It’s not hard to remember the fuss caused bythis tweetby Techland, the developers ofDying Light 2. They announced, with great fanfare, that to “fully complete” the game would take players 500 hours. To put that into perspective, even a game as dense and massive asBreath of The Wildclocks in at less than half that time, with an estimated 189 hours for full completion.
So Dying Light 2 is a big game. Fair enough, but the tweet raised a lot of questions. Would this be 500 hours of bespoke, beautifully handcrafted, zombie-flavored thrills and spills, or a 20-hour campaign with a few hundred hours of busy work to polish off once you’d watched the credits roll? In actuality, it was something like the latter. Looking at the stats on HowLongToBeat.com, most players were done with the game after about 50 hours, with hardcore completionists spending maybe twice that hoovering up all the side content—a far cry from the initial boast of 500 hours.
Read More:Starfield Could Learn A Lot From Fallout: New Vegas' Wild Wasteland
This is all of secondary importance, however. What really worries me is that Techland clearly thought that throwing around big numbers and boasting about its game’s size (with no context to back it up) would blow our minds. We would be so impressed by the sheer scale of this game that we wouldn’t ask awkward questions like “What are we supposed to do for hundreds of hours?” and “Is this game actually any good?”. I say this worries me because it suggests that developers (or more likely publishers) think this is what we want. We just want games to get bigger and shinier, even if that means sacrificing quality, because let’s be honest, Dying Light 2 was nothing special. It was perfectly serviceable, but think how much better it could have been if all the effort that went into making it big had gone into making it good instead.
Gratifyingly, the tweet was met with a great deal of skepticism. Most people didn’t want a 500-hour-long game, and Techland had to make a statement clarifying exactly what it meant by “full completion”. Unfortunately, not everyone seems to have learned their lesson, and recently, GSC World, the developers ofS.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Heart of Chornobyl—a game I am very excited about,despite a number of hiccups on the road to release—have been making alarming noises.
They’ve been talking about how their game is going to have “one of the biggest open worlds in video games to date”, and that it will take “more than 100 hours of gameplay to explore its secrets”. Not quite as sizable a boast as Techland’s, but one I find just as concerning. I’m also a little wary of the fact they specifically mentioned that the new game is going to have one seamless open world, unlike the previous Stalkers, which had a handful of distinct zones to explore.
Why Are We So Critical Of Cyberpunk 2077’s Open World?
Night City might not be a flawlessly vivid environment, but which open worlds truly are?
I can’t help but feel that this is another case of priorities being in the wrong place. The lack of a gigantic open world in the old games never bothered me, and neither did the fact that they could be finished in about 40 hours, give or take. I don’t want Stalker 2 to be just its predecessors, only bloated to the point of absurdity. I don’t want yet another game with an enormous world that adds a commute at best, and hours upon hours of busy work at worst.
There must be people out there who genuinely get excited about the size of a game (otherwise why would developers keep banging on about it?), but I am not one of them, and GSC World telling me Stalker 2 is going to be one of the biggest games ever leaves me cold. All I can think about is what has to go on the chopping block in order to realize that ambition. There was a tremendous amount of depth to the original Stalker games, and I would hate to see that sacrificed in the name of hype because really that’s all this is about.
This might be something of a hot take, but I think most people like the idea of an open world a lot more than they like actually playing in one. Speaking for myself, I almost always end up using the fast travel system for every journey as soon as it’s made available. It’s a sad truth that most games don’t understand that there is more to exploration than just covering a large space and that traversing a mostly empty wilderness really isn’t that interesting. So many games fall into the same trap, and I’m sick of it. There are exceptions of course. Games like Death Stranding (despite one or two missteps) understand that if you make traversal a core mechanic, and make it interesting enough, you can justify the scale of your game’s world.
Banning Russian Gamers From Mortal Kombat 1 Punishes The Wrong People
More companies should make a stand against war but Mortal Kombat 1 punishes the wrong people for the crimes of others.
Stalker 2 isn’t about traversal, and while elements of the game do lend themselves to a more open-ended approach (the roaming monsters and bandits, the exploration, etc.) I don’t see how the biggest open world of all time is necessary for this kind of game. The old games pulled off all the horror, action, and tension that makes the Stalker series great with what are presumably much smaller spaces to play with.
Maybe I’m wrong about all this, and Stalker 2 will make full use of every inch of its allegedly gigantic open world, but I’ve been burned before. Hopefully, the developers can keep what’s important in sight and deliver a quintessentially Stalker experience for us to enjoy. This game has been a long time coming, and I really want it to succeed, despite all my doom-mongering.
Next:Epic Games Store’s “Steam Competitor” Ambitions Are As Good As Dead
