10 Ways You Can Tell A Video Game Is Going To Suck
6. A Cluttered Map
Hands up those among us who feel a sudden surge of anxiety when, typically in the open-world genre, they open up the game map for the first time and are inundated with hundreds of icons cluttering the damn thing up.
The primary difficulty of designing open-world games lies in making exploration of the vast world feel meaningful, and often developers will simply litter the map with quests, points of "interest," waypoints, collectibles, and so on in a lousy attempt to make the world seem populated.
It's a common industry tactic, though one employed most cravenly by Ubisoft above all others.
If you want to make players tired of your game in record time, this is the way to do it - flooding the map with icons and Things To Do, such that even if a lot of it actually is interesting, players will most likely feel overwhelmed by the experience before they've even started.
Nothing compensates for a rich story, well-drawn characters, and dynamic gameplay quite like a visual shopping list of tedious, time-wasting nonsense, right?
At least some open-world games are charitable enough to let you toggle the map markers off altogether and just focus on the main meat of the campaign.