10 Manipulative Gaming Tactics You Fall For Every Time

8. Bigger Worlds = Better Worlds

PS4 LA Noire
Ubisoft Montreal

The last generation of gaming has been all about open worlds, where games have tended to sell their teeming locales on the proud promise that they're larger than the maps that came before.

No publisher is more guilty of this than Ubisoft, which relishes wowing players with the ever-expanding map sizes in series such as Assassin's Creed and Far Cry, under the pretense that bigger is automatically always better.

And yet, many complained that Assassin's Creed: Odyssey in particular featured an excessively huge map which proved more exhausting than fun to explore, especially given that Ubisoft lazily resorted to bloating the map out with busy-work icons rather than genuinely interesting, curated content.

But the fact that these games continue to pull gangbusters businesses, selling huge worlds under the banner of "immersion," suggests that players always have and likely always will be easily lured in by a gigantic sandbox, even if vast swaths of it are completely uninteresting.

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Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes). General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.