Darksiders: Derivative, Redundant, Uninspired

Darksiders (2010) is essentially the love-child of The Legend of Zelda and Devil May Cry. Picture, if you will, a Zelda game in the vein of Ocarina of Time or Twilight Princess, set in modern times after a war between Heaven and Hell has wiped humanity off the face of the earth and left its landscape a ruined mess, in which you play as War -- one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse -- trying to clear his name after he's framed for prematurely bringing about the apocalypse, by going into Zelda-style dungeons to solve puzzles and unlock special items that will help you defeat the boss and unlock new areas of the world map, while fighting enemies using a combination of a giant sword, scythe, and pistol to build combo-chains Devil May Cry-style. That's Darksiders in a nutshell; it's a carbon copy so similar to those two games that a cynical person might say it straight up plagiarizes them, while others might say that it is more of an homage in the style of those two games.

I certainly qualify as a hardcore cynic, but I generally enjoy Zelda games and there aren't enough 3D Zelda-clones out there to scratch the Zelda itch while waiting years on end for a new Zelda game to come out (on a brand new console that you can't afford until the price drops several more years later). I was looking forward to playing Darksiders, hoping that it would offer that same Zelda feel but with a more mature theme full of grimdark imagery and bloody violence. Darksiders succeeds on both fronts, but at the same time it feels a little too rote and mechanical, as if the developer, Vigil Games, was so focused on reproducing the Zelda and Devil May Cry formulae that they forgot to put any of their own creativity into the game, thus leaving us with a perfectly functional and decently enjoyable game that's ultimately too derivative, redundant, and uninspired for its own good.

Let's get the Zelda comparisons out of the way first: virtually everything in this game (except for the combat and leveling system) is lifted directly from Zelda. It has the same type of world structure and progression, where you get a semi-open world to explore that expands as you gain key items from dungeons that not only are used to defeat the dungeon boss, but also unlock new areas of the world map. The dungeons themselves require you to solve environmental puzzles, usually involving the new item you just gained (with the usual pushing blocks and flipping switches), and you can find treasure chests that grant you a map of the dungeon's layout, a compass showing the location of all items in the dungeon, and keys to open locked doors. The world map has a lot of hidden areas to explore, encouraging you to go back to previous areas with new items to gain extra powerups.

Using the boomerang Crossblade to hit a switch above a door.

Other Zelda staples that appear in Darksiders (in some form or another): bombflowers, using bombs to blow up obstacles, the deku leaf, catching a draft with the deku leaf to fly higher, lighting torches on fire, the power glove, the hammer, climbing up or down vines, a horse that uses carrots to run faster, using a horse to cross a huge chasm, the Dark Link fight, the hookshot, the grappling hook, a Navi-esque companion, the Lens of Truth, the bow and arrow, the boomerang, heart piece containers, getting a full heart container for beating a boss, a blue teleport thingy after beating a boss, a magic meter, magic meter upgrades, using a musical instrument to open doors, earning money for breaking things in the environment, deku bulbs that launch you into the air, bosses with glowing weakpoints, bosses that always follow a scripted pattern, the master sword, collecting fragments to restore a mystical object, using consumable items from glass containers, going into a shadow realm to find and defeat a certain number of things to free important NPCs, plus probably many more that I'm forgetting or didn't notice.

Some of these comparisons are a bit of a stretch (the pistol is obviously not a direct copy of the bow and arrow, but it serves the same function) while others are somewhat incidental (like the blue teleport thingy that only shows up once, I think), but the point is to show that Vigil Games was deliberately trying to make Darksiders as close to Zelda as possible -- the only thing it's really missing is a princess that needs to be rescued. That's not necessarily a bad thing, however -- if you're going to directly copy another game, then you may as well copy one of the greatest game franchises in existence. The problem is that Darksiders brings absolutely nothing new to the table, since its only twists on the classic Zelda formula are things taken from yet other games -- Devil May Cry (or God of War if you prefer) and Portal.

The combat system is basically Devil May Cry, where you're using a variety of weapons and attacks to build a combo chain, swapping weapons mid-combo and ultimately trying to look as cool as possible while doing so. Left-clicking attacks with the Chaoseater (a giant sword), while right-clicking attacks with either the Scythe (a scythe) or the Tremor Gauntlet (a power glove fist); you can quickly and easily swap between the Scythe and Gauntlet by pressing the tab key. Additionally, you can equip various weapons to your three item slots, pressing numbered hotkeys to switch between the Crossblade (a giant bladed boomerang), the Earthcaller (a horn that causes AOE stun and knockback on enemies), the Mercy pistol (a rapid-fire pistol), and the Abyssal Chain (a hookshot that pulls you towards enemies, or pulls their armor off), and pressing the R key to use your toggled secondary weapon. You can also press the shift key to block, counter-attack, and dodge.

Using Din's Fire Death Rage in the Twilight Cathedral.

Each of the primary weapons has its own unique moveset, and you can spend souls earned from defeated enemies (Demon's Souls, anyone?) to buy new attacks and to upgrade existing ones. You can also buy special "wrath abilities" that function like magic attacks, consuming wrath from your wrath meter as you use them. Blade Geyser shoots spikes out of the ground all around you; Stone Skin buffs your armor and attack values; Immolation lights the area around you on fire so that enemies who get close enough also catch fire; and Affliction poisons a single target for damage over time. You start with only the Chaoseater sword and a few basic attacks at your disposal; the rest is progressively unlocked as you play the game.

The combat is functional, and it can even be fairly satisfying at times, but it serves as a good example of the superfluous, redundant, incohesive design problems of the whole game, where the designers just threw everything they could into the game without considering how it would integrate with everything else, and whether it actually needed to be there at all. The combo multiplier builds as you string consecutive hits together, but it seems to do absolutely nothing. The scythe is meant for wide-sweeping, crowd-control AOE attacks, but the sword handles that role perfectly fine (maybe even better) with the Whirl Wind combo. The scythe has two 360-degree attacks, but one of them is faster and also attacks vertically with a tornado, rendering the other obsolete.

The sword has two attacks that launch enemies straight up into the air, optionally taking you with them if you hold the button down for mid-air combos, but one launches the enemy higher and hits more times, rendering the other obsolete. Blade Geyser is meant to hit enemies in AOE around you, but you can do that exact same thing with the scythe or gauntlet without having to spend wrath from your limited supply. Stone Skin and Immolation can't be used simultaneously, and they both have the effect of causing more damage to enemies, but Stone Skin also boosts your defense, rendering Immolation obsolete. You unlock the Tremor Gauntlet well after you've already started upgrading the sword and scythe, which makes it immediately a much less appealing option.

Using Nayru's Love Stone Skin in the Iron Canopy.

The whole game suffers from feature creep, bombarding you with so many options that you don't need or even want to use. Just in combat, you've got three main weapons in the sword, scythe, and gauntlet (each with a crap-ton of moves, many of which are redundant), three secondary weapons/items in the earthcaller, crossblade, and pistol (five if you count the abyssal chain and voidwalker, which are used extensively in their respective dungeons), four "magic" abilities (half of which are redundant), plus the chaos form which you can activate once your chaos meter hits max, mounted combat once you unlock the horse, and a few temporary items like the fracture cannon and redemption rifle. Smaller enemies can be grabbed and thrown into other enemies, and you can even pick up things in the environment like cars or street lights to throw or bash at enemies. It's good to have options for the sake of variety, but only when those options are actually worth doing; in Darksiders, most of your options just give you more ways to do the exact same thing you're already doing and/or are simply less effective than other options.

There's simply no reason to mix up your techniques, except against bosses, which aren't really combat scenarios as much as they are action puzzles. In Devil May Cry, you're graded based on how many attacks you're able to string together, how varied your attacks are, and the degree of difficulty for the attacks you use; if you spam simple, repetitive attacks on enemies, your score will be much lower, which will get you fewer red orbs, which are what you spend to upgrade your stats, buy new weapons, and learn new attacks, so it's in your best interest to mix up your attacks and to try to pull off more complicated attack combos. As already mentioned, the combo multiplier in Darksiders doesn't do anything at all (or if it does, it's trivially inconsequential) -- enemies drop the same amount of souls no matter how they die, and you aren't graded for your performance in the various dungeons (like in Devil May Cry), so once you find an effective technique there's no reason to branch out; anything else you do is purely aesthetic, because the combat system is entirely superficial with zero mechanical depth to it.

This principle even applies to exploration, where a lot of your "tools" for reaching otherwise inaccessible areas really aren't that mechanically distinct from one another. Using the gauntlet to break blue crystals is mechanically no different than hitting it with your sword or scythe, except you now have the correct "key" for the "lock," and breaking the red crystals is essentially the same except its "lock" will only accept bombs as the "key." Whether you're crossing a chasm by using the shadowflight wings to glide from draft to draft or using the abyssal chain to swing from grapple point to grapple point, you're really just holding a button down and moving forward towards the next target -- it just looks different. Whether you're using the crossblade to activate a set of switches, or throwing a bombflower onto a red crystal, or using the voidwalker to create a set of portals (Portal-style), you're really just aiming at two different hotspots in the environment and clicking to "connect" them with the right key item equipped, then walking forward into the newly-opened doorway.

Using the Aperture Science Portal Gun Voidwalker to make portals.

Maybe that's oversimplifying things, but it really feels like all these different items were designed to serve the same function, in terms of exploration, but that some situations arbitrarily require one item instead of another. There's usually no logical, immersive reason for it ("why in the world are there Portal pads here, of all places?"), and the gameplay involved is basically the same in every situation, except you have to constantly dig through your inventory and juggle your equipped "keys" every time you come across a locked "door." From a design standpoint, the decision-making process of what to use where is simply "make it require something the player doesn't have yet" while consulting a chart to make sure they're using everything evenly. I normally like it when games do that, because it's usually pretty rewarding to backtrack through previous areas to unlock something you couldn't access before, but it feels, in this case, like it was designed to artificially inflate playtime, especially considering how spread-out the world actually is, and how generic most of the transition areas are.

The world is broken into about 10-12 primary areas, each with its own distinct, memorable theme and level design. You've got the Choking Grounds, a circular graveyard with the gazebo in the center; the Ashlands, a huge sandy wasteland with natural rock formations; the Anvil's Ford, a forested area with cliffs and rivers; the Iron Canopy, a modern cityscape that's been overrun by giant spiders; and so on. These areas are all fun and interesting, but they're separated by a bunch of long, linear transition areas that have no relation to the two areas they're connecting; a lot of them are just a bunch of generic grey tunnels that you could easily swap around and it would have no effect on the level design. Most aren't marked on the map, and few of them have any kind of memorable feature to help remember which one is where. It doesn't help that the warping system means you only ever have to go through an area once, until you decide to go back for optional unlocks, meaning you have even fewer opportunities to become familiar with these areas.

Talking to Navi Luke Skywalker The Joker The Watcher. 

Towards the end of the game, when you've finally gotten the abyssal chain and the voidwalker Portal gun, it's really hard to remember where all the grapple points and portal pads are that you've spent the last 16-20 hours passing by because there are so many of them and a lot are tucked away in those generic, forgettable transition areas. I could vividly picture specific grapple points and portal pads in my mind ("it was at the end of a long, rectangular, grey hallway, the pad was on the ceiling, and you had to shoot over a wall that didn't quite go all the way up") but I could not, for the life of me, remember how to get to them. In the end, I basically just had to re-explore the entire game world inch-by-inch, top-to-bottom to find all these places again, after I'd already spent a bunch of time previously backtracking through areas each time I unlocked a new item like the crossblade or the gauntlet.

The unlocks aren't even that rewarding, and they're especially not very exciting. In each case, it's just a small barrier that leads to an immediate treasure chest, which can be really anti-climactic after all the hours of anticipation. Most of the things you unlock are lifestone shards and wrath shards, each of which needs four to give you a new bar of health or a new bar of wrath, meaning each one you find only gives you a small amount of progress towards eventually getting something rewarding. It's even worse with the Abyssal Armor pieces, of which you need 10 to unlock the new armor set. Sometimes you find consumable items meant to fill your glass containers; these are completely worthless, equivalent to Zelda's "here's a measly five rupees" chests. The Mask of Shadows, which you unlock at the very end of the game, is the most disappointing thing of all, since all it does is let you see things in the environment that were obviously there before, but that you just couldn't interact with without the mask. That doesn't bring anything new to the gameplay, and is no different than if they'd just spawned all these things for the very first time at the end of the game without giving you a fancy "powerup" to access them.

Using the Lens of Truth Mask of Shadows to see the anvil and shard.

The game's pacing is all over the place, too. Zelda games usually have a pretty good rhythm of giving you a new area to explore, where you get to talk to NPCs, solve problems (ie, quests), and find hidden treasure before going into the area's dungeon; you typically always know what you're getting yourself into and the different stages and gameplay elements flow seamlessly into one another. Darksiders, in contrast, is pretty jarring, often plucking you out of regular gameplay to drop you into bizarre one-off scenarios. At one point you're running along a dilapidated highway and then you watch a cutscene and suddenly, for some reason, you're riding a griffon in a StarFox kind of gameplay sequence (or perhaps more accurately, a Panzer Dragoon Saga sequence), with no idea what's actually going on. That type of gameplay sequence never pops up again.

Another stage randomly turns the game into a third-person shooter, which randomly gets reprised later, for some reason, with a different type of weapon. Early on you're given a horn that you use to open gates, and then for some reason the gatekeepers make you go into random "challenge arenas" where you have to complete some arbitrary challenge like "perform five aerial kills" or "perform 20 grab/stun finishers" within a time limit. Meanwhile, certain abilities (like the counter-attack) are bestowed to you randomly, for no reason, and you sometimes stumble into dungeons or their final bosses as if by accident, with no real setup to set your expectations. It creates this really weird, disjointed pace where it feels like Things Are Just Happening and you're just kind of along for the ride, not really in control.

The real satisfaction of Darksiders comes from its dungeons, which despite being a carbon copy clone of Zelda prove to be just as fun, if not more so than typical Zelda dungeons. Darksiders' dungeons are comprised by a series of rooms that spread out in multiple directions, often requiring you to explore deep in one direction to get a key item needed to unlock access to other areas in other directions. Along the way you have to fight enemies and mini-bosses and do some platforming, but mostly you'll be solving puzzles. These puzzles are pretty clever -- even if the solutions are usually pretty obvious, that doesn't mean it's always easy to do. Sometimes it takes trial-and-error to figure out what works and what doesn't; other times it comes down to personal skill with navigating the environment, timing your actions right or having good enough aim with your weapons. All-the-while it's really satisfying to progress through a dungeon, figuring out where you need to go and what needs to be done as you work your way towards the dungeon's boss.

Pushing a block platform off a ledge. 

Unfortunately the bosses suffer from antiquated design, perhaps a problem of trying too hard to be too much like the source material. By that I mean, every single boss is a repetitive pattern of attacks and behaviors meant to be exploited, requiring a singular sequence of actions on your part to expose their glowing weak spot. It's basically a puzzle to figure out what you have to do in each situation (it always involves some application of the item you just obtained), but once you do so it's simply a matter of repeating the same pattern two or three more times until the boss eventually goes down. There are no second or third phases, no escalations in boss tactics that require you to change and adapt your tactics to a new situation; you simply follow the script, repeating the same thing until you eventually win. They're rarely ever challenging, and that simplistic design can feel incredibly anti-climactic when you finally reach the end of the dungeon.

The dungeons also have a problem, much like the overworld map, where they can become too sprawling and hard to navigate if you ever decide to backtrack in search of artifacts or treasure chests you might have missed. They flow perfectly fine the first time through, since a lot of areas are initially restricted to create a particular route through the dungeon as you unlock doors and solve puzzles, but since they sprawl out in long, linear paths you can get stuck going through huge chunks of the dungeon all over again just to get a single missed chest, and then you have no easy way out and have to backtrack long distances just to get out again. The final dungeon, in particular, can be incredibly tedious, with it requiring you to go into three branching paths, each of which is about half a dungeon in its own right, and then backtrack to the center so that you can go to one of the other branches to do it all over again, fighting the same boss three times, once at the end of each branch.

Combat leaves little to be desired, even ignoring all of its redundancies. You have the ability to block, dodge, or counter enemy attacks (all of which is done with the shift key, which means you can easily perform the wrong action by accident), but enemies generally don't telegraph their attacks, so you end up taking a lot of damage from hits that you had no realistic chance to avoid, short of understanding how the AI works and anticipating that an attack is going to come before you get a chance to see it. The dodge, meanwhile, only moves you a very short distance, which is usually insufficient to dodge attacks by larger enemies that cover greater distances, and dodging also seizes control for a moment afterwards, leaving you completely exposed to attack and unable to do anything. That's good in the sense that it forces you to time your dodges properly, but that's already shaky business because of the untelegraphed attacks, and it really disrupts the flow of combat having these awkward pauses forcibly inserted into a free-flowing combat system.

Using the bow and arrow pistol while riding Epona Ruin.

Then you've got the control issues which are just atrocious on the PC, despite the fact that I played a supposed remastered version where the designers have had two opportunities to get it right, and failed both times. If you want to use your magic skills, by default the game expects you to press and hold the B key, and then press 1, 2, 3, or 4 to use the slotted ability. Like, what? Never mind the fact that you already have three of your fingers occupied with the movement keys at WASD, but expecting you to reach for the B key with your thumb and the number keys with your pinky is just absurd. It's like whoever was in charge of programming the default controls is not only not used to PC gaming, but has never seen a keyboard before. By default you have to press O to bring up the map (instead of the usual, more logical M), and you have to press Control and Shift to cycle left and right in menus. Throwing the crossblade at multiple targets involves pressing a button to toggle aim mode, then pressing and holding a second button while aiming the mouse at your desired targets, and then pressing a third button to throw it.

Going into aim mode lowers the camera over the shoulder, proving useful for aiming the crossblade, pistol, Portal gun, fracture cannon, or redemption rifle, but the targeting reticle moves independently of the camera, so if you need to turn you have to drag the reticle to the edge of the screen and then drag it back to center, and it's easy to lose track of where the reticle is on-screen (and therefore what you're aiming at) when you've got a bunch of enemies also shooting at you and things exploding at the screen. Swimming, likewise, is completely mouse and camera independent; you have to press Control to swim lower and either Shift or Space (I don't remember which) to swim higher. This often feels clunky and imprecise. I tried playing with my Xbox 360 PC controller to see if maybe the controls would work/feel better that way, but the game never recognized it for some reason.

If I had played Darksiders when it first came out, back in 2010, there's a chance that a younger, more naive version of me would have been part of the crowd saying "it's better than Zelda," but now that I'm older and more analytically-minded I'm forced to conclude that Darksiders is simply too derivative, redundant, and uninspired to qualify as a good game. I don't mind that it so blatantly copies the Zelda formula (that's a positive as far as I'm concerned), but the fact that it brings absolutely nothing new to the table while feeling like a cluttered mess of ideas that have been indiscriminately and awkwardly shoehorned into the game makes the whole thing more than just subtly disappointing. It can be decently fun and satisfying at times, but it lacks the charm and cohesion of a good Zelda game, and it lacks the satisfying depth of Devil May Cry. In essence, it's an average Zelda game and an inferior Devil May Cry game mixed into one mediocre package.

The Problem With Open World Games, or "Why Open World Games Suck"

The joint release of Horizon Zero Dawn and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild -- two of the biggest and most ambitious open-world games ever made -- within days of each other has spawned a lot of discussion about which game handles the open world formula better, and which represents the future of open world gaming. I've not played either one so I won't be commenting on that issue directly. Instead I'll be giving my thoughts on open world games in general, based on observations and trends I've noticed in the open world games I've played over the past 15 years.

As the title already states, I have some major issues with open world games. It's not that I don't like them, or that they're all bad across the board -- in fact, many of my all-time favorite games are open world, or at least semi-open world. There are a lot of good things to like about open world games, hence why they've become so popular lately, but I feel like very few developers do the open world concept justice. It seems like most of the mainstream AAA open world games that I play end up subtly or outright disappointing me, and consequently I've grown apprehensive of games that consider their big open worlds to be their main selling point.

Let's start this negative critique on a positive note by first covering the good parts of open world design. The main appeal of these games, as I see it, is simply the freedom you have to explore and discover things all for yourself. They give you a strong feeling of control over the game, that you're the one in charge of deciding how they play out, able to tailor your gameplay experience to your own interests. There's usually a lot of different things to do in these games, so if you like some things and not others, then you can focus on the things you like and ignore the things you don't. For some people, the fun is simply in the curiosity of seeing something intriguing in the distance and going to investigate, along with the wonder of all the situations you find yourself in, often by pure happenstance. It's often possible to derive an emergent narrative for your character, unique to your own playthrough, based on where you go and what you do in these open environments.

A dragon flying around the hot springs in Skyrim.

A lot of these games also feature RPG elements (or are RPGs themselves), with you earning experience or talent points to invest in different skills and abilities that improve your character over the course of the game. While it's always fun to watch your character grow and evolve, that's typically where an open world game's dynamism begins and ends, since the worlds themselves usually remain pretty static from beginning to end. And that's one of my big problems with open world games; while their worlds are usually pretty large with a lot to do within them, they don't really change or react to what you do.

When a game tries to be truly open by allowing the player to go anywhere and do anything from the get-go, most of the content (quests, activities, locations, etc) typically ends up being completely isolated from everything else, with no consequence for anything outside of itself, because everything has to be designed to be completed by any type of character at any point in the game, no matter what you've done previously. It's really hard to write a complex series of inter-connected quests when the world is so spread out and players are likely to go in opposite directions and can pick up quests in any sequence, and you can't have quests radically altering the state of the game world because that could interfere with other quests, which is probably why big open world games don't do this. A lot of games' side-missions don't even play out in the actual world map, instead sending you to a separate, instanced version of it that only exists for the duration of the mission.

The worlds are made as big as they are for the simple purpose of spreading the content out, which typically does nothing but force you to walk long distances to reach the next Thing Worth Doing while wading through shallow, repetitive filler content like fighting random, pointless enemies or collecting random, pointless collectibles, or exploring simple, repetitive dungeons, or completing simple, repetitive fetch quests. The interest, usually, is in churning out as much stuff as possible instead of focusing on making that content unique and interesting -- quantity over quality. In a lot of cases you spend more time staring at the mini-map than actually exploring the world, because the world itself is so bland and featureless that you look for ways to bypass it.

Surverying the city from above in Assassin's Creed 2. 

It's also hard to tell a good, compelling main story when it, by pure necessity -- like everything else in the game -- is made to be ignored. People often consider it high praise when they say they played a game for a hundred or more hours before even touching the main quest, but to me that's bad quest design if a major, important quest-line isn't interesting enough for people to want to follow through with it. The impact of the main quest is also broken when there's supposed to be some important sense of urgency, but then there's really no threat or consequence if you go do something else instead. You can fix that by removing some of the urgency and giving players a non-linear set of goals to accomplish, but that can be even less compelling since you've chopped the story into a bunch of self-contained, interchangeable bits, with kind of stagnant pacing that leaves you on the same set of objectives for the vast majority of the game.

The result of all of this is an open world sandbox game that feels too much like an offline, single-player MMO, since many open world games actually share a lot of common design elements with MMOs -- huge, sprawling landscapes that force you to spend 5-10 minutes holding down the forward key to get anywhere; clusters of randomly respawning basic enemies spread across the landscape; simplistic quest design that involves a bunch of item-fetching and monster-slaying; a static world that doesn't change based on your actions within it; crafting systems that require farming a bunch of resources; pointless collectibles for the sake of padding out content; and a central leveling system all about grinding repetitive tasks to get stronger. Playing a poorly-made single-player open world game is never as bad as running around a dead, empty server in an MMO, but it can evoke similar feelings.

A properly-designed open world game gives you all of the positive elements of open world design (freedom, non-linear exploration, discovery, emergent narratives, immersive worlds, rewarding choices, a personalized gameplay experience) without all the negative elements (shallow, repetitive, inconsequential content designed to waste your time to build up the illusion of a bigger, deeper world). The easiest way to accomplish this is simply to scale back the size of the world; we don't need a playing area the size of a small country to have a grand, epic adventure with lots of things to do. By putting the focus on quality instead of quantity, you'll offer a more engaging and more rewarding experience for the player, even if the world isn't quite as big and there isn't quite as much stuff to do within in.

Part of the harbor city of Khorinis from Gothic 2.

A game like Gothic 2 is a mere fraction the size of Skyrim, and yet its world is more densely packed with interesting content to explore everywhere you look, without a hint of repetitive content padding, while still offering a ton of completely open space to explore and a substantial 80-100 hours of gameplay. It also has a main story that runs in tandem with the side-quests and world exploration; you have a ton of freedom to go off and do whatever you want, but at certain points you're required to advance the main story, which keeps the game's momentum moving forward with an engaging pace, opens new areas of the world, and actually causes it to change dynamically over the course of the game. In other games, you help some farmers drive some bandits off of their property, and that would be it for the rest of the game; in Gothic, you come back later and things have changed, requiring new input to address the new situation. It creates this feeling of a more living, breathing world where it's worth going everywhere -- and even back to previously "completed" areas -- and trying to do everything you can.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines isn't technically an open world game, since it takes place in a series of hub areas (I guess you'd say it's semi-open world), but this type of design still gives you a lot of areas to explore and lets you complete quests in a non-linear order. You unlock each area as part of the main quest, which allows everything in each area to be designed around the knowledge that the player will be doing things in close proximity to each other. Quests actually overlap and things in the environment relate to one another; you hear about a grisly murder on the news, and it gets referenced in an unrelated side-quest. If you go to the scene of the crime you can pick up more information, and then another quest will task you with finding the killer. Afterwards, the news reports change to reflect this new development in the story, and the quest continues on into other hub areas before eventually requiring you to return to the starting area. Instead of just being one linear quest from Point A to Point B, it's a complex web that permeates much of the starting area and has lasting consequences on the story.

Compare these games to something like Skyrim, or Red Dead Redemption, or Assassin's Creed 2 -- three games by some of the industry's biggest hitters when it comes to open world games. They're all somewhat older, but I've not played any of these designers' more recent games, and both Gothic 2 and Vampire Bloodlines are years older than these games, anyway. Skyrim's open world is filled with repetitive dungeons that are all virtually the same and "radiant quests" generated by a computer algorithm, completely devoid of any soul. Red Dead Redemption's open world is filled with repetitive random encounters and side-missions that take you completely out of the open world, where none of your actions will have any consequence once you're finished. Assassin's Creed 2's open world is filled with repetitive item collecting, mundane side-missions, and an economic system where earning money is a practically worthless reward.

Overlooking Touissant in The Witcher 3: Blood & Wine. 

The actual maps in each game consist of huge, sprawling landscapes that can take a lifetime-and-a-half to traverse, the bulk of which is occupied by ... basically nothing. Of course there are random animals to hunt, random enemies to fight, random sights to see, random people you probably can't talk to, random quests to complete, random collectibles to collect, random loot to find, random mini-games to play, random events to resolve, and so on, but this stuff is meaningless busy work designed to pad the game with extra Things To Do, often completely inconsequential whether you do them or not. These kinds of activities are usually fun for a little while and in small doses, but in the context of a 15-square mile map, where you'll be spending anywhere from 60 to 120 hours exploring, they can quickly become shallow and repetitive. Even a game as good as The Witcher 3, which is filled to the brim with interesting content and set a new bar for the genre in 2015, is ultimately diluted by the size of its world and the amount of content in it.

So when I see mainstream, AAA, big-budget games being hyped for how big their open worlds are (Breath of the Wild is said to be 10 times bigger than Skyrim), I have no other reaction but to wonder how the hell they're going to fill all that space. The trailer for Breath of the Wild shows a lot of really cool-looking stuff, but then it also shows a lot of wide open, empty spaces with absolutely nothing going on -- not even interesting terrain. I've watched gameplay footage where people spend ten whole minutes walking/gliding across the landscape just to get somewhere nearby, and they barely encounter anything interactive -- just a few measly enemies and a treasure chest with 10 arrows, maybe a flower or some apples here and there. I see that kind of thing happening and I think "that looks like such a huge waste of time."

And that's really my main concern with these open world games: that I'm going to end up wasting a lot of time traversing their stretched-out landscapes, doing a bunch of shallow repetitive filler content, and having to deal with a slow grind to improve and progress, when I could be playing a much more focused game that offers all (or many) of the same benefits of open world design while cutting out all of the fat. We don't need constantly bigger and bigger worlds; we need better quests, more rewarding exploration, more satisfying progression, worlds that change and react (not just superficially) to your presence within them -- we need quality instead of quantity. And again, it's not that I don't like open world games -- I really do enjoy them -- it's just that I don't think enough of them handle the open world formula as good as it should be executed, and these big-budget AAA games are the ones largely to blame for that. Maybe Horizon Zero Dawn and/or Breath of the Wild buck that trend, but my cynical, pessimistic side tells me not to get my hopes up.