NEEDLESSLY EMPTY LARGE OPEN WORLDS
Open world games have seen an explosion in popularity in this generation of console gaming. Not that they were ever unpopular, but as technology has progressed and hardware has allowed developers to create larger, more believable worlds, more and more games have chosen to go in that direction. Which, in my book, is one of the best things that this generation of gaming has done. But a byproduct of the genre growing in quantity is that it can’t sustain its quality across all games. So many games try to go for the open world approach, but can’t back that up with an actual, compelling open world environment, and end up having worlds that are either too large, or too empty, or both. Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, for all its strengths, had an open world that felt fairly empty a lot of the times- it derived its strengths from its systems and its strong stealth gameplay, not from its world design. Another recent example is The Crew 2, which had a world that felt hollow and empty so many of the times. Another example, one even more recent, is Fallout 76, that, without any human NPCs, ended up feeling like a dreary, uninteresting setting that was sporadically interspersed with engaging exploration… though that’s not exactly single player, is it?
