I will now complain about things that have come to annoy me in open-world RPG games. Most of the things I will now list annoy me because they are replicated in every open-world genre hybrid, almost unchanged. You may feel free to agree or not in the comments below.
1. The maps are covered in too many fkn icons
The problem with the open world genre is, in order to make it feel like a world that is open, the sprawling in-game map must be filled with a million in-game activities. This must happen because, if it doesn’t, the world feels devoid of life or things to do.
The problem is that you’re also loading me up with too many things I don’t want to do! I’m trying to find my way to the next thing I do want to do and trying to pick through all the map icons to drop a waypoint. Thankfully, a lot of open world games include map filters to help cut down on the number of icons, but even that is a symptom of the problem. There are too many! And you know there’s too many because you’re smart enough to know a filter is required to keep them from being a headache to parse.
Credit where it’s due: Assassin’s Creed Mirage cuts the size of its game world and the total number of activities way back and is a better game for it. More of this please.
2. Crafting is only there because everyone else is doing it, not because it’s interesting or useful
I will die on this hill. When was the last time you used a crafting mechanic that felt properly alchemical? That felt like you were going to make something surprising or unique? You might be able to answer that honestly, but I bet you had to think about it for a minute. Therein lies the problem. If we’re all going to have to endure endless crafting systems and resource collection, at least make those systems interesting or surprising to use. I miss games like Dead Rising that used crafting as a vehicle for constructing unexpected doohickeys with whatever was lying around. Bring that back. I miss it.
Most open world games won’t do that though because that requires the kind of time and resources most AAA teams just aren’t afforded anymore.
3. Pale imitations of the Destiny 2 Big Number Go Up school of RPG design
Destiny 2‘s RPG and loot systems, and even the character screen UI that drives them, have been stolen by almost every major open-world action adventure RPG genre multihyphenate going. You know the screen I’m talking about. Your character appears, usually in the centre, surrounded by a series of squares that relate to various loot styles — chest pieces, helmets, weapons, amulets, boots — and you can shuffle through the loot you have equipped and those you have on hand. If the number on a piece you’ve found is bigger than the one you have equipped, put it on. Where Bungie put a lot of time into Destiny 2‘s byzantine, multilayered RPG system (some might argue too much), its imitators don’t even try to exhibit the same depth. Why are you going to all the trouble of creating these huge loot pools if so little of it matters? Shouldn’t the point of a loot system be that it matters to your character and how they play?
Don’t even get me started on the skill trees.
This methodology is less prevalent in Eastern RPGs and much more prevalent in Western ones — Ubisoft is a noted fan of this approach, deploying it over and over.
Is there an answer to this? I think we either need to lean into Diablo 2‘s levels of hyper-granularity in character creation to make me care and pay attention, or we need to go right back to the Chrono Trigger era of Your Character Levelled Up And Now They Are Simply Stronger.
4. Everyone talks too fkn much
Video games are currently in a moment where every AAA title feels like they have too much interstitial chatter. This felt like it reached a pinnacle with 2023’s most forgettable open-world RPG, Forspoken, a game with so much extant chatter that the developers implemented a slider to suppress or enhance the amount of it. At its worst, it feels like major games understand that open-world games require long periods of travel to get around the world but are paradoxically afraid of players hearing even a moment of silence.
There are several titles I consider the best to ever tackle this problem of interstitial dialogue. The first is genre progenitor Grand Theft Auto, which has traditionally used travel sequences as a vehicle to deliver a short, story-related conversation between characters en route. The second is The Legend of Zelda, which has historically revelled in silent travel outside of specific NPC encounters. In Breath of the Wild, the silence was actually the point, enhancing the feeling of isolation. The third are Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, which lean into silence in a similar way to make you feel alone in a big world.
In fact, Fallout is a good, recent example since everyone’s been jumping back in. If your open-world RPG is doing things right, the players won’t need constant chatter to propel them forward. I spent several hours running around in Fallout 76 the other night, and I kept getting distracted by random buildings and points of interest on the map. The time spent travelling in silence is useful for thinking about your next moves — where you’re going, what you’re planning to do when you arrive, and what you want to do next. I don’t need a jabbering bracelet to keep me on the golden path or tell bad jokes for the banter.
5. Everyone’s got branching dialogue, but most of it is window-dressing
One of the greatest gifts the Mass Effect series gave the RPG genre was its branching dialogue trees. Conversations were critically important in those games, and they were one of your primary ways of interacting with the world. The things you said mattered and could come back to bite you one or two games down the line because there was a system in place to track it all.
The result is that everyone felt they needed branching dialogue in their RPGs too, and now it’s become a bare minimum addition to any RPG. The problem? No one is prepared to implement it with the depth or sophistication that Bioware did back then. Now, you can choose from a few different responses, but most of the time, they all lead to the same conversational conclusion. Fewer still ever come back to bite you later or have an impact on the world around you.
Again, addressing this is a matter of resourcing. No one has the time, space, or resources to make RPGs with these kinds of systems anymore. RPGs where you can speak to numerous NPCs and have it mean nothing are no longer RPGs at all, and I think that’s a terrific shame.
Anywhere, there you go. These are my open world RPG gripes. Please understand.
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