It’s bizarre, there are a ton of mini-games, combat is sometimes fun, storyline is yakuza melo-drama, dripping in themes around loyalty, honor and sacrifice.
There are quite a lot of ways of making an open world game with infinite replayability without requiring massive maps, but they’re not in the style AAA gaming has been going for in the past decade, they’re more things like Oxygen Not Included, Factorio, Minecraft or Battle Brothers were the game space is procedurally generated, the fun is in conquering the challenges of a map, and once you exhaust it you stop yet end up coming back months later and try a new game with a new map, from scratch, because it’s again fun and there’s no “I know this map” to spoil it.
The handmade game spaces with custom made “adventures” do manage to have better experiences than those games that rely on procedural generation and naturally emerging situations for providing gamers with experiences, but they’re mainly once of and rely on sheer size to remain entertaining for long.
To be able to say “our map is 100x100km!” The only games where it is worth it to have a huge map like that, is army simulators and RTS. Anything else could probably be better off with polish in some other place, rather than a huge map.
One of the notorious examples in PS3 gen era that’s now can’t be purchased at all. It’s a derpy offroad racing game in what looks like a procedurally generated world emptier than ash deserts in Morrowind.
Games / game engines use units which correspond to size IRL. It’s needed to keep scale consistent. The characters are usually around 1.8m tall for instance
Yakuza maps have never been particularly huge. Even in the most recent game, the new map is maybe on the scale of GTA III or Vice City. Still, they manage to pack 15-20 minigames into each game’s word map, some of which involve driving or riding around the map, plus the inevitable scavenger hunts and hidden collectibles.
The key is the “density”, activities and (player) engagements. I find it funny RGG is probably one of developers that can get away reusing assets so much that even can be traced back to ps2 assets on their newer games.
Too big of a map ultimately becomes a deal breaker for me because it will inevitably have too much empty space and get too boring and time consuming to play through.
Smaller more refined maps are better than larger maps where the team can’t sufficiently justify every single corner and make sure every inch truly is fully designed and makes sense.
I would absolutely love it if games started going back to the original Borderlands 1 style maps/areas. The type of maps that were more small-medium sized area that were completely self-contained sections of a larger world.
I realized this idea long, long ago, when Rare made Banjo-Tooie.
Banjo-Kazooie was a fun game. You unlock worlds, go to the world, collect 100% of all there is to collect, then continue.
Banjo-Tooie, its sequel, wanted to be bigger and better in every way. Sprawling open world hub, much larger worlds with more sub-zones, interconnectivity between worlds, more things to unlock, more things to do, etc. etc.
And I think, despite having so much more, it was a worse game for it. You go to a new world but find there’s a lot you can’t do yet because you didn’t unlock an ability that comes later on. You push a button in one world and then something happens in another, but now you have to backtrack through the sprawling overworld and large world maps to get there.
And this was just a pair of games made for the Nintendo 64, before the concept of “open world” had really even taken off.
But it demonstrated to me that bigger was not always better, and having more to do did not make it a better game if it wasn’t as enjoyable.
Early open world games were fairly small, and the natural desire for people who have seen everything becomes “I wish there was more,” but in practice it ends up typically being that they take the same amount of stuff and divide it up over a larger area, or they fill the world with tedium just for the sake of having something to do.
When looking at the collectibles and activities on a world map like Genshin Impact, it’s basically sensory overload with how much there is to do.
But almost all of that is garbage. And this is just a fraction of one region among several. Go here, do this time trial, shoot these balloons, follow this spirit, solve this logic puzzle, and then loot your pittance of gatcha currency so you can try to win your next waifu or husbando before time runs out.
And don’t forget to do your dailies!
If a game has a large world, it needs to act in service to its design. It needs to be fun to exist in and travel through, not tedious. It needs to have enough stuff to do that keep it from feeling empty, but not so much stuff that it makes it hard to find anything worthwhile. And it needs to give enough ability for the player to make their own fun, to act as the balance on that tightrope walk between not-enough and too-much.
Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the most recent games that seemed to properly scratch an open world itch for me. While they weren’t perfect, the way they managed to really incorporate the open world as its own sort of puzzle to solve, in ways that Genshin Impact failed to properly emulate, made them more enjoyable as an open world than most other games in that genre I’ve played in recent memory.
I’d rejoice, but I’ll believe it when I see it happening consistently. I want smaller, denser, and richer worlds. Not giant, sprawling, and barren. It doesn’t add anything to a game for me if I have to walk or drive 10 minutes to get to my next location and it’s just empty in between.
Infinite Wealth was deffo a bigger map and set thereof then its predecessors (Like a Dragon was also substantially larger, as was Lost Judgment in comparison to its predecessor), but it did absolute numbers, so I dunno about that.
I think it comes down more to if it feels appropriately sized and filled. Prior Yakuzas were bursting at the seems with shit to do everywhere in their smaller maps. Breath of the Wild had new and interesting shit going on everywhere too.
I’ve gotta disagree on BotW. I love Zelda games and the mechanics of that game were an amazing shift in the franchise. But that open world was so boring. The same like 4-5 enemies, even the harder variants didn’t have different movesets. TotK was even worse with the depths and a majority of sky islands being empty and devoid of content.
But the e gameplay is so fun it’s a lot easier to forgive them than say AC Odyssey.
I’ve been saying this since it released. Cool mechanics, but boring world and gameplay. I’m still a bit salty about the loss of real dungeons, nothing in BOTW or TOTK feel as memorable as the previous games.
I would say that map size never was “most important”, at least not to the players, they’ve been complaining about huge but empty maps for years (the poster child of this, AC Odyssey was released in 2018, six years ago). It was just something devs and publishers pushed to one up each other in some kind of “bigger = better” way.
I’m so sick of action rpgs including crafting or an endless list of slightly different weapons. Give me a small mix of situational weapons at most and let the gameplay be how difficulty works.
It’d be nice if JRPGs would go back to the old school overworld design like in Star Ocean 2. It’s a good compromise between sense of scale and interactivity with the world.
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