Can open worlds be improved by putting less objectives/chests/stuff in them?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I fondly remember playing Shadow of the Colossus on the PS2 and galloping across the humongous valley the game takes place in. Most of the map has no "content" in it. There are no fodder monsters to fight, no sidequests to do, no NPC villages, no treasure chests, no nothing. It's just, your horse, and the current colossus waited to be activated upon proximity, and that's it. I remember exploring the vast plains to the Southwest and the Southeast, discovering hidden forests, trotting through canyon mazes, and gallopping down by the Southwestern beach. And there is absolutely no gameplay or story reason to ever go to these places. They're just there to visit if you want to. And I did want to, because the world was beautiful, riding the horse was fun, and there was nothing else to do but go to the next colossus and finish the game.

In these modern open world games, there is some game thing every 30 seconds. You walk 30 seconds that way and there are trash mobs to fight, or a treasure chest, or a collectible, or a bandit camp, or a tower, or an NPC shouting at you to come do a sidequest, etc. So navigating the world becomes busywork as there are a lot of things fighting for your attention and you are having to decipher what stuff is worthwhile. And in the meantime, you are not really focused on exploring and admiring the environments themselves. You are instead focused on the checklist of things to do. Right now I am struggling to get through FF7 Rebirth, and I think this is part of the problem. I was kinda enjoying running around the coast before I went to the Chocobo Ranch to talk to Chadley, and then a bunch of sidequests and towers and summon shrines and chocobo signs etc activated.

[Vergil]

No I don't think having less video game content in the video game would improve it.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

No I don't think having less video game content in the video game would improve it.

Strong disagree. Whenever I hear someone say "this game has 100 hours of content in it!", I wonder "is that actually 100 hours of GOOD content? Or 20 hours of good content and 80 hours of mediocre waste of time?". I have played many 100+ hour long games, but I am struggling to think of any off the top of my head that were good for the who 100+ hours.

I would rather play a short game that is holistically good throughout than have my time wasted by longer games that where the experience is poor most of the time.

[Vergil]

I'd be more inclined to agree with you if your alternative wasn't a borderline gameplay-less walking sim like Shadow of the Colossus. The reason so many games that try to compete with Bethesda games fail is because they don't have the same level of intractability that those games have. Everything can be interacted with, opened, and/or looted. The less interaction the less alive and open the game feels. The sort of thing you're describing is stuff like Assassin's Creed flags or whatever which are meaningless collectables to pad things out but for an open world RPG I can't think of a single one that would be improved by having less chests, less items, less dungeons, and less enemies to fight.

Not to mention the fact that there's nothing stopping you from having the same aimless wandering experience inside any of those games which also include a feature rich world with things to do in them besides wander around. You can also gallop around Oblivion or Skyrim but there's also things to actually do when the novelty of that has worn off. I'd say it's just as important to have actual gameplay incentives and little rewards to keep you going along the path as it is to have moments of downtime where you're just going from one goal to the next. Oblivion would be so much worse if it had no caves, ruins, dungeons etc to explore or enemies along the road to fight.

[Stack of Turtles]

So navigating the world becomes busywork as there are a lot of things fighting for your attention and you are having to decipher what stuff is worthwhile. And in the meantime, you are not really focused on exploring and admiring the environments themselves. You are instead focused on the checklist of things to do. Right now I am struggling to get through FF7 Rebirth, and I think this is part of the problem. I was kinda enjoying running around the coast before I went to the Chocobo Ranch to talk to Chadley, and then a bunch of sidequests and towers and summon shrines and chocobo signs etc activated.

I honestly can't say I've ever had this problem. Attention isn't a finite resource and it's not taxing for me to pick what things I want to do or not.

[Oyster Sauce]

The map in Shadow of the Colossus is littered with items that increase your health/stamina IIRC

[Norfleet]

It depends. Back in the old days of MUDs, we had "open worlds" that were REALLY open and REALLY empty. As in, literal hours of the complete and utter emptinesss. If you wanted to go somewhere, you were looking at maybe 15 hours of travelling through the most empty thing in existence: The VACUUM OF SPACE. Naturally, there was not a whole lot of interactables in between, although players found ways to crash into things and die anyway. It did, however, make for some intense moments which the silence and quietude of an 8 hour space journey was interrupted by the sudden detection of an enemy contact on your scopes and everything went to Red Alarm.

This, obviously, might be much too boring for a single player game and we would likely see that subsumed into fast-travel, and with it, any sense of distance, unless the internality of your playing piece was the dominant element of gameplay and going to Red Alarm was a distraction from wrangling crewcritters or whatever it is you're doing when lost in space or at sea. It may still be workable in the environment of a multiplayer game which functions as a part time idle game with moments of active terror and death, though.

Of course, in a game where you have to micromanage the very process of moving, this would probably be pretty annoying, to spend your time holding W for hours at a time.

[Tangerine]

Shadow of the Colossus was a boring, two-hour puzzle game padded out with a dead world to make you feel like you weren't cheated out the $40 you spent on it.

[Tadeusz]

I think Gothic made a near perfect open world - it's small but filled with content. And I wouldn't say that the player is distracted all the time - all quest givers are mainly located in the forts or camps and you're free to explore whatever you want outside. Perhaps open worlds just need less meaningless content and less overall space to feel more satisfying to explore.

[Vergil]

Shadow of the Colossus was a boring, two-hour puzzle game padded out with a dead world to make you feel like you weren't cheated out the $40 you spent on it.

Shallow of the Colossal waste of time

[Tangerine]

Arcanum is an open world that meets the requirements you describe. Barring sea travel, you can spend in-game days walking to any point in the world instead of using the map's auto travel. You might do that once for the novelty, but will never do so again because it's actually really boring manually walking from point A to point B for hours on end doing nothing except travelling. You could find a point of interest along the way, but that would require exceptional luck that you may as well not consider it a possibility.

[rusty_shackleford]

[rusty_shackleford]

In these modern open world games, there is some game thing every 30 seconds. You walk 30 seconds that way and there are trash mobs to fight, or a treasure chest, or a collectible, or a bandit camp, or a tower, or an NPC shouting at you to come do a sidequest, etc. So navigating the world becomes busywork as there are a lot of things fighting for your attention and you are having to decipher what stuff is worthwhile.

The problem is the content is copy-pasted just to fill the empty space. The activities can be fun to do once or twice, but once you realize it's just doing the same thing repeatedly it's boring. Ubisoft checklist games, of which there are many not made by Ubisoft, thrive on this formula.

[rusty_shackleford]

I think Gothic made a near perfect open world - it's small but filled with content. And I wouldn't say that the player is distracted all the time - all quest givers are mainly located in the forts or camps and you're free to explore whatever you want outside. Perhaps open worlds just need less meaningless content and less overall space to feel more satisfying to explore.

It's because they made the world while making the game, rather than generating a world and trying to populate it with activities. Every part of that map is created for a specific purpose.

[Tadeusz]

It's because they made the world while making the game, rather than generating a world and trying to populate it with activities.

Yes, I guess this is the main problem with modern open worlds. World generation works if it's a sandbox game but with more classical RPGs this approach works poorly.

[KOS-MOS]

Divinity2 Ego draconis had a great open world, I really liked this game

[DecadeRiptide]

Well, one of the main things that stuck out to me about FFXIV is that the map is pretty much completely static.

What I mean by this is that the environment is extremely barebones. It looks pretty and you can walk around it, but you can't actually do anything with it.

You can't loot mobs, can't steal from towns, can't loot from your immediate surroundings, can't click on things. It's pretty bad.

The game is just endless fetch quests too. So you have this pretty looking but empty open world map that you just run around to click on NPCs for the rest of your life.

Genshin, on the other hand, is ridiculously spammy with it's open world content. There's just **** everywhere.

Skyrim is my perfect example of a good amount of things to do in the map. It is not too dense or too sparse. I enjoyed exploring it.

[J1M]

If opening a chest in your game is not exciting you have failed.

Zelda 64 vs Tears of the Kingdom.

[J1M]

Shadow of the Colossus was a boring, two-hour puzzle game padded out with a dead world to make you feel like you weren't cheated out the $40 you spent on it.

Also, the graphics were ****. But I guess if you only had playstation the fog hid the jaggies you were accustomed to.

[Oyster Sauce]

I hate when games have like 27 crates and sacks and barrels you have to manually search in a room, and some of them are empty. The Witchers and BG3 do this. Just consolidate everything in one box.

[J1M]

I hate when games have like 27 crates and sacks and barrels you have to manually search in a room, and some of them are empty. The Witchers and BG3 do this. Just consolidate everything in one box.

KOTOR did this and I praised it contemporaneously.

[Stack of Turtles]

What if it was Shabbat of the Colossus?

[Cedric]

I think so, yes. I hate games like Witcher 3 and Breath of the Wild or any Farcry where the map is full of relatively minor, optional things to do that just get repetitive. I prefer actual games.

Autism doesn't help; I innately want to do everything. But doing everything is never fun in open world slop. And if it isn't fun, why did you put it into your game?

[nullSector]

I hate when games have like 27 crates and sacks and barrels you have to manually search in a room, and some of them are empty. The Witchers and BG3 do this. Just consolidate everything in one box.

AtomRPG has that too, but I feel it adds to the immersion of the place being post-apocalyptic, that things have really gone to **** and resources are scarce. It does suck for convenience, though. The balance of realism vs. convenience is something each game has to decide.