10 Video Games To Blame For The Current State Of Games

10. The "Content-Filled Open World" Boom - The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The Witcher 3 is unquestionably one of the greatest video games of the generation and, honestly, of all time.

Not only did it tout a massive, sprawling open world that actually felt alive, but the side quests were among the most substantial, meaningful, and even hilarious that the RPG genre had ever seen.

The game was a mammoth achievement, no doubt, but its enormous success naturally led to numerous action-adventure games in its wake making half-hearted attempts to match its ludicrously ambitious sense of epic scale and detail.

The Witcher 3 pushed the boundaries of what open world games could be, and sensing a gold rush on the horizon, countless publishers offered up their own inferior stabs at the genre.

Mass Effect: Andromeda rather infamously failed to deliver on its expansive promises, and though Assassin's Creed Origins made a solid attempt to elevate the series into the open world realm, neither the storytelling nor the overly cluttered map were quite up to par.

These are two just major examples, of course, but we can blame The Witcher 3 for inspiring so many mediocre action-RPGs to offer up over-large worlds filled with bland copy-paste environments, repetitive sidequests, and tedious collect-a-thons.

The Witcher 3 wasn't the first open world game, but it is arguably the best, and the one which most others have so blatantly - and often lazily - tried to aspire to.