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.

However, switch your browser to Mafia III’s various sub-Reddits and you’ll read testimony decrying Mafia III’s so-called shoddy, unplayable state. “I’ve only noticed a few bugs here and there,” some say, whilst others declare – aside from a momentary frozen screen following a cutscene – that they played through Mafia III without issue at all. The worst, some acknowledge, was the need to restart the game if this frozen screen failed to reanimate, causing them to lose a portion of their save file. If you’re planning on playing through Mafia III in 2024, then these concerns are barely cause for alarm.

If we’re to take both these stances at face value – the wiki page’s lengthy list of problems, or the testimony of players on Reddit who’ve forged through the front line – then you’d have to go with the Redditors. It’s no secret the game launched with a glut of immersion breaking problems, but much like Cyberpunk 2077 or maybe Shenmue I & II Remastered, these problems presently seem to be minimal. Your tolerance for such issues will vary amongst yourselves, of course, but in its current state it doesn’t appear Mafia III is unplayable. Fixed? No, but certainly not broken.

The question then is would you want to play it anyway? There’s no denying Hangar 13 have created a wonderfully evocative world in New Bordeaux – an obvious stand-in for 1960s New Orleans. Swampland nestles adjacent to dilapidated housing, ostentatious suburbs decorate elaborate networks of rivers and canals, open farmland, slums, it all bustles with ever-presence. Interwoven into the fabric of the city are heavy socio-economic themes contemporary to the time (and still bubbling under the surface in most parts of the world today); racism, intolerance, prejudice, systemic struggle, social division, all sound tracked by the afternoon hum of emergent dialogue, opinionated radio stations, and hazy jazz bars. If the game’s mission design (which we’ll get on to later) makes for a hollow experience, hollow this city certainly is not.

Player character Lincoln Clay – a tormented Vietnam war vet – is just about likeable enough to endear the ripples of this intolerance to yourself, whether you’ve experienced it in real-life or not. The city’s police treat him with distain should he stray into a predominately white area, whilst shopkeepers alert the authorities should Lincoln decide to browse their wares long enough to appear suspicious. It’d be easy for Hangar 13 to drop the occasional racist slur and resulting anguish into open play as means to appear socially conscious, but having the player live through it first-hand underpins a considerate approach to how these issues materialise and the effects they have. New Bordeaux clearly isn’t a city on the cusp of resolution; these societal issues are deeply entrenched, and their effect on gameplay is tangible.

The principal issue however lies beyond the effects on gameplay and the decisions it forces you to make for Lincoln. For all its attempts at prodding at any political outrage nestling in your soul Mafia III’s absence of consequence no matter your actions mean the impact of this on-street tension is reduced. Case in point: you can literally plough through traffic lights and street signs in your stolen muscle car, crash into other vehicles, throw air punches in a pedestrian’s face – all within sight of the disdainful cops – and they’ll do diddly squat. Cross into the wrong side of town and eyebrows will furrow, anything else other than murdering someone seems fair game.

See, it’s the game’s AI that’s the biggest let down here, and if we consider the point of this article as to whether Mafia III is ‘fixed’ – in inverted commas – then the game’s AI unfortunately is unfixable. It isn’t only happenstance on the street which leaves you scratching your head as to where the repercussions are, missions – and in particular – missions requiring stealthy approaches are ruined by lacklustre AI. Opponents outright refuse to stay in cover, make non-sensical decisions despite an awareness that threat is lurking, or will split from the safety of their pack individually to investigate a whistle. Stealth becomes paint-by-numbers; spot your target, distract, silently takedown, move on.

Mission structure itself follows an identical format established by open world games for the best part of a decade prior too. Go here, kill some people, go somewhere else, kill some more. The overarching goal is to flush out district mob bosses, exposing them for assassination before taking control of their patch, but the means to get there we’ve done time and time again. To Hanger 13’s credit, they’ve justified Lincoln’s violent rampage by his terrifying military history, his revenge mission utilising tactics he developed with the Vietcong, his single-minded approach to retribution forged through the perplexity of proxy war. The story – if a tad predictable – is well-written and well-acted for the most part too, so the process of slaving through the 30 plus hour campaign isn’t mindless. It’s just that, despite the wealth of content, it’s all the same thing redressed in a different building or district and the sheer length of the game bites down hard on those determined to see it through to the end.

Some intrigue is implanted via the lieutenant system though, whereby once districts are conquered Lincoln then chooses who to assign to oversee its control. Giving one allied mob boss the keys to another wing of the castle risks undermining another, and it creates an interesting dynamic between this disparate conglomerate of nationalities and belief systems – with Lincoln at the helm – who’re attempting to wrestle control of New Bordeaux for themselves. Whether it’s enough to keep you engaged over the game’s length, with all the shoddy AI and occasional bug is up to you.

Going back to the start, the exorbitant array of bugs listed on the game’s fandom wiki paint a picture of a game that’s totally unplayable, but we know from eyewitness testimony this isn’t totally the case. So, from that perspective we can probably say that, yes, maybe Mafia III is fixed after all, or, as stated earlier, at least not broken. You can play it, enjoy it, see it through to the end, move on to something else. The deeper question: is Mafia III fixed from all its design foibles, its underbaked AI, and unimaginative mission structure. Well, no, it can never be. Much like the social angst engulfing New Bordeaux’s streets, these setbacks are interwoven into the fabric of the game code, and you’d have to ask yourself if it’s worth putting yourself through it given the wealth of superb open world titles out there that do what Mafia III does, but much better and less buggy.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Kojima Productions delivered one of the best stealth experiences of recent memory with Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. The game meshes together a great story filled with underlying themes along with an open world that’s quite literally a playground of possibilities. It’s one of the best games that use the concept of systemic world design to the fullest extent, and it’s really fun to bend these systems to your will and come up with interesting solutions to a variety of problems.

The game starts out really strong, and Kojima ensures gradual progression as new tools start to open up and missions get more complex with new enemy types and labyrinthian designs – forcing you to use everything in your arsenal to get through it all. But once you get past Mission 31, you notice that the “new missions” are actually just rehashed older missions with new mission clear constraints tacked on top for good measure. It’s still fun to clear out these missions, but stripping away the freedom to cause chaos can also turn some people off – and that coupled with the fact that it’s all essentially rehashed content built to pad out the game can tamper with the enjoyment.

Metal Gear Survive

Metal Gear Solid 5 took the fan-beloved series to new heights with its shift to an open-world structure, but the road to release was anything but smooth. The turbulent development led to the infamous Kojima Konami breakup, putting a big question mark on the future of the franchise. Konami tried to take the game’s foundations and create another makeshift zombie open world out of it with Metal Gear Survive, but it was a spectacular failure. A barren open-world, repetitive missions, and uninteresting progression mechanics were some of the biggest issues that plague Survive’s gameplay loop – making it a really boring time.

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.

DEAD RISING 4

The Dead Rising series had already suffered a bit of a dip with its third instalment, but Dead Rising 4 turned out to be the final nail in the coffin for what had at one point seemed like a major Capcom franchise. Unfortunately, it seemed like the game just never got what it was about the series that fans liked. From the questionable changes made to Frank West’s character to the ridiculously over-the-top tone that tried too hard to be funny, from poor design decisions (like the removal of timers) to disappointing boss fights, there was too much about the game that just didn’t work out.

Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain – Repeat Missions

Metal Gear Solid 5 is a great game where you can spend dozens upon dozens of hours just tinkering around with the sandbox and its many systems, but there’s little argument to the fact that the game is excessively padded out when it comes to the missions in Chapter 2. Many missions in the last chapter are rehashed missions from before, but players now have to complete those missions with brutal challenges tacked on which can quickly turn into frustration as you try to satisfy the new clear conditions. Granted these can be satisfying for some players but given that the story ends randomly, these repeat missions stick out as a sore thumb. Those familiar with the game’s turbulent development cycle might know why this otherwise great game has been padded out, but it doesn’t really soften the blow of it regardless.

DEATH STRANDING

This was probably the most obvious choice for a list such as this one. Death Stranding is built all around the idea of players’ actions and their cooperation having a significant impact on the game’s world. What was once a barren wasteland might look entirely different based on what players were doing. A once-deserted landscape might have a long highway stretched over it now. Mountains that were once desolate and almost impassable might have networks of ziplines scattered across peaks and valleys. It’s very effectively done, and adds so much to the gameplay experience.

With every entertaining and well-designed open world game, there are several that feel mundane, awkward or terribly put together. Let’s take a look at 10 of the most boring open world titles.

Ghost Recon Breakpoint

If there’s one thing that stuck out the most when first playing Ghost Recon Breakpoint at launch, it’s how utterly dead Auroa felt. There was no seemingly no semblance of normal day-to-day life with environments that felt sterile and samey. Sure, the setting had a lot to do with it, whether it was the whole “island belonging to a military contractor” or the occupation by Colonel Walker and the Wolves forcing much of the populace into hiding. But it seems like this was all done just to reinforce the Skell Tech drones as the true indigenous life (and it doesn’t help that the Wolves were fairly disposable as well). Combine all of this with boring activities and a terrible storyline, not to mention tons of bugs and copy-paste outposts, and you’ll beg for Wildlands’ Bolivia. New paid content and updates including the return of AI squadmates helped improve the overall experience but it was a disaster at launch.

POKEMON SWORD AND SHIELD

Most Pokemon fans will tell you that the series has been on a downward spiral ever since Black and White, and Sword and Shield are probably its lowest point to date. Even if you ignore the controversies surrounding the whole National Dex fiasco, Pokemon Sword and Shield are still disappointing games. The shocking lack of ambition, the almost complete lack of challenge, the excessive linearity- for all of these reasons and more, Pokemon’s mainline console debut fell severely short of expectations.