How Live Service Video Games Are Poisoning The Industry

2. Video Game Stories Don't Benefit From Long Runtimes

The open-world structure impacts the story the most, though. While Deacon gets a cohesive arc, in order to justify its length, the game constantly throws in new characters, locations and themes to tackle.

That only results in an unfocused story, though, where the actual main narrative is obfuscated as threads are dropped and picked up hours apart, and villains are introduced and dispatched on the regular. At one point, when the game feels like it's building to a climax, you're thrown another 10 hours of busywork that sucks out any and all momentum from the story. The pacing is terrible, and that stems from the title being so lengthy and padded with side content.

For the most part, in both the story and gameplay, Days Gone feels like it's on the same level for 40 hours. It starts out good, and it ends good, but the padding and lack of peaks and troughs makes for an experience that all blurs into one, with it being difficult to pick a high point out of what becomes a hodge-podge of similar feeling and looking events.

This is just the most recent example, but the same criticisms could be levelled at plenty of other modern open-world games, from Far Cry 5, to Marvel's Spider-Man, to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.