The appeal of an open world game is the sense of discovery one feels upon stumbling onto something interesting. At least that's the appeal for me. I've noticed that there's an unfortunate trend in games where instead of filling open worlds with actual meaningful interesting content, developers choose to copy and paste content and then spread it across an open world.
Before I first played Breath of the Wild I was incredibly excited. I imagined it would be a Zelda game on steroids. Hundreds of dungeons spread across an open world, side quests to rival any other open world game. What we got was boring brainless kindergarten puzzles and repetitive fights spread and copy pasted across an open world with nothing else to do outside of occasionally fighting the same enemies over and over. What's sad is that at its core Breath of the Wild did have good ideas. The climbing mechanics were an improvement over climbing mechanics in most games. The weather system was fairly unique and interesting. However, as a game it was so incredibly shallow that I personally found it difficult to not get bored.
What I did not expect was for Breath of the Wild to heralded above Skyrim as one of the best open world games of all time. I struggled to understand what was so good about it.
Elden Ring released in 2021? And copied Breath of the Wild's open world format of spreading out content throughout an open world and copy pasting a good deal of it to give the illusion of expansiveness. Although, one could argue that Elden Ring as a game offered more meaningful original content than Breath of the Wild. It was still undoubtedly a downgrade from the formula of the past souls games. At least I hear this from fans of the series on this forum.
Unfortunately, it seems like Breath of the Wild is going to encourage developers to become increasingly lazy when making open world games. I predict the next Elder Scrolls will have a game design core more similar to Breath of the Wild than Elder Scrolls.
And I mean that in only the worst ways.
Before I first played Breath of the Wild I was incredibly excited. I imagined it would be a Zelda game on steroids. Hundreds of dungeons spread across an open world, side quests to rival any other open world game. What we got was boring brainless kindergarten puzzles and repetitive fights spread and copy pasted across an open world with nothing else to do outside of occasionally fighting the same enemies over and over. What's sad is that at its core Breath of the Wild did have good ideas. The climbing mechanics were an improvement over climbing mechanics in most games. The weather system was fairly unique and interesting. However, as a game it was so incredibly shallow that I personally found it difficult to not get bored.
What I did not expect was for Breath of the Wild to heralded above Skyrim as one of the best open world games of all time. I struggled to understand what was so good about it.
Elden Ring released in 2021? And copied Breath of the Wild's open world format of spreading out content throughout an open world and copy pasting a good deal of it to give the illusion of expansiveness. Although, one could argue that Elden Ring as a game offered more meaningful original content than Breath of the Wild. It was still undoubtedly a downgrade from the formula of the past souls games. At least I hear this from fans of the series on this forum.
Unfortunately, it seems like Breath of the Wild is going to encourage developers to become increasingly lazy when making open world games. I predict the next Elder Scrolls will have a game design core more similar to Breath of the Wild than Elder Scrolls.
And I mean that in only the worst ways.
