10 Open World Game Tropes We NEVER Want To See Again

There are so many things to love about open-world video games.

At their best, they tell bold, expansive, and affecting stories with unique and richly developed characters across equally diverse and complex worlds. At the same time, top-tier titles also provide endless opportunities for players to shake things up (or screw around) with a smorgasbord of side quests and random activities to partake in.

Open-world games have only gotten more popular and ambitious in recent years, too, with current-gen hardware and bigger budgets prompting greater immersion and more content for players to sink their teeth into.

Yet, potentially because of the sheer quantity and frequency of open-world titles hitting the market, a great many of them seem to be increasingly and frustratingly reliant on aggravating tropes as well.

Sure, having certain gameplay mechanics, environmental designs, and protagonist archetypes was novel and forward-thinking once upon time. Today, however, they can unnecessarily prolong playtimes and diminish gamers’ enjoyment just as often as they contribute to what could potentially already be an enthralling and surprising journey.

In particular, the 10 examples we’re exploring here really need to go away. Not all of them single-handedly ruin our fun, but they've gone a long way in making the open world genre one of the most frustrating over the last decade...

The best open-world games make their worlds feel engaging and believable with worthwhile side quests. They’re usually given by secondary characters, and they can be assigned automatically or discovered accidentally as you explore the map.

As demonstrated by Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Red Dead Redemption II, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (among other knockout titles), the ideal side quest progresses the narrative, offers a substantial bonus, and/or entertains enough to justify the effort invested.

Far too regularly, however, what should be a tightly woven and perpetually rewarding campaign of a few dozen hours is turned into a bloated 80, 90, or even 100+ hour slog due to the obligatory inclusion of tedious and insignificant side quests that don’t impact the story or the player - typically collectathons, exemplified by the feathers from Assassin's Creed.

Some of the other most common types of these meandering tasks are unimportant fetch quests; irritating escort missions; repetitive item searches (for example, “Find all 20 pieces of graffiti”); and cyclical jobs that require players to backtrack across various places and speak to various people in a specific order.

Rather than enhance the experience, these unoriginal and cumbersome side quests distract from the main mission(s) as they grate on our nerves and waste our precious time.