Sundberg also reflected on where things went wrong with Just Cause 4, noting that internal dynamics and external pressures dulled the series’ edge: “The problems with JC4 was partly me (unwillingly) moving away from creative leadership to more corporate crap, publisher problems, team composition and roles and more.” He added a broader critique of Avalanche’s current posture: “They need to find the fire again, take risks, piss people off and make games the rest said was impossible.”

His comments arrived amid renewed interest in Contraband, the Avalanche-developed Xbox project that surfaced in 2021 and was later halted. Sundberg clarified his role in its origins: “Me and my team pitched Contraband back in 2017 to Microsoft (and signed it). It’s changed quite a lot since then, obviously.” Reports this year confirmed that the game was shelved, followed by studio cost-cutting moves.

Bottom line: Just Cause wasn’t only a toolset. It was a philosophy of gleeful excess built by a specific crew, and without it, Sundberg argues, a numbered sequel risks becoming a brand exercise instead of a proper escalation, and that’s something he’s not willing to endorse.

Players like to be rewarded with additional story, characterization, and fun upgrades upon discovering more of the open world, not another checkmark on a map. The Witcher 3‘s world is huge, but players don’t complain about it being bloated because it’s filled with unique landmarks and interesting side quests around every corner.

These 10 games even manage to disappoint the casual collectathon fan with their uninspired locales and boring terrain, proving that games need to do more than merely populate the world with objects. Here are 10 more open world games in recent years that have suffered from bloat.

Forspoken

Like other games on this list, Forspoken had a ton of potential leading up to its release. We first saw glimpses of it with the impressive next-gen demo when the PS5 was announced but the final result was severely lacking. The best thing about the game, its versatile and engaging parkour, isn’t facilitated well by the open world.

For one thing, there’s entirely too few things to do in the magical world of Athia. What’s more, there’s an absence of ‘magic’ to capture the imagination in the world, consisting of empty rolling hills dotted with repetitive activities as it is. What hinders the empty exploration further is Frey’s constant quipping and complaining. If you’re not keen to hear constant quips and snarky complaints over the course of several hours of empty, though fun, world traversal, you’re not going to have a good time in Athia. After critical and commercial failure, the studio was shuttered.

Rise of the Ronin

Team Ninja’s design identity lives and breathes by its dense and action-packed linear nature, so naturally, the decision to go open-world in their next samurai game was ambitious for the team. Being the first open world game from the studio, Rise of the Ronin doesn’t falter too hard, but it could’ve been better within a more streamlined structure.

The refined action combat the team has been known for helps the formulaic world activities feel a bit more fun than they otherwise would. This is the third game on the list to feature dozens of bandit camps in its large world, but there’s also genre mainstays like watchtowers, and … cats to pet across mid-19th Century Japan, okay at least that’s kind of charming. Still, the lack of organic environmental discovery, unlike, say, Ghost of Tsushima’s waypoint wind, and a more empty and boring world map than other games within the space, keep Rise of the Ronin from reaching the potential set by its unique time period and deep combat. Hopefully, the developers will keep on investing in this IP, because there is potential here and a Rise of Ronin 2 could be a genuinely great game.

Biomutant

Unlike Gotham’s largely samey environments, the open world in Biomutant is rather diverse and visually unique across biomes. But visual distinctness between the six tribal regions  is where Biomutant’s open world stops being impressive – unless you enjoy the busywork of clearing checklists, that is. Completing the many outposts, resource towers, ruins, and fast-travel signpost rewards you with little while being but it’s as shallow as it is repetitive.

But the combat and quests don’t really do anything interesting to accommodate the rote world activities, firmly solidifying Biomutant as a quintessential ‘mid’ game. It’s unremarkable, but not bad per se, and when multiplied by the huge open world and all its repetitive activities, makes for a lot wasted time one could have spent in more meaningful game worlds. Biomutant is a prime example where a stong investment doesn’t always result into a meaningful product.

Gotham Knights

If rote repetition is the death knell of open worlds, Gotham Knights feels oddly lifeless for a city meant to be in constant crisis. All of the positives of the Arkham games, save some of the third-person combat DNA, is gone with this game. Sure, there’s some fun stealth sections to be found within the story chapters, but a majority of the game’s content is beating up the same thugs and solving copy-pasted crimes throughout Gotham to grind towards Knighthood progression.

Players can typically look past a bit of padded grinding if the world feels alive and responsive, but Gotham also fails on that front. Alleyways are mostly empty, civilian traffic is practically non-existent, and the city doesn’t evolve or react to story advancements or a recently liberated borough. At least the game looks really nice with its lighting. Gotham oozes atmosphere on a superficial artistic level despite the lack of liveliness and organic activities. Gotham Knights does have its shining moments, but very few of them have to do with the open world structure. Honestly, at this point, we just need a new Batman Arkham, not to mention the disaster that was Suicide Squad.

Just Cause 4

While Biomutant can’t reasonably be considered bad by any means, Just Cause 4 certainly can. The only thing I’m uncertain about is if this game suffers more on the story or exploration axis because it sucks at both. First and foremost, there’s just way too many patches of nothingness in the game world, resulting in terrible activity density.

At least Rico’s versatile grappling hook can be played around with to traverse the boring environments because it’d be downright sleep-inducing to go anywhere in this game otherwise. Accommodating the poor map design is a total absence of a minimap or radar. I mean, come on, an open-world game with no way to track points of interest at-a-glance, and one with such a bloated and empty world at that, is inexcusable. The missions and side activities are also far less creative and interesting than previous Just Cause titles, and the game crashes pretty often. You know what, I can’t even point the main blame on the open world, Just Cause 4 is just plain bad. It’s amazing how the series shifted into a complete free fall after Just Cause 2. Such a massive shame!

RAGE 2

Rage 2 is another game on this list that certainly isn’t altogether bad; its open world design just kinda feels tacked on to extend game time. Avalanche studios used Id Software’s wonderful gunplay tech to craft a fast and fun gameplay. Shooting in Rage 2 feels fast paced but with very lackluster and repetitive map design, its potential is severely diminished. There’s hardly any reason to spend time checking off side activities due to the drip-fed upgrades that players are rewarded with. This is thanks largely to a pretty early plateau in the upgrade tree, which maxes out your character pretty quick.

And without any meaningful side stories or lore to discover out in the wasteland, exploration is largely an exercise in repetition. The rapid pacing of the gunplay also just isn’t well suited for the wide swathes of land, something a more densely populated map could’ve remedied a bit.  It’s a shame Rage 2 faltered on the open world front. A synthesis between Id gun mechanics and the open world chaos of Just Cause 3 set within a Mad Max-esque setting seem like a dream come true. But Rage 2’s world is largely average and is enough to pull down the game’s otherwise fun gameplay and traversal mechanics. It’s unlikely we will ever see a new RAGE game and that’s such a disappointment.

Mafia III

The original studio behind the first two Mafia games merged into Hanger 13 for Mafia 3. Hanger 13’s debut game lacks a lot of the charm and density the previous games had, going for a quantity over quality approach. The territory control system quickly becomes repetitive, with little variation between districts. The world itself, a fictional version of New Orleans, also lacks intriguing landmarks and unique stuff to do within it. It’s just a shallow and hollow open world all-round.

At least the story and atmosphere somewhat make up for it; however, repetitive side objectives are often mandatory to progress the main plot, harming that aspect as well. Here’s hoping the Hanger 13 has learned from their first game and refined Mafia: The Old Country’s Italy into something more engaging.

Saints Row (2022)

In a lot of ways, the 2022 reboot of Saint’s Row feels like a first draft of a game from a decade ago. It’s got the basic elements to make a classic Saints Row experience, but hardly any of the creativity, charm, or polish. Where previous Saints Row games made exploring and causing mayhem unpredictable and fun, this reboot turns every open world activity into a chore.

Criminal Ventures are just one example of this; once you do your first couple insurance fraud busts and repo jobs, you’ve pretty much seen done them all. The world does little to encourage curiosity either, considering how empty and vacuous it feels. What’s really a shame is the lack of charm across the whole experience, thanks in part to the odd incongruent meshing of attempted wackiness with serious drama, resulting in an experience that falls flat in the end. This release, more or less, has killed Saints Row.

Crackdown 3

Out of all the games featured on this list, Crackdown 3 reigns supreme when it comes to boring environments. We all wanted to explore a dark sci-fi city in the sequel, but the city’s repetitive building designs make exploration feel stale and uninspired. It’s one of those games where the asset reuse is so glaringly obvious that it significantly detracts from the experience. But it’s not just the bland environments of the city that hurt the open world experience, mission and enemy variety is severely formulaic too. What puts the nail in the coffin is the paltry rewards for doing open world activities.

You’re mostly just collecting ability orbs after completing activities or exploring environments with no interesting lore or customization. And of course, Crackdown 3 commits the major sin of mandating side content to progress the main story, this time in the guise of collecting intel for regional boss fights. At least there’s the charm of playing as Terry Crews throughout the formulaic experience, but even that wears thin pretty quickly. With Microsoft cancelling projects left and right, the future of Crackdown seems like it’s done and dusted.

Need for Speed: Payback

Need for Speed: Payback is a game I still kind of enjoy playing to this day, but it’s not to experience the exploration or anything. No, it’s the superb vehicle selection and customization which is the main draw of the game, but even that can be had in the better NFS maps that Heat and Unbound facilitate. Payback’s fictional map is quite large and spread out, but it features no police chases outside of scripted events.

Instead of hiding from cops and making an intricate escape through a dense downtown route, you’re just collecting stuff and starting events on the map. This makes Payback’s map the least dynamic and least designed for racing than any of the modern-era NFS titles. Fortunately, a lot of great Need for Speed games were released since then, so let’s hope this continues into the future.

WATCH DOGS 2

The Watch Dogs franchise obviously has its own unique DNA with its pseudo-cyberpunk trappings and its hacking-centric gameplay mechanics, but there’s still a lot of GTA in Ubisoft’s franchise, and no game captures that better than Watch Dogs 2. If what you’re looking for is a large open world sandbox where you can have all kinds of chaotic (and criminal) fun with solidly implemented mechanics, in addition to a healthy dose of GTA-esque missions and side activities, Watch Dogs 2 offers that in spades.

SAINTS ROW 4

By the time the Saints Row franchise got to its fourth instalment, it had moved quite far away from how similar it used to be to the Grand Theft Auto games in its earlier days, and though that’s a stick that’s often used to beat Saints Row 4 with, on its own merits, as an open world crime action game, there’s a lot to love about it. From the bombastic, over-the-top mechanics that the game arms you with to wreak havoc with in the world to just how fun it is to simply explore the sandbox and mess about with its systems, Saints Row 4 offers a solid dose of open world action.

RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2

Let’s get to some of the painfully obvious picks now, because even though they’re obvious they’re well worth mentioning. Rockstar’s very own Red Dead Redemption 2 is, in fact, by far the best game on this list. Owing to its period setting, its more somber tone, and the added focus on character-driven storytelling, Red Dead 2 is obviously quite different from GTA in some key ways- but it’s a Rockstar open world. The sheer size of the map, the astounding variety and attention to detail it exhibits in spite of how large it is, the spectacularly designed content it’s brimming with, the complex web of systems that make the sandbox an infinitely enjoyable one- all of the hallmark Rockstar qualities you’d want in an open world game, Red Dead Redemption 2 delivers in extreme abundance.

GRAND THEFT AUTO 4

You don’t need us to tell you that you should be playing GTA 5 to scratch your GTA itch. More than a decade on from its launch, people can’t stop buying and playing it. That does mean, however, that some of its predecessors don’t get the retrospective attention that they deserve. Grand Theft Auto 4, for instance, has aged remarkably well. Not only does it have one of the strongest stories in the entire series, its open world is also one of the best-designed and most intricately detailed ones even today, so long after the game first came out. Do yourselves a favour and hop back into GTA 4, because it’s an absolute classic.

YAKUZA 5

Yakuza and Grand Theft Auto games might not be as similar as many often perceive them as, but particularly where Yakuza 5 is concerned, there’s a lot of GTA DNA in it. It is, for starters, one of the series’ larger games where pure real estate is concerned, while similar to GTA, it also offers a smattering of excellently designed side content that you can pour countless hours into. On top of that, you obviously have plenty of opportunities to commit outrageous crimes throughout the game’s world, and there are also multiple protagonists to play as, similar to GTA 5 (though that’s the case in several other Yakuza games as well, to be fair).

MAFIA: DEFINITIVE EDITION

2K’s Mafia franchise doesn’t put as much stock into the open world sandbox aspect of its experience as something like GTA does, instead putting the vast majority of its focus on storytelling. But even so, if you want to run and drive around an intricately crafted real-world (or real-world adjacent) city as a hardened criminal, Mafia: Definitive Edition is a game that’s likely to appeal to you. On top of that, it adds extra flavour of its own with an incredibly authentic and atmospheric period setting, allowing it to stand out in what’s clearly quite a crowded category.

FAR CRY 6

The Far Cry and GTA franchises have often had very similar sensibilities, in spite of how outwardly different they tend to be, and that’s abundantly evident in Far Cry 6 as well. Yes, having an open world that’s mostly wilderness and rural areas does give it a different flavour from Rockstar’s franchise (though Far Cry 6 does have way more urban environments than any of its predecessors), but from the systemic nature of its open world mechanics to the driving to so much more, Far Cry 6 does owe a lot of itself to GTA. 

GHOST RECON WILDLANDS

You might stand on the opposite sides of law in Ghost Recon Wildlands and Grand Theft Auto, but the former still borrows liberally from the latter in several respects. On top of offering a massive, systemic open world featuring third person shooter combat, Ghost Recon Wildlands is also a great game for someone who simply wants to get behind the wheel in a vehicle and cruise around the open world. And of course, it becomes doubly enjoyable if you’re doing all of that stuff in co-op.

JUST CAUSE 4

The Just Cause franchise has always been famous for its unique brand of open world chaos, and there’s plenty of that to go around in Just Cause 4 as well. Though the game is not without its issues in some key departments (like its storytelling and many of its bland missions), the actual sandbox itself is an absolute blast to exist in. From the explosive combat to the riotously fun wingsuit and grappling hook loop to the addition of extreme weather, Just Cause 4’s open world is brimming with opportunities to have fun of your own making.

CYBERPUNK 2077

Until quite recently, Cyberpunk 2077’s attempts to inject its open world with elements similar to the Grand Theft Auto games were unsuccessful ones, to say the least, but in the wake of Update 2.0 and Phantom Liberty, that’s certainly no longer the case. The open world is alive and buzzing, and the game does an excellent job of immersing you in its dense metropolis. From driving around in your vehicles to engaging in a variety of side activities to committing crimes to your heart’s content and wrangling with the cops, Cyberpunk 2077 and Phantom Liberty are the closest we’ve ever come to a futuristic take on GTA.

Sons of the Forest

Sons of the Forest is a brutal survival game that tasks players to hold their backs against cannibalistic primals with only a limited few resources to spare. It presents its brutal world with gorgeous graphics and striking attention to detail, and the gradual process of collecting resources and becoming more powerful is one that will keep you hooked for dozens upon dozens of hours. Add to that the ability to enjoy exploring with friends, and Sons of the Forest becomes a great option for a co-op open-world experience.

However, there are some whose open worlds either don’t live up to the potential of their gameplay and setting, or crash and burn by doing everything that we’ve already seen a million times before but worse. Some are still good games and even classics, while others…not so much. Let’s look at 15 open-world games that wasted their potential.

Forspoken

As dire as the final product ended up being, Luminous Productions’ Forspoken had an interesting premise when first revealed. The idea of exploring a vast fantasy world with magical parkour, sailing over objects and unleashing powerful magic was enticing. It felt like the team, full of Final Fantasy 15 veterans, was using that knowledge and focusing on what players enjoyed the most about that RPG – its open world.

Unfortunately, not only was the story bogged down by awful dialogue and characterization, but Athia felt artificial. The vast empty fields full of endlessly respawning monsters, the fetch quests, and typical towers which unlock new icons on the map, adding to the “to-do” list, didn’t come together well. There are some interesting optional dungeons and bosses, for whatever that’s worth.

Teardown

Tuxedo Labs has delivered an enticing playground of destruction with Teardown, which lets you lose in complex levels with nothing but a set of tools and your imagination to pull off heists with increasing difficulty. The game features fully destructible environments with physics properties, and the game encourages you to smash walls and blow up stuff to chart the most efficient path to your objective and back to the starting point. The voxel based art style might look primitive at first, but it has its own distinct charm that will slowly grow on you as you spend more time with the game.

NOTE: There are spoilers ahead for all games mentioned in this feature.

HALIFTREE (ELDEN RING)

It wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate to say that Elden Ring’s Haligtree is probably the first name that comes to mind for a feature like this but there’s no denying that this is easily one of more brutal areas in a game that’s by no means lacking in challenge as it is. Unpredictable enemy placements, enemy types that can easily one-shot you, the looming threat of deadly status ailments, tricky movement and platforming challenges.

We’re at the point now to where the year is slowly winding down. Thanksgiving is here (if you’re in the United States) and December is right around the corner. It’s been a year I imagine a lot of us want to put behind us with hope that 2021 will be a lot better. With one last month also comes one last month of free titles for PS Plus and now we know what Sony is giving us to close out the year.

The final PS Plus selection for 2020 consists of three titles. First up is the multiplayer-focused Rocket Arena, a unique 3v3 title all about blowing each other up. Then you have the massive open world title from Avalanche Studios Just Cause 4 that will allow you to also blow up a lot of stuff, but in a huge sandbox world. Finally, like last month, we have a game that will be debuting day and date on PS Plus, Worms Rumble, a new entry in the franchise all about worms blowing each other up in turn-based warfare.

All three titles will be available to redeem for PS Plus members starting December 1st. All three games will also be redeemable on either PlayStation 5 or PlayStation 4.

December’s PlayStation Plus games bring the chaos, with Worms Rumble, Just Cause 4 and Rocket Arena leading the line-up: https://t.co/VCTOJtmOH2 pic.twitter.com/foo1B6tss6

— PlayStation (@PlayStation) November 25, 2020

GRAND THEFT AUTO 5

Let’s start off with the biggest, most popular sandbox game there is, shall we? Sure, GTA 5 has a massive campaign to go through, and finely crafted missions to experience, but the real star of the show is the open world sandbox. We’ve spent countless dozens of hours wreaking havoc all around the map, messing with the NPCs, and trying out new things just for the heck of it. You can spend hours upon hours just enjoying the open world of GTA 5 without ever even touching the main story- that’s the mark of a truly great sandbox game.

]]> https://gamingbolt.com/15-best-sandbox-games-you-need-to-play/feed 0 445351 https://gamingbolt.com/15-games-where-weather-effects-had-an-impact-on-gameplay https://gamingbolt.com/15-games-where-weather-effects-had-an-impact-on-gameplay#respond Mon, 22 Jun 2020 11:47:40 +0000 https://gamingbolt.com/?p=445228 Well done weather effects can contribute a lot to games. They can add immensely to the atmosphere, the can make the world prettier- but the best weather effects are the ones that have an actual impact on the gameplay itself. In this feature, we will talk about fifteen games that had such weather effects.

METAL GEAR SOLID 5: THE PHANTOM PAIN

Metal Gear Solid 5’s emergent sandbox has a ridiculous amount of depth, with multiple systems constantly interacting with each other to deliver some of the mot dynamic stealth gameplay we’ve ever seen. Weather effects are one of many layers in that complex web. Rainfall and storms can dampen the noise you make, making it easier to sneak around enemy bases, while sandstorms do the same, in addition to also impacting visibly, which impacts the enemies as well as you. Having to adapt strategies on the basis of the weather feels truly rewarding in The Phantom Pain.