An Open Letter to Open-World Video Games (Part 2)
One closeted video gamer's confessions about the genre he just can't quit
Part 2: The Bad
Bigger than games
I wasn’t the only one who enjoyed Clip Clop Horsey Fun Time. Red Dead Redemption 2 earned $725 million in just three days in 2018, the highest-grossing opening weekend in entertainment history.
Due to COVID, the video game industry has overtaken the film industry and is now valued at over $200 billion. Twitch, a site where people watch people play video games, became the largest source of live video streaming traffic back in 2014, surpassing CNN and MLB. Amazon acquired Twitch that year for $970 million. In 2020 alone, Twitch viewers watched 17 billion hours of content.
Gaming’s power is both economic and cultural. For years, the most subscribed YouTuber was PewDiePie, a Swede who built his following by playing and reviewing games. In 2022, he was dethroned by MrBeast, who started his channel with Call of Duty and Minecraft videos.
So whether you love or loathe them, play them or don’t, the forces present in the video game industry should still concern everyone, even if only in a Kai Ryssdal “betcha didn’t know that was so interesting” kind of way.
Consider how the video game industry eerily mirrors the film industry. It’s plagued with all of the same terminal afflictions: creativity being slowly strangled by the hegemony of a few risk-averse mega studios, a focus on franchise sequels instead of innovation, a toxic culture of sexual harassment, a pattern of producing impressive trailers for underwhelming products, and a reliance on exploitative “crunch culture” to create CGI monstrosities that are as aggressively mediocre to consume as they were hellish to create.
Yet, while I’ve been aware of all of these issues for years, I didn’t truly understand the downsides of them for myself until I played Far Cry 6.
A far cry from the marketing
I was ecstatic about this game as soon as I saw the trailer. It starred Giancarlo Esposito, the man who played Gus Fring, one of my favorite characters in Breaking Bad.
The idea of liberating a lush tropical island from Esposito’s tyrannical rule sounded too good to be true. It was.
To start, despite being all over the marketing, Esposito’s character, Anton Castillo, was barely in the game. He appeared mostly in cutscenes and stole the show every time he did, but I only encountered him three times. I spent most of my playtime interacting with less charismatic side characters while sprinting around the map blowing stuff up with the wanton disregard of the protagonist of a Michael Bay film.
The open-world of the island of Yara was well-imagined, with production design inspired by Cuba, down to the architecture, cars, and a believable tropical beer called Caña.
Yet everyone I met felt like a caricature of Latin American stereotypes. My guerrilla group, 'Libertad' and its idealistic Gen-Z faction 'La Moral,' felt lazily written, even by video game standards.
Despite what the dramatic trailer implied, I didn’t spend most of my time on Yara exploring themes of fascism, colonialism, and rebellion. I spent it shooting my way through copy-pasted bases full of enemies with the intelligence and self-preservation instincts of drunk mosquitos. In between these predictable firefights I had to scrounge the map for the paper clips and bottle caps necessary to turn my super soaker of a rifle into something with more stopping power. The game also kept suggesting new weapons for me the way an overzealous friend recommends new TV shows. These included wacky “resolver” weapons McGyver’d together from scraps, like a launcher that fires CDs at people while playing “The Macarena”—its hilarious ineffectiveness in combat a perfect metaphor for the disorienting, semi-problematic underwhelm of the entire game.
Then there was the tonal whiplash. While the main story was incredibly dark, the side content was light-hearted and consequence-free. The result felt like someone had stitched together episodes of Jackass with scenes from Full Metal Jacket.
For example, I was encouraged to bring an animal “amigo” into battle with me, as if our guerrilla war was happening during “bring your pet to work day.” Nothing takes you out of a gritty gunfight quite like a crocodile wearing a t-shirt named Guapo or an adorable dog named Chorizo roaming into the fray. There was also a cockfighting mini game I could play at my home base—Mortal Kombat for poultry. The less said about that, the better.
In a hilarious review for the ages, Girlfriend Reviews summed it up nicely:
“Playing Far Cry is like giggling your way from ride to ride at a carnival and the cutscenes are like entering that tent at the carnival where a scary man tells you to join the army.”
After I stormed Castillo’s tower in the story’s crescendo, I learned that, despite having defeated him, an ongoing insurgency would continue on the island as long as I kept playing. The dizzying absurdity of this revelation made me promptly turn off my PlayStation and take a walk. While the game assumed I wanted this war to never end, in reality, I couldn’t wait to leave Yara.
Spreadsheet odyssey
After I finished Ghost of Tsushima, I revisited the Assassin’s Creed franchise, which had ignited my love for open-world games. Going from Medieval Japan to Ancient Greece in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was the single most jarring game transition I’ve ever experienced. Tsushima offered a single, beautifully crafted island brimming with adventure. In contrast, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s numerous islands amounted to little more than an archipelago of underwhelming diversions.
I first noticed this in how weightless the gameplay felt. Ghost of Tsushima featured precise combat, stylish animations, and sound design that gave each sword slash and arrow shot a real sense of weight. In Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, my sword felt about as deadly as a pool noodle, and my arrows might as well have been Nerf darts. The only thing effectively assassinated was my motivation to keep playing.
Where other games organically compelled me to continue, Odyssey used a cattle prod. Each cave, temple, or fort I walked into showed me a checklist of things I needed to do to complete the area. Every section of the map and enemy I fought also had a number indicating its suitability for my skill level. This killed the joy of open-world exploration, turning every journey and encounter into one overwhelming to-do list.
Even the clothing didn’t fit. Since I had to keep upgrading my gear to survive combat against higher-leveled foes, the game kept hurling loot at me. This kept me from getting attached to a specific identity or play style, ultimately breaking my immersion. On Tsushima, I’d meticulously pick out a stealth or archery outfit before a critical enemy encounter, but here I was discarding and picking up gloves and helmets faster than a beleaguered hockey mom picking up after five rambunctious boys. I settled on fighting with a dagger not because I enjoyed it or was particularly good at it, but because nearly all of the larger weapons were too awkward to wield via the clunky combat system. Like Far Cry 6, the variety of weapons created the illusion of a variety of play styles, but in reality most of the weapons, like most of the game, were just head-scratching filler.
All games have spreadsheets undergirding the whole affair, your every move turning smaller numbers into larger, more impactful ones. No one makes this more painfully obvious than Ubisoft, the developer behind the Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry franchises. While Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghost of Tsushima elegantly hid these mechanics, offering me a compelling sense of progress, Odyssey’s checklists turned every potential adventure into a joyless grind. Despite dedicating more hours to it than a work week at Goldman Sachs, I emerged months later having barely progressed the story and feeling like every last drop of dopamine had been squeegeed out of my brain.
Ubisoft games are widely maligned for this. Girlfriend Reviews poetically summarized them like this: “These are what I call fast food video games and Ubisoft is Mickey Ds.” This analogy fits perfectly; the gameplay felt like empty calories that left me with an emotional hangover, as disappointed with Ubisoft as I was with myself.
Getting lost (in addictive patterns)
The urge to explore is as primal as the urge to play. Humans are wired to wander. This makes it easy to understand why one of my favorite parts of open-world games is meandering around the map, a gameplay loop dubbed the “Hole Up a Minute” by Girlfriend Reviews.
The bountiful roaming at the core of these games is either their best or worst feature.
Good game exploration feels like serendipity. As I traverse the world I never quite know what challenge or opportunity I might stumble across: a treasure chest to loot, a pretty mountain to climb, or an enemy stronghold to sneak around. These encounters let me practice my skills, gain experience, and acquire trinkets.
Bad game exploration feels like over-caffeinated ADHD. My mini map gets cluttered with inconsequential activities. NPCs pester me for favors like persistent Jehovah’s witnesses. My heads-up display gets peppered with notifications and icons resembling pop-up advertisements.
The apparent serendipity of these detours and interruptions is, in reality, meticulously engineered. Thousands of hours of design, engineering, and play-testing have gone into making them as satisfying as possible. The nice lady that needs a ride into town in Red Dead Redemption 2, the ambush that needs my sniper skills in Far Cry 6, and the villagers needing to be rescued in Ghost of Tsushima are all carefully placed like the bait in a trap. This clever crafting makes it easy to overlook their artificiality, but the illusion occasionally falters. Cognitive dissonance seeps in, like water escaping a dam. When it does, I emerge from getting gleefully lost in video game world wondering if I’m actually getting woefully lost in the real world.
Viewed through this lens, the pronounced mediocrity of Far Cry 6 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey was a blessing. It taught me that the genre I’d quickly worshipped, alongside millions of other gamers, didn’t warrant unqualified praise and uncritical loyalty. These games, with their derivative designs, repetitive mechanics, and illusory depth, are a cautionary tale of when profit and pride overshadow passion and formulas and focus groups eclipse creativity. What was once a field ripe with innovation has become bogged down by greed and commercialism.
While I’m curious if the gaming industry’s stagnation and bloat will be saved by the console equivalent of A24, the real question gnawing at me is deeply personal. I’m left wondering if video games can play a healthy role in my life or if they are merely a juvenile time suck with an artsy coat of paint. Put another way: knowing what I know now, is it even possible to play them more intentionally or is the wisest decision to stop playing them entirely?
Morrowind was this but before the Ubisoft icons plague. Actually being able to get lost in a game is a huge benefit towards immersion. The goal is not doing all the tasks as quickly as possible, the goal is living in the world which sometimes includes tasks. Obviously BotW mostly did this, and Baldur's Gate 3 and Dragon's Dogma and Elden Ring all push back on the icon task list by being intentionally obtuse (especially the latter two).