The past generation has given us some amazing games in this genre (infamous 1&2, assasin's creed 2, saint's row 1&2 are some of my top games this gen). But unfortunately it has also started another trend which makes me worried. Replacing meaningful central story line content with mindless side missions.
Assasin's Creed Brotherhood and Revelations were VERY guilty of this (the maps was so cluttered from all the races and other side missions), Mercenaries 2 Saint's Row 3 and Red Faction Guerilla and Just Cause 2 had the basis for an amazing open world action game, but the developers just didn't do anything meaningful with them. They just spread the map with side missions, and then pieced some of them together to make a weak central storyline.
It makes the game feel weak, it becomes boring after a while and it doesn't make me want to continue playing. It also doesn't help that in their effort to woo you into the game right at the start (to seem amazing at the demo maybe?) they give you all the best toys at the start, which makes the feeling of escalation of power (and enjoyment) feel hollow.
If the storyline is weak, if I already have so many amazing stories, if I can explore the entire map right away, why should I waste time playing the central game? I'll just do the sandbox stuff.
But the side missions are always weak. I think developers have confused quantity with quality. Saying your game has 15 different types of side missions and about 300 of them in total, does not mean that makes your game amazing. It makes it bland and boring.
What made GTA, and those other games I mentioned good, other than the engaging storyline and the good pacing in giving you more areas and "toys", is that the side stuff was less but more well developed.
Case study: GTA San Andreas and the Assasin Creed games. They both had racing side missions (let's just for a minute not focus on the fact that one is on foot and the other is on wheels. infamous had on foot races that were amazing too, but were far too few and well....I don't know how many people here have played that game).
SA's racing missions are few, they are well designed ,the "tracks" are interesting, the checkpoints are put in places where it makes sense, the races are fun and if you fail you don't feel cheated, you feel like you have to do better.
In the Assasin Creed games, they have many more races but they are so badly made. There aren't any special places to climb/jump too to get to the checkpoints faster like in infamous. Instead you have an approach that feels like they first made the city, and then added the races in random places and put the checkpoints wherever. Many times I would get lost during a race because I was following the course the game was "pushing me" to, cause I thought that at the end of the roof there would be somewhere else to jump too, cause it makes "sense". But it doesn't, cause the buildings weren't designed to serve the purpose of the race side missions.
So we end up with weaker bloated games that personally disappoint me. I wish developers would focus more on the main storyline missions, and only make side missions if they feel they will be fun. Then invest more in making those side missions good, and make sure the world is designed around them, not them designed around the world.
So does anyone else feel like this? Any good action sandbox games I should try that are more to my liking? (meaty story, quality side missions, and of course big interesting world to explore
)
, so I will try them out one day.
. I actually downloaded the demo for Sleeping Dogs on the PC, but the thing runs like shit (horrible optimization, but then again it's a SquareEnix published game, so what did I expect). I will try the demo on my PS3 too, when it is available to me again, to see if it's as good as they say.
