Opinion - Open World Games Are Smaller than Linear Games

Gamecrate makes the case that open world games offer less content than linear games.

 There is one aspect of game design that has been annoying me ever since it became the hip new popular thing to do: open-world games.

Everyone says that open-world games are huge! “Wow there’s so much to do!” everyone says. “I can’t believe I can travel anywhere!” they exclaim.

No! It’s all a trick! Open world games aren’t huge! In fact, many of them are smaller than most linear games!

Have you ever tried to mainline an open-world game from start to finish? The main quest lines aren’t actually that long. Big epic RPGs that take “hundreds of hours” to finish only take 10-20 hours to finish if you go from main quest to main quest.

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Alright. Let’s talk about my first problem with that claim: bigger does not mean better. I remember when everyone was saying Dragon Age: Inquisition was such an amazing game because it had a huge world to explore. False. It did not have a huge world to explore. It had a huge world to travel through.

Exploration implies a certain degree of interacting with your surroundings. You either discover new information, encounter new enemies, solve new puzzles, and the like. Dragon Age: Inquisition as well as many other similarly designed open-world games, don’t actually let you do this all that often. Instead, the open world is just space with different coats of paint between side-quest markers. You aren’t doing anything in it. You aren’t exploring it. You are just walking from point A to point B. Linear games had something like this way back in the NES era. It was called a world map.