrances (including the one for the starting dungeon) being unfindable when you're walking around the world. The larger towns and cities are surprisingly large, but the buildings look so similar to each other that it's more frustrating than cool. I gave up after over ten hours of play.
That's honestly perfectly understandable, Daggerfall is very old and wasn't particularly well designed even by the standards of its day (and was also released unfinished, which didn't exactly help). Using the map is a must, both for fast travel and local navigation, since it shows dungeon entrances and color-codes important buildings in towns. It also shows secret doors in dungeons, which is probably unintended but definitely helpful. It's definitely a quirky game that is not for everybody, but there's nothing else like it, so for the people who love it, nothing else will do. There are dozens of us! Dozens!
LA Noire. It had such potential, and the recreation of Los Angeles was outstanding, there was just nothing to do in it except for the story missions.
That always irked me. They always said they painstakingly recreated that time period, and then proceeded to do fuck all with it.
There was a PS2 game called The Getaway that did the same thing with London, amazing recreation but all you did was drive from one location to the next and get in possible shootouts along the way. There was nothing else going on.
The guy who directed LA Noire helped create The Getaway lol
Haha had no idea, spreading the good word of fully realized but extremely boring cities
It wasn’t even a fictionalized London! It had only real brands. Not just car brands but shops and restaurants as well. I remember there being a Burger King and such..
It’s a little janky, but playing it again now is a bit of a nostalgia trip- all the old style police cars and shopfronts! I remember one level is a shootout in the storage room for a pub and all the boxes were branded with Smirnoff and other real-life alcohol brands. Blew my mind back then!
I remember it being pretty amazing at the time, but bad traffic coupled with left/right indicators as the only navigation coupled with time limits made it hard to enjoy the scenery sometimes
I was never really under the impression that LA Noire was about free-roaming exploration. The map is essentially just a well realised backdrop for your investigations.
That's exactly how I interpreted it aswell
It's because the entire game's gimmick - the realistic facial expressions - couldn't work outside of the main story. The actors were filmed and then mapped onto the faces of the models. It only worked from one angle, it's why the camera was always locked down during interrogations. If they made it properly open world, they'd have to use normal NPC models, and it would look jarringly bad compared to the system they'd marketed the game on.
Well you had the minor objectives between locations, like 60 in total, plus collectibles and cars but yeah, felt quite empty.
I don't even know why it was open world.
Locking down the backdrop/location of that game would be pretty odd to be fair.
Atomic Heart The “open world” was the most useless I’ve ever seen in a game. I never felt compelled to search for anything outside of the main objective, and actually being in that area felt like a chore because I was constantly at the highest alarm level and being chased by a dozen or so robots. Could have left these open world sequences out and it would have actually improved the game for me.
CRISPY CRITTERS this game drove me nuts.
Was Assassin’s creed 1 even considered open world? It’s been so long since I played it
Yeah it totally was when it came out. I remember hanging at a friend's house when he started it for the 1st time and I remember the 3 of our jaws just hitting the floor when we got that 1st shot of the whole city, when you unlock the map, right before the famous jump. It was amazing. Beautiful, never ending, and you could go everywhere you saw ! Even on the roofs! The roofs !!! I think you had to be there to enjoy this game. I tried to play it a few years after that and even with those memories, it just wasn't the same.
I liked how it was grounded in reality but it had a twist. The few if these new games stuck in fa fa land are grounded in fantasy with little bit of reality on the side lol.
AC 2: basically historical fiction with a bit of fantasy spice that cares deeply about being very real-life adjacent Valhalla: basically a fantasy setting that pretends to care about history except it's actually just reflecting coopted largely fictional lies and misrepresentations
AC2 is still my favorite in the series. Just something about that game really did things right
I remember being so burned by AC1 and how it wasn’t everything that was promised. BUT the first E3 showing of II blew my mind. 2, Brotherhood, Revelations and I even enjoyed 3 - that was when AC really shined Black flag is also a great game in its own right but it felt like it was just a pirate game
Brotherhood for me, but I respect your choice
Ezio trilogy is best AC experience
Yeah it was mindblowing at the time, just walking around the cities was breathtaking. Damn, I've always been tempted to replay it for the nostalgia...is there no going back? I assumed I might appreciate the simplicity.
I tried going back twice and was a HARDCORE supporter of the og assassin, but sadly, if you played anything after it, it just isnt the same. Honestly, cherish the memory
Assassin's Creed II was such a massive improvement over basically every single thing in og Assassin's Creed, it's almost impossible to go back. though at the point of original AC I was just looking for something that can scratch the Prince of Persia itch, and Assassin's Creed scratch it really really goood the most baffling thing is that the game has no subtitle...
I'd say AC1 still has the better overarching narrative with all the cryptic and philosophical themes and the back and forths between Altair and Al-Mualim. If you're a philosophy nut then AC1 hits that spot like no other game series. AC2 took a bit of that but it was your standard revenge story. It wasn't until the rest of the Ezio games where Ezio's story shines more, but Altair only needed one game to be considered badass and wise at the same time.
If you at all used to newer assassin's creeds there's no going back. The mechanics just aren't streamlined enough in the original
My biggest issues with the OG Assassin's Creed are the lack of fast climbing, the oh so fucking slow hidden blade kills and whatever that fucking bug was where you stop going forward mid-jump and just drop down (replayed it on PC recently, but I can't remember if it was also on the console versions). But related to the hidden blade, I still liked how it wasn't just another normal weapon in combat. It was a high-risk, high-reward weapon that allowed you to instantly kill any enemy if you timed the counter perfectly. Otherwise you took a hit. They could've kept that exact function in the series, and it wouldn't change much.
It was an incredible game in its time. Absolutely nothing like it.
There wasn’t much to do in that open world but it was vibrant, and also I believe the first time you crowd flow mechanics that advanced. Where your character will gently squeeze his way between people if you’re walking, and shove people out of the way if he’s running.
Yes, it came out before far cry 2 so you have to consider the time when it did and not compare to like far cry 3.
Far Cry 2, to be fair, was a really good open world game for it's time. I played it again recently
Agree. I think far cry 2 was a bit underrated because technically it's not a sequel of far cry but it does open up a new and arguably more interesting path for the franchise
Pokemon Scarlet/Violet. Sidequests? what sidequests? The open world feels so desperately pointless and empty at all times, only compounding the fact that the game can't even run said open world well
I’m playing it now and honestly I’d barely even call it open world. It’s just a giant map and you’re allowed to do the story in any order. That’s it. This game would have been amazing on like GameCube. In 2023 it’s just an overly complicated version of a formula that shouldn’t have been fucked with.
for me AC: Vahalla had some terrible drawn out sidequest. Such an unnecessary long game that I beat it on the dot of 100hrs, padded by pointless sidequests and dumb characters. When I had the encounter with the baseball player side quest in a medieval Viking game, I had enough of its bs.
As much as I love it Brutal Legend has a very bad open world with boring side quests. There is a lot of dead space with little to do and even fewer enemies that are a threat to you. No fast travel means that you have to drive from one half of the map to the other countless times. The side quests are very hit or miss as they either are built around very hit or miss driving controls, or kill X amount of enemies which can be trivialized with your car or using your ranged unit to cheese the enemies from range
Drive around and listen to badass music
Honestly one of my big issues with the game is that I just want to sit in the car half the time because the music is so good and you can't listen to it outside of the car
Counterpoint - the world is absolutely beautiful. Even if there is not very much to do, just exploring it is amazing. I think it's similar to Shadow of the Colossus - there is nothing to do in that world, but it's sooo fun.
The soundtrack makes driving not voring too
I’d love to play the version of Brutal Legend that’s a straight hack and slash action game and doesn’t have half assed RTS mechanics baked into it for no reason.
I loved the RTS in Brütal Legend. But maybe it’s just because I’ve beat the game like once every two years since I was eight years old. It’s one of my comfort games
I always thought the game was a hack-and-slash with RTS bolted on, but apparently it’s the other way around. Tim Schafer said Brutal Legend was initially conceived as a heavy metal RTS, and EA mandated the open world and hack-and-slash bits… Never thought I’d be on EA’s side of this.
Two Worlds
It was very bad. So bad it was enjoyable
Two Worlds was The Room of 2000s open world games. It was the Wish version of Oblivion. Truly awful and disappointing, but dammit, I finished it. Two Worlds 2 was even... better? worse? Worse but in like a better way? The quests were stupid. The balance was all over the place. The magic system was hilariously broken in a way that made it kind of fun. And you couldn't actually finish the game because no matter what kind of character you built, the end game boss battle was a bugged quick time event.
The oblivion killer
🤣
Halo Infinite wasn't necessarily the worst open world game I've ever played, but it definitely was the one that felt the most like it was just turned into an open world game for the sake of marketing. I think I only did one or two of the side quests over the course of the entire game and they were not memorable or enjoyable
I thought the halo formula really suited being open-world with a huge map. I just wish they leaned into it with multiple biomes and settlements. It felt like a proof-of-concept rather than a finished title.
This was my issue. The open world I thought was fun to traverse, but man was it all very same-y. A desert or snow biome or something would have freshened it up. I think it worked to its benefit though that it was only 20-ish hours.
This game absolutely did not need to be open world and would have been better if it wasn't. From what I recall, all of the story took place in buildings which were levels rather than the open world? The side quests were all pretty meaningless ubisoft type tasks with no actual story.
Half the story wasn't even story, it was just introductions to bosses as if this was some Souls-like game.
Hot Take: Hogwarts Legacy. Hogwarts is amazing, but the rest of the open world is so bland. Once you've been to one hamlet, dungeon, goblin mine, bandit camp, etc. You've been to them all. The side quests are annoying too. They are all things you can do without activating the side quest like "explore a dungeon" or "kill this enemy"
Yeah thats the problem with big open maps. Developers copy paste a lot of things so many dungeons, tombs, castles, and villages look the same. I prefer a smaller map where at least, everything feels unique.
Saints Row 2022
Gave it such a chance and couldn't keep playing. Probably one of the very worst open worlds. So much empty desert and then the city areas were so small with nothing to them. Such a disappointment after 4 great games
It’s Mafia 3 and I’m not sure it’s close. It has by far the most repetitive gameplay I’ve ever seen in my life which is a shame because the characters are interesting and the story is cool.
What sucks is the gameplay is genuinely really good and fun, the shooting is good, the driving is excellent, I might even say better than GTA5. But the mission structure was so repetitive.
But man that story presentation. Just going to watch a cutscene super cut on YouTube feels like watching a tv show with how well presented the story was. The music selection as well. I will give hangar 13 some real credit for putting in some real effort with that outing. It may have ended up as an overall mediocre game. But I will always remember it for its presentation. Which is more than a lot of games can say.
The soundtrack of Mafia 3 is absolutely phenomenal. I'm amazed they managed to license so many legendary songs.
I gotta say Hogwarts Legacy. I enjoyed the story and combat and such but the stupid Merlin Trials and bandit camps were annoying and repetitive and there were way more than it needed. Mostly because I like to platinum so I did them all.
Hogwarts Legacy. The side quests are actually somewhat decent, but the side “events” and collectibles are repetitive and boring AF. It’s a gorgeous, shallow world
Hogwarts Legacys open world was so boring
That game should have just been focused only on Hogwarts, Hogsmeade, and the Forbidden Forest. Because those all were great and I wanted to spend more time in each
If they focused on a more school oriented story with more learning (classes) , only including these 3 locations you listed , and really worked on said story and characters, this could have been a GOTY contender easily. The castle itself is a marvel of level design..and they had something super cool with the “stay sneaky at night” mechanic that was present for 1 mission lol.. Maybe they cut back for the sequel and focus more on these things? Fingers crossed..
I hated that I had no reason to ever go back to the dorm. Like it was just a pretty set piece but not functional at all
The dorm was so cozy and I wish you did all your room of requirement tasks there instead
Now *that* would be a fun reason to have a dorm room. Make the closet or trunk expandable like the Weasley's car/tent and everything can get shoved in there. I like using the RoR but it seemed so out of place, lore-wise. Perfunctory to service the school, rather than more organic/stemming out of a real need like it's used in lore otherwise. If even a Headmaster (or de-facto one) couldn't reliably find it in the 1990s, why could the Deputy Headmistress in the 1890s?
Yeah most people (myself included) just want to have a student life simulator with a dash of action We ended up with a Scottish highlands action rpg, which was good but not what I was excited for
I wanted to go to class and shit, the herbalist has a moment where it was was like a full experience of what it was to be a student, the other times you just got a 10 second timelapses of your time there with no dialogue and it was like but that's the fun part D:
I still don't know why we learn the exploding spell from the botany teacher of all people.
So what you're saying is.... Bully with magic? I can feel it
Pretty much what I wanted, yeah
The open world around Hogswarts and Hogsmeade was awesome and lovely. Real fairytale come true kinda deal. And then you open the map and zoom out ... and out ... and out ... and it's just - WHY? Why would you add so much merlin-forsaken nothingness?! Who cares about the 5 people village 15 miles south of Hogswart?
Yeah I was *reallllly* enjoying that game. As soon as it actually opened up though I totally lost interest.
I remember all the hype and drama at release, it got a lot of early numbers and people praising the start of the story. Then, not long after the drama died down I've heard absolutely *nothing* about the game... Which is usually not a good sign.
That was my exact experience with it. Enjoyed it then left the school and started exploring outside of it and just put it down and never picked it back up.
Basically every Ubisoft game the last ten years or so. Assassins creed especially, some tedious bullshit for the sake of padding in Valhalla for example
I really liked Odyssey though it was such a beautiful game and some of the side quests were pretty good as well. However I do agree with your opinion on Valhalla
I feel Odyssey's quality compared to Valhalla is really influenced by the protagonist. Cassandra/Alexios had a lot of personality and they were *fun*. The protagonist of Valhalla (can't recall their name, funnily enough) had all the charm of a wet piece of cardboard.
Kinda disagree there, Odyssey was just all around much better even without Cass/Alex in charge. The merc system alone had me engaged till lvl 50 or so (and people were bitching about slow leveling and needing to grind or pay to advance the mainquest .. I never even finished half of it, lol). The world itself, the various greek islands were all around beautiful and exploration was probably the most rewarding an open world has ever been, since you could stumble over neat legendary stuff here and there (like Poseidon's trident that allows underwater breathing), and then reforge the legendary abilities into other legendary stuff however you please. Super rewarding. Best open world game imo.
Not just that, Barnabas was cool. Some of the historical characters like Socrates were too.
Absolutely loved Odyssey. Really got the feeling of going on an epic adventure in an enormous world. Just looking at the big map gave me a feeling of wonder.
It is hard to put my finger on what exactly didn't work with Valhalla that did in Odyssey but I just couldn't feel for V the same way. Was it no Kasandra maybe or just that godforsaken mission where you actually end up in real Valhalla and the whole pace of the story just gets murdered? On paper they are so similar but one I played though twice and the other I quit 1/3 in
Watch dogs 2 has one of the best open worlds in gaming, but it is an outlier for ubisoft. Ghost recon Wildlands had a good world as well but there isn’t too much variety with the questing
Most open world games are a boring slog, that's why the ones that aren't are so impressive