Where Horizon ZD fails

[Goodnightmoon]

pokoko said:

BraLoD said:

Horizon doesn't have invisible walls inside, it has story based events, you can go everywhere while playing the game, you'll get to walls when going on the edges of the world. The bold and the first part are the same, it's not better design, it's different design.
Horizon doesn't exist in a rectangle as you said Zelda does, and Horizon has a much greater focus on the story, while still proving an open world to be explored when you want to.

Zelda is not better designed than Horizon because of that, maybe it is better designed, but not because of that.

This is what makes me scratch my head.  Looking in from the outside, it seems obvious to me that the two games had different design objectives.  Unless I'm mistaken, Horizon seems to have a more linear, story-based progression system.  It's perfectly fine to prefer one or the other but it feels silly to attempt to prove that one is "better".

Games don't have to use the exact same design.

One of my favorite franchises of last generation, Borderlands, used a semi-open approach and it worked very well.  I have no interest in trying to prove it was or was not a better approach to building a game world.  All I care about is that both games were enjoyable.  

Well, when you are making an open world you are trying to give freedom to the player, making a linear open world doesn't really sound like great game design, which doesn't mean the game is automatically worse, but seems to be approaching the open world concept in a less interesting way than it could.