I had started writing a full on article on why I do not like open world type games. For me it has nothing to do with how empty the world can seem, I never found that to be a problem. For me open world games lack a sense of urgency, like what I do will actually matter in some capacity. When I can spend many many hours sidetracking the main objective sort of falls apart and becomes just another maybe.

My favorite design is a linear progression with freedom to do things other than the main quest. The Zelda games before Breath of the Wild are good examples. Often large world to explore but a pretty clear main path and order.
A game like Resident Evil 4 or Uncharted is extremely linear to the point of many times feeling like going through a corridor and that is probably my only real hang up with games like that. I can feel so cheap having a small piece of furniture blocking the path.

To me open world games are side quest sandboxes. Fun to play around in for a while but soon turns boring for me.

That is problem of most developers not making them living, breathing worlds that have "fronts" (factions/BBEG/natural disaster...) that will develop whether player character(s) act or not (depending on amount of influence that PC(s) assert in that world), but instead are making them more of a sandbox theme-parks for "hero" to play in.

First of all, it's great to see you more active on the forum

Second of all, I really appreciate the thoughtful post!

Third of all, I don't really agree

For me, Breath of the Wild is the best open-world game ever made, yet it has a very uneven balance between "overworld" and "underworld". The overworld is phenomenal and the underworld is relatively underdeveloped. But I think that barely makes a dent on the overall excellence of the game, because it excels in so many other ways: tactical, improvisational combat; a wistful, poignant story; quirky, lovable characters; expressive art direction; immersive sound design; realistic and predictable chemical, physical, and mechanical systems that encourage and reward creative problem-solving and outside-the-box thinking; the feeling of joy and accomplishment when discovering something new; the sense of solitude and wildness; and a deep commitment to player agency and emergent gameplay.

In other words, I don't think the recipe for success is as simple as good overworld + good underworld. Other things make a major impact: moment-to-moment gameplay; controls; art direction; narrative; puzzle design; atmosphere; interactivity; etc.

I like this topic

But, my tastes are a little different. As I tend not to enjoy underworld content at all in anything other than small doses.

I like Witcher 3, Xenoblade Chronicles X, and Breath of the Wild. One thing I enjoy about these games over other types is that I mostly have control over the pacing of the games - there are tasks that take a couple minutes, some that take longer, and you can string together a bunch of stuff to play for several hours.

One thing I like about these games is they aren’t very dungeon-crawler-like. Dungeon-crawling bores the crap out of me. In Witcher 3, if there’s one thing I could do without, it’s Elven ruins - there aren’t many of them, and only like 3 or 4 of them are actually longer than a few minutes and are often split by a dozen or dozens of hours, but those are the parts of the game I generally don’t enjoy - although, they’re less painful on subsequent playthroughs. In Breath of the Wild, I like the Shrines, but heavily dislike the Divine Beast Temples - luckily again, there’s only 4 of them, and find they’re not as unenjoyable as the majority of temples in other 3D Zelda games.

Elements I like:

Exploration: What makes a great open world game for me is the amount of interesting things to discover. Exploring new regions, finding locations I want to take snapshots of. Feeling that freedom that everywhere I go there might be something amazing. Sometimes you see it in the distance, and think “I gotta get there”. There’s some of this in Witcher 3, seeing the lights of Novigrad in the distance - much more of it when you get to Toussaint and see the various landmarks throughout the world. But even in 2D games where you can’t necessarily see everything from a distance, exploration is a lot of fun. By the way, looking for a specific objective, IMO, breaks the feeling of exploration. So, in Witcher 3, I find it’s more fun to keep the world map off most of the time - but the game was built around using it to get through objectives quickly without having to do that Ocarina of Time style “find the key!” stuff. When you want to explore, turn off the mini-map and go exploring! :D

Extermination and emergent storytelling: finding big enemies and killing them. Having hunts to go on and completing them. More or less using these elements to build your personal story. Sometimes these will be objective based, particularly in RPGs, other times they aren’t. You find your enemies, and knock them out, change the landscape of the world, and continue your story.

Expansion: the ability is there, expansion of my presence and stakes in the world, which could be a household in Witcher or Breath of the Wild, business ventures, probes, and bases in Xenoblade, or building your Kingdom or Empire in Romancing Saga 2.

Exploitation: this is a big part of the next few bits, including sandbox elements and resource gathering, but these tap into other elements that I like in games. At its simplest, it’s finding resources to gather for crafting and other necessities - this is a big part of Breath of the Wild and Xenoblade Chronicles X, and Witcher 3 - although, the latter two often contextual uses this with quests and other more concrete objectives, or by showing the user slots in the UI for them to fill (this was pioneered with FF8’s junction system) - Breath of the Wild is looser and players can generally figure out their own way to advance in the world with a bit of the UI contextualized goals.

Resource based Stakes: Metroid 1 is an example of an early open world game I enjoyed considerably, it’s a 2D open world - and while it’s underground, it doesn’t feel dungeon-crawlerish because the primary drive is exploration - which is different from later Metroid games where it’s find the key > find the key > find the key structure and exploration takes a back seat to the linear objective based gameplay - which is why I don’t like later Metroid games at all. But in Metroid 1, there are very few things you can’t access immediately, the majority you can do after the initial soft-tutorial section (by soft tutorial, I mean like the Plateau in Breath of the Wild, or White Orchard in Witcher 3 where it’s not a tutorial, but you learn to play the game). Metroid 1 is rarer in that the stakes rise as the player advances through the game. How? If you fuck up early in the game, it’s a few minutes to refill your power tank and missiles - but later in the game it can take half an hour or more to grind back the power and resources you lost - so knowing about exploitation spots to gather resources more quickly is a plus. Legend of Zelda has a similar thing, and even Legend of Zelda 2 where, if you get game over, you keep your levels but reset on experience to the end of the last level (something that grows with each level you get in the game). IMO, this makes these games much more suspenseful than anything because of the fear of having to grind to recover your resources :D
Why this creates suspense? Because there are areas of the game you know damn-well you have to be careful; and if it’s been a while, or it’s your first time, these might not be known to you immediately - it keeps you second guessing as to whether or not you want to travel down that particular road, or take another one instead.

Another thing I enjoy are sandbox elements - obviously games like Minecraft do this very well. Sandbox games, for me: these are at their core, games like Dwarf Fortress which is kinda like The Sims, except incredibly expanded to the size of a world, with civilizations, species that thrive and can go extinct, history with ages, societies and religions, thousands of characters, etc… SimCity is the earliest sandbox type game I recall, SimTower, and then in the 1990s sandbox elements became ore eland in strategy games, they’re a big part of grand strategy. So really, I like sandbox elements in open world: Breath of the Wild and Animal Crossing NH were very popular because of sandbox elements, Breath of the Wild shows how well sandbox and open world can mesh. Exploitation is typically a major part of sandbox games.

Anyway, open world games I didn’t enjoy:
Skyrim
And the reason was the game felt too desolate and dungeon-crawlerish - it wasn’t something I could get into, and I was looking forward to it because I was under the impression there were big sandbox elements in this game, but I didn’t find anything particularly enjoyable before I gave up.
If Celda is considered open world, I didn’t enjoy that one either for similar reasons.
But really, I didn’t particularly enjoy any 3D Zelda until Breath of the Wild and Wind Waker was still baked into that older 3D style Zelda that I found bland/unadventurous. A lot of space to travel, and very little that interesting to see - unlike Breath of the Wild that seemingly had interesting things over every hill. While 3D Zelda had its fan, Zelda was a franchise I didn’t feel translated into 3D in a way that catered toward my particular tastes until the open world games.

I promise, it was totally me hahaha there was a simple misunderstanding at the beginning, but after it was cleared up, I'm the one that made it hostile, not you. Your response was totally chill and reasonable!

I see what you mean. I think a time mechanic or something would solve something like that, but would be really unpleasent for a lot of people.

It wouldn't be unpleasent for me though lol. I don't need an open world game to be free, personally. I just want it to have a good "flow." I'm happy to have a linear, urgent story in an open world game, as long as it has a more free post game afterwards where I can explore the world as a sandbox after.

Glad to be back! Thank you!

My thing is that it's not that the underworld is underdeveloped (to be clear, I think just the dungeons that are a problem - I think the houses and stuff are amazing in botw), but that I really don't enjoy most the underworld at all. Every time I had to enter a shrine, it was a negative experience for me, and you spend a lot of time in them. My point being that the botw seems amazing in spite of its bad underworld, and feels like it would have been better with a better one.

I actually don't agree at all that the underworld is underdeveloped. There are like 150 shrines, and many of them have (albeit simple) puzzles in them. My issue with them is that they aren't good, and they replaced something that was much better.

And yet, I think a botw with no shrines or guardians would have been worse, because as amazing as the overworld is, it can never be good enough to carry the game on its own. I don't think botw sucks, but I think it's seriously brought down by its dungeon quality. Totk does a lot to address this, but imo I think all of the shrines should have been axed and replaced with something else. A few more large dungeons, and a few medium-sized dungeons of much higher quality than the shrines.

I can think several classic games that strike a good balance between overworld and underworld.  However, there is only one fairly modern game that I can think of (and I've played) that strikes a good balance: Elden Ring.  Elden Ring really hits it out of the park though.  The game is huge.  There is a literal underworld that is also huge.  And then it has tons of dungeon areas of various sizes.  I don't think they focused on the overworld at the expense of dungeons or vice versa.  It's got a lot of that classic RPG vibe, while definitely being a modern AAA RPG.

I think it depends on your personality. Personally, i'd love to go walking in a place like Tokyo, NYC or San Francisco, just to explore and do my own thing. I love walking in the woods by myself and seeing nature up close. Open worlds are just about exploration which is just something that we have within us as people.

There's an open-world racing game that i might get later this year, that would be sweet. I also hope that if MGS 6 is made, that it will be an open world game. GTA is just as nice.