My Thoughts After 30 Hours in an Open-World Game
I binged a recently released open-world game over the weekend, and the first 10 hours are genuinely fun. There's real joy in opening up the map.
But once you get past the midpoint, the quests all start to feel the same, and eventually the travel time turns into work. So in the late game, I just rushed through the main story, watched the ending, and dropped it.
The graphics and combat were satisfying, but these days open-world games competing on sheer content volume are a bit exhausting. I miss short, high-density games.
6 answers
True, the first 10 hours are everything that game has to offer lol. After that, it’s just repetitive grinding.
The moment moving around turns into work, it just shuts off.
Well, isn't that more of a genre trait than the game's fault? Expecting something short and densely packed in an open world seems a bit contradictory. Of course, I'll admit the travel grind is real—seriously, just increase the mount speed already.
I disagree. I’m the type who plays open-world games for the joy of scouring every corner of the map and clearing every side quest, and there are plenty of games I’ve sunk 100+ hours into. The problem is that these days side quests are all uniformly reduced to raiding warehouses and picking herbs. In the past, even if there were fewer of them, each one had a satisfying feel; now they feel auto-generated, so I get burned out too. I agree that it’s a matter of density, not content volume.
Once you're past 40 hours, it's better for your mental health to ditch side quests without hesitation and focus only on the main story. FYI, I turned off quest markers and the minimap, and my immersion really came back to life. It's inconvenient at first, but getting lost is also fun early on.
I felt the same way. I think density matters more than map size.