Summary
Open-world gameshave wowed players with increasingly vast worlds where they could explore every nook and cranny, though whether they had anything worth finding was another matter. Not every street corner has a key collectible in it, nor every mountain a horde of gold or the like. Sometimes, it’s just a piece of scenery.
It’s a common bugbear of the genre, where it feels like the tame spacing out random activities, items, etc., between wide spaces of nothingness, rather than making the most out of their space. But whether the game’s worlds are as wide as the horizon, or are just a chunk of a city, there are plenty of ways foropen-world games to make exploration exhausting.
Dying Light 2: Stay Humantakes the term literally by making movement exhausting. Aiden can use his parkour skills to climb, run, leap, use grappling hooks, paraglide, and more to get around the infected zombies in the city of Villedor. But they’re all tied to a stamina meter, so if Aiden gets tired with the undead on his tail, he’s going to have a tough time escaping.
If anything, some players found he got tired too quickly, as melee combat and 100-meter sprints took a lot out of him too. Granted, that could simply be a skill issue as getting the hang of the stamina meter takes some practice. But even skilled players will take a while to find everything in Villedor — especially when night falls, as that makes going anywhere beyond the rooftops a riskier endeavor.
This entry could also apply toTears of the Kingdom, as it uses the same Hyrule asBreath of the Wild. But its sequel threw in the nifty Autobuild ability where, with time and the right parts, players can make vehicles that could help them travel across the map quickly. InBotW,they only have Eponaand whatever animal they can tame to become their steed, and some are way better than others.
The game does have some mercy, as it has a fast travel system, but the fast-travel points do require unlocking. This means players still need to hoof it around Hyrule in the early goings, and Link’s tied down with a stamina bar and breakable weapons. So, they’ll have to plot their routes carefully until they can get the right upgrades. No wonder some classic fans miss the oldOcarina of Timeformula.
Compared to most other open-world games, theYakuza/LADmaps are pretty small. Even if they didn’t have taxis to act as fast travel, it’s not usually too testing to dash from one end of Kamurochō to the other. But thenYakuza 5came along and decided to live up to its number by offering five playable characters and five different cities, each with their own unique collectibles, substories, and side activities.
Driving a taxi around Fukuoka with Kiryu is simple enough. But hunting animals and treasure map pieces with Saejima is taxing, and doing dance battles and pop star functions with Haruka really pushed it. That’s putting aside Akiyama’s clean-up and Shinada’s baseball games. By the time they’ve finally got all five protagonists into Kamurochō, players might not want to see another shining collectible, J-Pop concert, or yakuza grunt ever again.
Yakuza 5at least split its different activities and locations into different character campaigns. WithCyberpunk 2077, players have reported feeling overwhelmed as its combat can feel chaotic, and navigating V’s skill tree can feel as daunting as getting through Night City itself. And Night City offers a ton of stuff for players to do.
If they’re not grabbing iconic weapons, cyberware, quickhacks, daemons, etc., players are doing gigs for side characters like Regina or Mr Hands, among others. That’s not to mentionthe side quests and romances, which can require multiple playthroughs with different Vs to achieve different aims, as certain characters are only attracted to certain genders and/or body types. Clearly, Night City is easier to explore than its social links.
Rockstar wanted to makeRed Dead Redemption 2bigger than its predecessor, and they succeeded. By combining multiple game studios to work across six years with a near $540 million budget, they created five states to ride across, and a new story following Arthur Morgan as he and his gang see the Wild West get tamed by modernization. Though by the end, some players were likely hoping modernization could come faster.
Going from state to state on a single horse can feel slow, no matter how pretty the vistas are. Even if the player’s nag isthe next coming of Red Hare, they can’t gallop at full pace everywhere, as their horse has its own stamina meter. Ride it too hard, take a bad tumble, or run into trouble, and it could die, leaving Morgan to hoof it on his own to the nearest stable, camp, or stagecoach for a fresh ride.
Elden Ringis Soulsborne gameplay in an open-world setting. Most people can probably guess why roaming its eerily pretty yet equally foreboding lands can be tiring. It’s hard by default and requires getting used to its style of combat to get ahead, or players will pay hard for their mistakes. And that’s \on top of quests and collectibles that are spread far and wide across its different maps.
That said, some of those maps offer more to do than others. On the one hand, some people might find this a welcome addition after going through Ubisoft’sover-the-top collect-a-thons. But on the other hand, they can make certain side quests feel longer, as they’re making players track and backtrack through the same settings and fighting off the same foes to exchange one item or another.
Speaking of Ubisoft collect-a-thons, theAssassin’s Creedgames have increasingly been filled with more items to collect across their growing maps. Any woes players in the past might have had about tracking down feathers inAssassin’s Creed 2feel like chicken feed whenAssassin’s Creed Valhallamakes them track down chests across Viking England and Norway.
If players had all the DLC, they’d have a total of 782 collectibles to track down across those two maps and Vinland, Ireland, France, the Isle of Skye, and fictional locations likeAsgard, Jotunheim and Svartalfheim. Even without the DLC, they’d still be scouring England’s shires for mysteries, wealth, and side quests dotted about the map. It’s enough to make players forget about the side content and race through the main story instead to get it over with.
Starfieldbeing at the top here doesn’t mean it’s the best of the most exhausting open-world games. Its reviews saw it get reasonable ratings, though it struggled to gain much clout with players. But it is potentially the most exhausting open-world game around as it offers 1,000 planets to explore across a hundred different star systems.
There are bigger maps out there, with the old alien-making gameSporebeing surprisingly gargantuan in scale, but making monstrosities took precedent over exploration there.Starfieldencourages exploration, completing side quests, all the standard open-world deals, but it feels more Sisyphean here. It leaves players racing across space to explore its nooks and crannies, just to tick that completion metric up by a single percentage or so.
