RPG General News - Open Worlds - a Chore

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Here's an opinion piece about open-world games from Rock Paper Shotgun:

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How the checklist conquered the open world, from Morrowind to Skyrim

The first in a new interview series about a sprawling, exhausting genre

There's no genre like the open world for inducing choice paralysis, so it's fitting that I've been agonising over how to begin this irregular article series on open world games for months. I have a lot of material, oodles of interviews with developers of all shapes and sizes - big shops like Remedy and CD Projekt, smaller studios like Ace Team and Awaceb, all holding forth on such topics as whether Elden Ring or Zelda did bandit camps better, and how you make a forest feel endless. There is so much you could talk about, so many trails heading off in all directions, but perhaps it's best to begin with the more personal and superficial question that inspired this investigation: how did the open world game get so boring?

I used to love open worlds for, in a nutshell, being virtual environments vast enough to get thoroughly lost in with no guarantee of what I'd find. They were enveloping mysteries, tantalising horizons. Nowadays, however, I regard open worlds as chores, because they are designed so insistently, even desperately, around recurring activities and rewards. Wherever I go, I always feel like I'm walking on the spot. The open world's promise of scale has become its greatest disadvantage, inasmuch as that scale is now justified and structured by a surfeit of smaller, looping acts of content extraction, typically joined at the hip to live service fixtures, which create a momentum for exploration that used to be supplied by curiosity, and which conspire to drain the landscape of grandeur. Open worlds have never been larger in terms of acreage, but they do not spend your time well.

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