Once an open world game runs out of mechanical or narrative steam, it can shift from being a pastime, a way to relax, into being work. After all, if you’re committing hundreds or thousands of hours to a game, it’s probably the only game you commit to like that. But games often treat that kind of player commitment as typical when it’s actually fairly rare.
Some people can happily play the same game for hundreds, even thousands of hours without getting bored. Of course, the point of switchover isn’t the same for everyone. Once an open world game runs out of mechanical or narrative steam, it can shift from being a pastime, a way to relax, into being work, a mental stressor. MGS 5's systemic complexity keeps you entertained after tens of hours. Meanwhile, the next huge open world game might already be sitting in your game library, tapping its foot and checking its watch, compounding that urge to finish a game despite no longer enjoying it so that you can keep up with whatever’s next. When you hit this point, an open-world game ceases to be entertaining and starts to become a chore, a looming obstacle that takes up mental space which you feel obliged to clear, but have no real motivation to. Much as I enjoyed Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, I’d had enough of clearing fortresses well before the end of the game. Otherwise, you end up with a situation where a game carries on long after the player has bled its play potential dry. At the 80+ hour point, an open-world game needs to have the questing design of the Witcher 3, or the toolkit and AI responsiveness of Metal Gear Solid V, to comfortably keep the player engaged. The larger an open world is, the harder it becomes to give it the foundations it needs to maintain the player’s interest across the duration. The ways players can interact with the world, and the ways the world can interact with itself, are just as important as the number of square kilometres an open world covers. Discovery in open world games doesn’t just happen at a visual and environmental level.
More important, however, the size of these games is aligned with the depth of their systems. Journey to the Savage Planet's environment design helps fill out its smaller world. While attending an all-you-can-eat buffet can be enjoyable from time to time, constantly binging on them simply isn’t healthy. But it is possible to have too much of a good thing. It may seem churlish to complain about games that offer such an abundance of playtime. Over the last few years, such feasts have become almost monthly occurrences, whether it’s Borderlands 3, or Red Dead Redemption 2, or whatever gargantuan virtual space is next on the list. I’ve picked on Odyssey because its size is somewhat notorious, but it’s hardly the only stuffed platter in gaming’s relentless open-world banquet. If I’d eaten slightly less, I’d probably be able to appreciate it more. It’s like after you’ve eaten a massive Christmas dinner and all you can think about is how uncomfortable you feel because you consumed your own leg’s worth in turkey and potatoes. My brain has overridden the quality of Odyssey in favour of the quantity of it, and I can’t help wondering how much difference it would have made to my experience had Odyssey been sixty hours long.
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