XboxEnthusiast thinks that open worlds don't always make games better:

Open worlds don’t make games better . . .

It seems that every game coming out at the moment is either an open world game or trying to find ways to give you more freedom to play the way that you want. For the most part, this is a welcome move, giving choice to players is nearly always a good thing, however this market saturation is leading towards the point where even games that have no right in being open world or always online feel the pressure to shoehorn it in. So what do developers need to beware of when implementing an open world?

The first and most important question that developers need to ask themselves is what benefit is there to the player in having an open world? Interestingly Ubisoft is both a champion and a villain with this criterion. Two of Ubisoft’s new IPs last year went the open world route to great effect. Tom Clancy’s The Division had me hooked (and still does as I often revisit it) because of the world that it created. The open world continually reinforced the dire circumstances that you were in and allowed the online focus of the game to blend seamlessly. The same is true of Steep. It’s not the first winter sports game to have an open world (Amped had this years before Ubisoft ever dreamed of their game) but the way that it encouraged you to just mess around in the world made this open world choice a winner. On the other hand I have often thought that both the Assassin’s Creed and Watch Dogs series would be better as linear games without an open world. I don’t see what the open world really adds to these titles. Imagine if Watch Dogs was a linear game (obviously with choices about how you complete a level à la Deus Ex), the hacking could be more substantial and more impressive as it wouldn’t have to be the one size fits all style hacking that is currently used. With Assassin’s Creed the number of people who complete each game is quite low, this is especially concerning when the series has a continuing storyline. If they made these games more linear (again with options of how you complete each level) they could really focus on the story telling and give us a much more engaging and gripping tale.

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Thanks Farflame!