Current Events > How can open world games avoid making boring missions?

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Why is it so easy for open world games to fall into the trap of making missions that are relatively boring or repetitive like a basic fetch quest, combat quest, escort quest, or some combination of those? Throw in collectibles with questionable usefulness and you have the whole typical package.

My recommendation would be for them to make missions that aren't boring

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Design a linear single player game with mission variety and quality writing as the first priority, then add an open world after that if there's time. The mission and story content should always be a higher priority than the random free-roaming collectible aspect.

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PatrickMahomes posted...

My recommendation would be for them to make missions that aren't boring

How? What makes a good mission?

Make it seem more like you're actually embarking on an adventure and not just going to places to kill x creature or retrieve y item.

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And another question: can you name some open world games that make fun an interesting missions? Just want to see what people think.

the problem is the dumb fucking arrow they put that tells you exactly where to go so you just walk in a straight line following the arrow.

World of Warcraft vanilla did it best. No arrow. Just a quest log with a vague description on how to complete the quest. It actually felt like you had to explore and think to complete quests.

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BroodRyu posted...

And another question: can you name some open world games that make fun an interesting missions? Just want to see what people think.

Most GTA games have good variety. Especially GTAV.

Typical escort/chase missions all over, but there are also plane flights, helicopter chases, a mission with a James Bond style spy car, several heists with tons of unique objectives and playstyles.

Spider-Man on PS4 also had some really great missions for an open world game. Most of the bonus content was typical wave-fighting or collectibles, but the boss fights and major story missions in that game were excellent.

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I think Yakuza 0 does this well (idk about the games in the series I haven't played them yet but I would like to assume it's similar), it doesn't have a map the size of a literal world and is just like one town, but it still manages to pack soooo much into it that there's always something new to do and all the side content isn't just "go to this outpost after traveling across hundreds of miles of nothing to kill a few guys" over and over and actually has stories for it's minor characters and doesn't feel like you are doing something repetitive while going over all that extra stuff etc. it's nice

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Give you multiple ways to complete missions like GTA3 did.

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I appreciate all the posts here. Its good insight to see how different companies approach mission design.