Ever play a game that you feel is swallowing your life, but you’re getting very little out of it in the process?
Open world games are particularly guilty of this, and there are some that just drag on and on without any respect for the player’s time.
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This doesn’t mean the game is bad either, but rather one that has tons of aimless tasks that pile up, and eventually it feels like a chore more than a game.
Here are a handful of games that do not respect the player’s time.
Some of these entries are considered semi-open world at first, but they open up as the game progresses.
10God of War: Ragnarök
Ironwood Broke Me
God of War Ragnarok
I’m in the camp thatGod of War: Ragnarokis far inferior to the first game in the sequel series and part of that is due to the time-wasting gameplay it has.
The most guilty offender of this is the Ironwood segment. It is 2 hours of riding around on a boar while Angraboda screams this horrific howl that has echoed through my nightmares ever since.
It goes on forever and while it’s visually incredible, the gameplay is so boring that I nearly stopped playing. It culminates with a fight against a giant grandmother and I felt like I was playing a different game at that point and not a particularly good or fun one.
It’s such an insane roadblock in the middle of a well-paced game that I feel like the QA team must have been bribed to not say anything about it.
Atreus, in general, is forced upon the player for no less than 10 hours in this game and, between that and reused areas and enemies from the previous game, there is just a bloated feeling to the game that lost me along the way.
Also, we come to God of War for Kratos, not boy. Boy sucks.
Can I Interest You In Crafting Materials?
Fextralife Wiki
Avowedis a solid enough RPG with some fun combat and a decent main plot to keep stringing you along, but this game is obsessed with wasting your time with some of the most unrewarding exploration I’ve ever seen.
It’s not that the exploration is bad, because it’s actually pretty great. There are tons of secret caves to find, buildings to explore and chests to discover.
The biggest issue is the rewards that await you. Crafting materials. And more crafting materials. Every once in a while, you might find somenew armor or a cool weapon, but around 80 percent of the time, you’re going to find secret, hard to get to chests, full of nothing but crafting materials.
Imagine Christmas morning and your present is a gift card. That’s pretty much the effect you get here.
Those materials might lead to something cool, but the instant gratification of finding something new is completely absent and makes the exploration feel pointless after you see what lies in most of these hard-to-reach areas.
8Final Fantasy 16
Saving All of Humanity One Fetch Quest at Time
Final Fantasy 16
Final Fantasy 16brought the series back to prominence with a very good outing in 2023, but part of the reason it never reached all-time classic status is because of the horrific side content.
There is an absolute ton to do when it comes to side content in Final Fantasy 16 and with a world as grand and intriguing as the one it sets up, that should mean tons of creative missions, right?
Wrong. Instead, there is a gamut of some of the most uninspired fetch quests I’ve ever seen. There is one quest where you literally go collect dirt in a field and another where it teases you that you’re gathering parts for an airship, only to reveal it’s for a toy airship.
It is appalling and feels like the MMO-based team behind the game forgot to put effort into these optional activities.
Now, there are a few in the back half of the game that are actually great, but it takes 50 hours to get them to unlock and by that time, you just want to finish the game.
The phrase “go through hell just to get to heaven” was definitely written about the side quests in this game, because they are some of the biggest time wasters out there.
7The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
The Legend of Wasting Your Time
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Yes, yes, the greatest game ever made and all that, fine. I don’t agree, but I can see plenty of the merits thatThe Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wildprovides players, but ultimately, I found this game had very little respect for my time.
The reason? The weapon breaking. It is absurd. No matter what hell you go through to get a cool new weapon, it will break, and it will likely break at a moment that you really need it not to break.
This makes it so that you’re consistently trying out new weapons, but a lot of those weapons are garbage, and you’ll find yourself hoarding ungodly amounts of them just to have a contingency plan for when your favorite weapons break.
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Then there is the open world, which, while amazing to look at, is ocean wide but puddle deep. There is very little reason for it other than to give you long stretches where you’re doing nothing but just running around or climbing.
Much of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is there to have you go “wow”, but I don’t come to games for that. I come for fun and fulfilling gameplay and, a lot of the time, I don’t think Breath of the Wild provides that.
6Metal Gear Solid V
Half-Finished Masterpiece
Metal Gear Solid 5 The Phantom Pain
Metal Gear Solid Vhassome fantastic moments, but the problem is that the game is completely unfinished and that aspect is what stops it from being an all-time classic.
This fact comes into play late in the game, where you seem to be steam rolling towards a thrilling conclusion. You might expect that you’re going to get an epic set of ending missions, but instead, you’re literally forced to replay missions you’ve already gone through if you want to see the game’s final ending.
Not even an asset swap, but the actual missions must be replayed. It’s honestly a disgrace to game design and pretty much admits to the player that they didn’t finish this game.
It would be one thing if it were just a few missions to replay, but it’s much more than that and this time, they’re all of amplified difficulty and among the most frustrating missions in the game to start with.
It’s just a blatant disrespect to the player, but not all that shocking considering the company behind the controls here.
5Kingdom Come Deliverance 2
Realism Is Not Fun
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2isone of the best games of 2025, but there are times when the game focuses more on realism than worrying about whether the player is having fun.
While I love the game, there are moments that made me go “Why am I playing this?”.
For example, early on, you’re tasked with carrying gigantic sacks into a shed and, while carrying them, you move incredibly slowly, and you have to drop them in the exact spot asked for, otherwise you won’t be able to progress.
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If this was a one-off, it would be fine, but this exact situation plays out in different ways, multiple times throughout the lengthy adventure.
Then you’ve got very limited saving capabilities, weight limits, weapon degradation that you need to literally fix yourself, which generally takes 2–3 minutes each time, and you’ve got a ton of time wasters here.
Some people eat this type of stuff up, but when the adventure is such a thrill, getting bogged down trying to stay faithful to old Bohemian life just wasn’t a great use of my time, and it added little to the otherwise amazing gameplay.
4Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla
The Bloat Goat
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
Assassin’s Creed: Valhallawas supposed to be a return to form in many ways, but instead, it strayed even farther from the path. The biggest issue with this game is the bloat. Usually, that would refer to side content and busy work, but here, it’s the entire game.
Every single area has such an absurd list of uninteresting activities you must force yourself to do if you want to be able to defeat any enemies in the game, as everything is pretty much level gated.
The game is great for 30 hours, and then you realize you have another 50 to go. It’s violently uninteresting from a story perspective, with so many mini-stories that just crowd the experience and by the time you get to the end of the game, you’ll have forgotten half of the characters that appear to help you, because they likely do nothing but force you through hours of painful questing to get there.
Then you’ve got the Asgard story, which has you doing largely the same thing you did in the main game, just in a more interesting setting.
There is just too much, and so much of it is not great. The side quests in particular are so bad this time around and some of them last like 5 minutes and barely give you a reward. What is the point of side content that doesn’t give you anything cool?
The same goes for their spin on the Nemesis system here, where you can be hunted by powerful knights. The fights are fun, but again, no rewards worth mentioning.
3Days Gone
Open Without Purpose
I really likedDays Gone, but this game did not need to be an open world. It came out late in the PS4’s life cycle and touted these massive zombie hordes as the selling point, but access to said hordes doesn’t come until you’re well into the game.
Without those hordes to carry out the action, the open world itself has very little that is interesting to offer. There are your typical camps to clear out, hives of zombies to eliminate and your typical open world busywork, but nothing unique.
Days Gone wants you to be obsessed with riding around on your motorcycle, and while that can be fun for a time, you start to wonder why this game needed to be open world in the first place.
There are some cool locations to check out, but even those are just dying to waste your time, with the worst being the side missions that have you slowly following these mysterious lab workers in gameplay, reminiscent of the eavesdropping missions in Assassin’s Creed, and they were terrible in that franchise and just as awful here.
The gameplay makes up for a lot of shortcomings, but a lot of Days Gone is just you riding through barren wilderness hoping to find something interesting to do and, unfortunately, most of the time you won’t.
2Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth
World Ending Threat, But First, Minigames
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
Final Fantasy 7: Rebirthtook a step forward in some ways for the new remake series, but took a huge step backward in others. First off, while the open world is beautiful to look at, there is little to no reason for it to exist. It falls into the Ubisoft towers trope and outside of that, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything worth finding while exploring.
Gongaga is an area in particular that will cause nightmares for years to come, as the structure of that map is so convoluted and repetitive that you’ll have a hell of a time figuring out where you’re even supposed to go.
That’s not the most egregious time waster though; that prize goes to the minigames. Right as the story picks up following a certain cruise ship experience, you are assaulted with minigame after minigame for no less than 2 hours.
From Costa del Sol to the Golden Saucer, the game takes a nose dive in quality that has to be seen to be believed.
I’m supposed to be stopping Sephiroth, yet let me first compete in minigames to win…bathing suits. Yes, this is how I should be spending my time.
It doesn’t stop there either, because getting new summons requires a minigame, getting important materia requires a minigame, unlocking useful items requires catching Moogles and, oh my god, just shove Masamune through my chest already. I’m done.
1Starfield
AI Ruins Everything
Starfieldwas supposed to be revolutionary, and it was in some ways, but it also set a standard that should never be followed in the gaming industry ever again.
Starfield’s big selling point was an endless galaxy to explore with 100s of planets all with things to discover. Technically, that’s true. The problem is that all thesediscoverable thingsare procedurally generated, which means, after just a short period of time, you’re likely to see the exact same areas over and over again.
Suddenly, that 10-minute slog across a planet’s surface to the point of interest becomes one of the most disappointing parts of the game.
Once you’ve seen the Cryo Lab location, get ready to see that exact layout with those exact enemies and find those exact same chests multiple times throughout the game.
Eventually, it just feels like there is no point to explore anymore, because the game is literally wasting your time with the reused assets.
