9 Ways All Open-World Video Games Are Starting To Suck

5. There's No Sense Of Pace

It's not a new complaint, but it still deserves to be said that open world games struggle to create a well-paced story.

Because of their inherently unfocused design, it can be difficult for sandbox games to create a sense of rising intensity and urgency when players can spend ten hours just wandering around helping farmers herd their sheep or whatever. In many cases - like say Mass Effect 3 - it actively doesn't make sense for the protagonist to do anything other than complete the most obvious task at hand (in that game's case, saving the world).

While this wasn't much of a problem when open world games were the exception to the rule, most modern major releases use the genre as a framework and haven't figured out a solution to solving the issue of this unfocused design, meaning that the quality of sandbox narratives hasn't improved over the past few years.