Spider-Man and AC: Odyssey - A tale of two open worlds.

[CriticalGaming]

I wanna take a few minutes to talk about open world games. As you all know, open world games are fucking everywhere, publisher are always eager to talk about how big their open worlds are. Ubisoft has been shitting out open worlds for a decade now frantically packing each one full of so much shit the maps are borderline unreadable. It became a meme after a while, and to Ubisoft's credit they have taken a step back and reworked how they made their open worlds work....sort of.

AC: Odyssey is massive. The map is huge and there is literally an endless supply of shit to do as the game constantly generates quests and bandits to kill should you want to go that route. I've spent about 12 hours with AC:Ody and while I have been having a blast taking out army bases, bandit camps, hunting legendary beasts, it didn't take me long to see basically everything the game was gonna throw at me. Ubisoft strikes again with a map filled with shit to do, until you realize it's basically the same 5 or 6 variants over and over again.

There are even the Ubiconic towers to climb on top of and "unlock" parts of the map. It's the same thing we've seen from Ubisoft over and over again. They make the same fucking game with a different flavor on a loop at this point.

Luckily for Ubisoft, that happens to be a fairly fun game so the different flavors actually help.


Now let's take a look at another developer Insomniac, who's Spider-Man opwn world game is getting almost universal love.

As Spider-Man you traverse an open-world version of New York, fighting random crimes, taking out enemy bases, unlocked radio towers, Challenges, etc etc....wait a second? Is this a Ubisoft game?

Well no it isn't, but the game does a lot of things almost exactly like a Ubisoft game. So why is it so loved?

I believe the difference is in TWO very key things.

Number 1 Size: The map of New York is much smaller than any of the massive open shit storms of Ubisoft's worlds. This allows even the collecting parts of the game to feel less daunting because each piece is so close to the next. I was able to collect all 53 backpack tokens in about 45 minutes, which means I was getting a collectable every 50 seconds.

Number 2 Web-swinging: Getting around the map is fucking awesome. There is nothing quite like swinging around the city, no matter where you are going. If there is a mission all the way across the city, you webswing happily over there because it is fucking awesome. In a Ubisoft game you instantly are check the map for the closest fast travel point because getting around their open world is simply a slog most of the time.

Another thing I think Spider-Man did that was really really smart, was to unlock the open world activities piece by piece. Unless you focus on the main story and progress massively through Spider-man, you'll never feel overwhelmed by all the shit to do. When I played I completed every collection, or every set of activities as they unlocked. So I never feel like I was grinding through a bunch of pointless or boring shit.

For the most part this meant that every time an activity opened up, I only have to do between 6-15 things around the map and then I was done. The only exception to this is the different crime types, which is grindy no matter when you do it.

What do you guys think?

 

[Casual Shinji]

I think Spider-Man has its length in its favor, which is short. The game doesn't drag itself out with fucktons of shit, and can actually be completed (side content and all) in 20 hours. Because quite honestly, the open-world of Spider-Man isn't that interesting. It's just the same New York we've seen dozens of times already, and very little about it is interesting to interact with or look at. I can't say traveling through the city filled me with any other thought than having to hold and release R2 and X till I got to the next mission, with the occasional marveling at the sunset lighting.


Games like The Witcher 3, Breath of the Wild, and Horizon: Zero Dawn completely blow Spider-Man's open-world out of the water. I know that puts Spider-Man in a difficult position, because it needs to take place in New York, thereby making it a more boring setting than the previous three games I mentioned by default. But this doesn't change the fact that you can't really do anything interesting in this city other than webswinging, which loses its luster quick enough since the skill ceiling is so low. I've heard comparisons to Tony Hawk, but the only tricks you can do are an air flip, an air tumble, and an air twist. That's it. If you actually could skim and slide across the sides and tops of buildings, and use your webs to screw around with things it might add so fun to the open-world. Infamous 2 did a better job in this regard.


I still like Spider-Man, but its open-world is pretty lackluster.

 

[Something Amyss]

I petered out (see what I did there) on Spider-Man in the third act, in part because they added even more bases for me to take and grindy legwork to do for suits.

Odyssey, on the other hand, started as a grind and asked me to buy pizza rolls to solve it. So I'm torn on which is the worse experience. At least I got several hours of fun out of Spider-Man.

 

[CriticalGaming]

I petered out (see what I did there) on Spider-Man in the third act, in part because they added even more bases for me to take and grindy legwork to do for suits.

Odyssey, on the other hand, started as a grind and asked me to buy pizza rolls to solve it. So I'm torn on which is the worse experience. At least I got several hours of fun out of Spider-Man.

I will shamefully admit that I had some credit with the ubisoft store and got the permenant exp booster so I've been having an ungrindy blast with the game so far. However I've heard that near end-game the grind is there no matter what booster you have. So I'll have to see what happens later.

Odyssey is a weird game for me, because it isn't an RPG as much as the dialog trees and leveling up seem to suggest. It's a pure action game and the dialog choices are meaningless and server only to add more time to pointless conversations (AKA add flavor and exposition to the game). However, it really really feels like Ubisoft tried with this game, and as a result the game is fun for me. I'm having fun running around and taking out all the "?"'s on the map and sneak killing fucking everybody.

I understand that microtransactions suck, but I also understand that the developers often don't have a choice when putting them in a game. So I try to look at the game without the MT's on it, judging the experience as best as I can as if the MT's weren't there. Once I get that opinion I then look at the MT's and see what effect they are having on the experience as a whole.

That being said, I don't know how Odyssey feels without the exp booster, however at my current place in the game I am about 5 levels OVER the current content, as I've been exploring everything and doing as much as possible. I did read some consumer reviews that said they weren't having a problem with the game without the booster, and I'm kind of inclined to believe that players would have trouble if they tried to just blitz through the story content and quests without doing many of the extra stuff lying around.

I can't say how true the lack of grind is without the exp booster, but I would imagine that if you are the kind of player that wants to power through the main game and ignore the side stuff in an open game like this then you probably aren't the right type of player for the game anyway. And even if you got 1000% more exp, you still would find the game lacking because you just aren't the type of player that likes to do open world stuff.

Like I said, I find Odyssey fun and testing myself on trying to sneak kill everyone is engaging enough that the repetitive things aren't bothering me. Especially when I split them up with story missions. Frankly I like Odyssey, more than I have ever liked anything Ubisoft has ever done, so take that for what it's worth.

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

I think a lot of developers get Open Worlds wrong which, for the most part, is caused by a misunderstanding of what exactly makes an open world worthwhile. Too many tend to treat it like a sort of playground, an all you can eat buffet of do whatever you want, wherever you want, whenever you want. They drop you in there and tell you to go wild. For the most part the player tends to burn out on that rather quickly.

Let's take some games that, in my opinion, make the most of their open world. GTA San Andreas, Fallout New Vegas, Red Dead Redemption, in a way also Witcher 3... what they have in common is that not the entirety of their world is free to explore right from the very beginning. New areas open up gradually as you go along with the plot.

Because, here's the thing: The big advantage of an open world is not that it gives you a large area to fuck around in in different ways, it's that it lends a sense of space and scale to the games story which helps to contextualize it in a way a game with level based structure couldn't. Take New Vegas: Once you get to Vegas and confront the guy the game has, to this point, been building up as the antagonist you've already seen quite a bit of this world and interacted with a lot of its people and factions. Seeing a lage, lively city with functioning electricity and various luxuries like hotels and souvenir shops and gambling machines and stuff wouldn't be anywhere near as impactful if you didn't spend the time leading up to that traversing the desert and staying in various underdeveloped towns, a lot of which still depend on agriculture to get by.

Or take Red Dead Redemption: You spend about a quarter of the game in the state of New Austin until the game, in what's a very memorable action setpiece, has you cross the Rio Grande to Mexico, where John Marston is a stranger. And the fact that it comes after the player has spent a while in what's basically Texas it will be change of scenery for him too. All of that would lose a lot of its effect if the player had been able to enter Mexico from the very beginning.

That's the appeal of an Open World: It gives the player a sense of place and to do so it needs to pace itself. Doesn't mean that a world that's open for exploration from the very beginning is necessarily a bad thing but if so the story structure need to accomodate that kind of design. Zelda: Breath of the Wild does that quite because it's vast enough that the feeling of being on a lonesome, aimless journey is Link's, and the players, place in that world. He has a specific goal to accomplish and has to wander Hyrule to do so. You mostly make your own narrative there.

 

[Something Amyss]

Odyssey is a weird game for me, because it isn't an RPG as much as the dialog trees and leveling up seem to suggest. It's a pure action game and the dialog choices are meaningless and server only to add more time to pointless conversations (AKA add flavor and exposition to the game). However, it really really feels like Ubisoft tried with this game, and as a result the game is fun for me. I'm having fun running around and taking out all the "?"'s on the map and sneak killing fucking everybody.

The problem I have is that it no longer feels like an AC game. I can spec to deal assassination damage, but the game forces you into open combat often enough that you have to respect to warrior or make tedious battles even more tedious. Origins had a good balance here because I didn't have to respect. Arguably, I was OP, but it's bull having to wait on the right gear just to assassinate someone of your level,m or kill them with headshots, etc, and to have to choose between that and boring damage sponges. Combat isn't hard per se, but I get tired of it.

I understand that microtransactions suck, but I also understand that the developers often don't have a choice when putting them in a game. So I try to look at the game without the MT's on it, judging the experience as best as I can as if the MT's weren't there. Once I get that opinion I then look at the MT's and see what effect they are having on the experience as a whole.

Origins did this without being grindy. I platinumed the game, and on all but the last DLC I have 100%, after which I got bored. I was engaged because I didn't feel like I was really level gated. Yes, you still had to level up, but I had a bajillion side quests and POI to do after I beat the game.

What Origins had was a crap ton of things to buy: outfits, mounts, weapons, etc. You could pay for power and the game didn't suffer. You could buy kewl gear, and it didn't slow down your progression. I don't even know if they had boosters, because they never felt necessary.

Syndicate also had MTs, and I loved that game. Possibly my favourite oldschool-style AC game.

This game was fun until my free booster ran out. I finally broke down and bought the permanent booster because I had the credits, and it's fun again. And I probably won't buy another Ubisoft game for a while.

I bring up prior AC games because I want to highlight I'm not anti-MT/DLC. If I like what a game is doing, I will throw money at it. I only get cheap when devs start getting scummy. Adjusting the gme to get another ten bucks out of players to make the game fun is just absurd. And I threw down this time because when you're not level gated, it's fun. But I already paid for a premium edition of a game based on the good will of the last game, and paying an extra ten to keep the game playable is a bad model and I have basically cashed out of the Ubisoft model. I hope the extra ten is worth losing sixty plus in the future.

There are models of MT I will support. I've paid for cosmetics before when I like the game. I've paid for VIP and I don't mind. I play Rock Band 4 to this day and pay two bucks per song to get songs I legitimately like into the experience even though they're not necessary.

That being said, I don't know how Odyssey feels without the exp booster, however at my current place in the game I am about 5 levels OVER the current content, as I've been exploring everything and doing as much as possible. I did read some consumer reviews that said they weren't having a problem with the game without the booster, and I'm kind of inclined to believe that players would have trouble if they tried to just blitz through the story content and quests without doing many of the extra stuff lying around.

As Angry Joe pointed out, at least some of these people were using a booster whether they knew it or not. There's limited time boosters attached to multiple editions. Without the boosters, the dichotomy is not rush the story or be the right level, it really is a lot harder to level up. I had to do a bunch of dailies in Megaris, which slowed me down. It's a good thing those are there, to an extent.

But after I bought the booster, I went from constantly struggling with levels to being two levels above the area max and now I have the option to rush through or not--though I still can't assassinate people two levels below me if they are captains or the like, and the RNG isn't giving me gear that would help.

Like I said, I find Odyssey fun and testing myself on trying to sneak kill everyone is engaging enough that the repetitive things aren't bothering me. Especially when I split them up with story missions. Frankly I like Odyssey, more than I have ever liked anything Ubisoft has ever done, so take that for what it's worth.

I am betting good part of liking it so much directly comes down to not having to do the grind. The game is more fun when you have options. But either way, if it's your jam, rock it. I've spent at least a grand on Rock Band by this point. But I will offer my experience that it only really got fun with the boosters.