Is open-world design making games worse?

I wouldn't say that it's making games worse. It's just that I can count the number of open-world games that I have enjoyed on one hand. I'm fine with just a new GTA game every decade or so. Zelda did it well, although, what do you even do after that besides reuse the map for a sequel, which they've already done? Or in GTA's case, pump out online content continuously, and print money. I preferred GTA 4, where they created 2 new narratives to play through on the same map, but I'm sure that was less lucrative. Then you have whatever Bethesda craps out any given year.

Personally, I enjoy a good sandbox game like Mario 64, or Hitman 1/2/3, or a game like Hollow Knight, while not technically an open world game, scratches the same itches.

They just cost too much time and money to do well.

I tried the Oblivion remake and have been just assaulted by the number of things I can try and do. There's a story behind nearly every quest with some kind of ironic twist. Thinking of how you can get over the next hump by developing your character is fun.

Now, compare this with the newer Fallout 4, Outer Worlds or Starfield. There are a ton of fetch quests. There's nothing at stake seemingly in a lot of cases, or whatever you're trying to do seems really far off. Nothing is immediate and everything is impersonal. That's boring.

So to pose a theory, it's about the quests, not necessarily the world.

I don't think that open-world design is that big of a factor anymore in the direction of modern games. It feels like that trend peaked 5-10 years ago with Ubisoft. It's been replaced by much more insidious trends.

As an old person, my take is that the business reality is what is ruining modern AAA games. To justify investing hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of people's time into producing a game, the game needs to be a global smash hit with a long tail. That means the game has to be a new lifestyle that a large group of consumers adopt, not just a game that they play once.

It's so rare to find a AAA game today that is a standalone game that you can just quickly play and enjoy. Sports games have become gambling casinos where playing the sport is secondary. Open-world exploration games have been replaced with "RPG mechanics" where you have to do the same things hundreds of times to level up, like feeding bad guns to other bad guns to make very slightly better guns, infinitely. Shooters have become online lifestyles centered around skin collection and gambling. The main exceptions to this trend for AAA games are 'system sellers' bankrolled by Nintendo and Sony who make money based on system install base.

It's hard out there for AAA publishers. There are scary stats like only 15% of Steam game playtime in 2024 was for games published in 2024. The most popular games by playtime are things like GTA V, Minecraft, Warframe, Counterstrike, DOTA, etc, many of which were published a decade ago or more. The market for a new game-as-a-lifestyle is saturated, and there are few new winners.

I think indie games are doing a great job of filling a lot of the gaps left by modern AAA games. But I also mourn the death of the "B game." Puyo Puyo Tetris I/II is a great example - it's not an indie game, but it's not an expensive game to release. It's a mid-tier release for a niche audience. This is the kind of product you don't see much of anymore, and what I miss the most.

I've always-and I mean always - loved open world games.

Yep, it's making it worse.

No offence to the author, but this feels like a pretty poorly planned study at virtually every data point. To start, there's little in the first place to suggest anything resembling a causal relationship between "open-world design" (which runs a pretty wide gamut of potential definitions, formal or otherwise, and is questionably encompassed by the similarly named genre tag on IGDB) and Metacritic scores. The hypothesis itself has a bunch of untested assumptions in it, none of which are relevant to "open-world design", which the rest of the study either completely glosses over or fails to account for. Et cetera...

I personally don't believe games are getting worse. From my perspective, as someone who makes them and plays a lot of them, sometimes for the sake of making them, sometimes for the sake of playing them, sometimes both, games are not really that much better or worse than they have been historically, in terms of what they are able to offer individually as pieces of entertainment and artistic craftsmanship.

But I do think tastes have changed tremendously, and more than that, the ways in which people talk about playing games, and how they actually go about talking about playing games (from a mechanical/technological perspective), have changed even more tremendously. There's a lot more public scrutiny now, and a lot of that scrutiny, because of the way social media platforms, where people talk about stuff, tend to work, that scrutiny is simultaneously much more intense and broader in effect, which makes things FEEL a lot worse than they are.

I think there's also a lot of nostalgia from people who grew up in one media generation and now, as more risk-averse, time- and attention-starved adults, they bemoan the fact that things have not only changed from that, but that they're different and cater to a different audience, which is not them, with different tastes, which are not theirs.