Assassin's Creed: The Wasted Open-World

The Perils Of The Open World

The issue with the whole open-world thing, though, is that each game has to progressively top what came before. This is where the cracks can start to show in the whole concept.

Grand Theft Auto V, the masterpiece that it is, offers a wonderful urban open-world environment in Los Santos. There are minigames to indulge in, a variety of optional quests, or players can simply enjoy driving/flying from place to place in the nicest cars and planes they can afford with their ill-gotten gains.

At the street level, though, the many NPCs going about their business are completely lifeless. Most can’t really be interacted with in any meaningful way; they exist to give the illusion of bustling streets and that’s about all.

Grand Theft Auto V has become such a content-laden package that its racing component alone is more robust than many fully-fledged racing titles, but other parts of the game seem to be there just because minigames and sidequests have become a prerequisite.

Filler has become a major issue in a lot of open-world titles. While travelling around Final Fantasy XV’s vast areas in the Regalia, sidequests pop up at an alarming rate. The same is true of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, Red Dead Redemption 2 and so on.

100% completion becomes a heck of an undertaking, and the reward often isn’t worth a lot of the busywork that comes with it. Odyssey, in particular, attracted quite a lot of criticism for this sort of thing, and it’s put a lot of doubt in fans’ minds as to what to expect from the new game, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which is set to launch on November 10.