10 Worst Open World Video Games Of All Time
What is the exact opposite of Skyrim, GTA or The Witcher 3?
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00:00 Ever since Grand Theft Auto 3 proved how much of an interest there was in sandbox experiences,
00:05 every studio since has been trying to capitalise on the boom, resulting in over a decade of
00:10 diverse, top-tier titles that continue to push the industry forward.
00:14 With that said, in a genre as popular as this, where so many different releases have continued
00:19 to innovate and push boundaries, there have been just as many stinkers acting as cautionary
00:24 tales of how chasing the open-world dollar can go terribly wrong.
00:28 Consequently, throughout the years, gamers have had to endure some of the most boring
00:32 video games ever made, travelling through the same old sterile cities and repeating
00:37 the same old missions over and over again.
00:40 I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com, and these are the 10 worst open-world games of all time.
00:45 10.
00:46 Vin Diesel's Wheelman While Vin Diesel has starred in some actually
00:50 pretty damn good movie tie-in games, his 2009 vehicle, Oyoi, Wheelman, is not one of them.
00:56 The main problem is that the title just doesn't really know what it wanted to be.
01:00 It mixes bits of Need for Speed with Stuntman and, of course, a little Grand Theft Auto
01:04 for good measure, but doesn't really know what made all of those games tick, except
01:08 from the iconography and high-speed car chases.
01:11 This lack of identity is present in the gameplay itself, as a lot of the missions are confined
01:16 to a car, as players control a blocky Vinny D and drive around restricted parts of an
01:20 open world, but a scant few do allow you to get out, stretch your legs and shoot people's
01:25 faces off.
01:26 Unfortunately, neither gameplay style is all that engaging.
01:29 Like the movie itself, Wheelman could never quite escape the shadow of other, better releases,
01:34 but it is admittedly probably the best Fast and Furious game not to be called Fast and
01:39 Furious.
01:40 It's just a shame that it's more Too Fast Too Furious rather than Fast Five.
01:44 9.
01:45 Risen 3 Titan Lords Enhanced Edition A series which has continued to chug on despite
01:50 never releasing a game that's actually been any good, Risen 3 Titan Lords Enhanced Edition
01:56 was the cherry on the shitty cake of this notoriously terrible pirate-themed franchise.
02:01 While a lot of open world games on this list feel empty, Risen 3 is completely bereft of
02:05 ideas and imagination in every department.
02:08 Boasting combat clunkier than the ships you travel on, the very act of playing the sandbox
02:13 title feels like a punishment forced on the player, while the fragmented story and repetitive
02:18 enemies don't entice you to dig deeper into its admittedly grandiose world.
02:23 Not only a technical disaster despite its "enhanced" moniker, Risen 3's RPG elements
02:28 are some of the most needlessly complex the genre has ever seen.
02:31 Just about every character has an ability they can teach you or something to sell, but
02:35 the sequel never communicates which items and upgrades you can actually use or what
02:39 you need to do to gain access to them.
02:41 And that's if you can even remember which character had which thing in the first place.
02:45 It's a right chew on.
02:47 8.
02:48 Ghost Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 Despite having three attempts at creating
02:52 a good Sniper Ghost Warrior game, developers at CI Games have never really made something
02:57 worth playing.
02:58 2017's third title was their most valiant effort yet, but while the gameplay was more
03:02 refined than ever, taking the series open world only introduced a myriad of new problems.
03:08 Rather than offering anything new for fans of sandbox shooters to dig into, Ghost Warrior
03:13 was content to just riff on the mechanics other games perfected years ago.
03:17 Likewise, the shooter's entire selling point, adopting the role of a sniper and having to
03:21 adjust for wind, distance and movement to line up the perfect shot, was far too similar
03:26 to the superior Sniper Elite series, slow-mo, bullet time and all, meaning the sequel pretty
03:31 much had nothing that allowed it to stand out from the crowd.
03:34 7.
03:35 Saints Row IV - Got Out of Hell Although it started out in the shadows of GDA,
03:40 over the years the Saints Row franchise proved that it was more than yet another copycat
03:44 by doubling down on wacky open world design when the competition was moving towards more
03:49 mature and self-serious experiences.
03:51 That approach allowed the franchise to soar for a while, but by the time Saints Row Got
03:56 Out of Hell came around, it became clear that the series' over-the-top zaniness was papering
04:00 over a severe lack of original gameplay ideas.
04:04 In fact, despite literally going to hell, the latest sequel felt staler than ever, and
04:08 instead of ripping off GTA, was content to riff on the likes of Crackdown.
04:13 Even worse, the humour that propped up the previous game's simile started to get old
04:16 in Got Out of Hell, and despite a few creative flourishes here and there, only made the whole
04:21 affair feel even more punishing.
04:23 Saints Row could have gone anywhere after the release of the fourth game, but unfortunately
04:27 the devs decided on the most lifeless option imaginable.
04:31 6.
04:32 Two Worlds Drawing inevitable comparisons to Oblivion
04:35 when it released back in 2007, the open world RPG Two Worlds showed players how bad Bethesda
04:41 series could have turned out in the wrong hands.
04:44 While the game featured all the tenets you'd expect from a release in this genre, boasting
04:48 a huge world to explore, characters you could tailor to your choosing and a wide variety
04:52 of beasts to fend off against, just about every one of these features was botched in
04:57 some way.
04:58 The map itself, while ambitious, became a chore to explore, thanks to some glaring bugs
05:02 and glitches that made even simple movements a pain.
05:06 Combat didn't fare much better either, with clunky controls turning every enemy encounter
05:10 into a scrappy wrestling match rather than a grand fantasy battle.
05:13 Likewise the story crumbled the longer the game wore on, with the abysmal if noble voice
05:18 acting - accomplished by the developers rather than a professional studio - ruining any impact
05:23 it may have otherwise had.
05:25 5.
05:26 Fuel Back in 2009, Fuel's open world was the largest
05:30 the video game industry had ever seen.
05:32 While that scale was certainly enticing, the empty arcade driving propping it up tanked
05:37 EA's chances of Fuel becoming a smash hit.
05:40 A predictable rubberbanding system meant that player-controlled drivers often took the lead
05:44 early on, slowing down in the final stages to allow the player to edge in front of the
05:49 competition for a quote-unquote "epic" photo-line finish.
05:52 While that could admittedly make the occasional race an exhilarating experience, when it happened
05:57 every single time you jumped into the game, it became tiresome.
06:01 Likewise, the bland open world itself didn't do much to stop every race from blurring into
06:05 one hodgepodge of last-minute victories and wonky driving mechanics.
06:09 The brown smear over everything was supposed to evoke a strange, surreal post-apocalyptic
06:14 landscape, but it only resulted in skid-marked environments to drive around in, and not the
06:19 cool race car kind.
06:21 4.
06:22 Driver 3
06:23 Although the Driver series actually got out ahead of Grand Theft Auto in creating a 3D
06:27 open world, by the time the third game in the series rolled around, the latter franchise
06:31 had completely outmatched it with releases like GTA 3 and Vice City.
06:36 Driver 3, or Drive-three-er, or Drive-thur, however you pronounce it, consequently, was
06:41 developer Reflections' dreadful response to the increased competition.
06:45 Once again putting you in control of Tanner, the third game in the franchise attempted
06:49 to ape Rockstar's open world formula, but only managed to create broken missions and
06:54 a shooting system that always seemed to miss the mark.
06:56 Endeavouring to create a dynamic open world by having NPCs react realistically to your
07:01 actions and introducing a rather impressive damage modelling system for vehicles, the
07:05 sequel's technical shortcomings compared to its technical ambitions resulted in a sandbox
07:10 that always felt under threat of coming apart at the seams, rather than the cohesive and
07:15 lifelike environment that devs had imagined.
07:18 3.
07:19 Gangs of London
07:20 Wanting to prove just what the PlayStation Portable was capable of, Sony released the
07:24 open world crime game Gangs of London in 2006, but it wasn't exactly the ace up its sleeve
07:30 the publisher thought it was going to be.
07:32 There's something in the premise of letting you choose to pick a gang to join and wage
07:36 war in London like you're in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or something, but
07:40 the gameplay itself was just so uninspired.
07:42 Yay, you can shoot people, yay, you can run them over, yay, you can pelt them with baseball
07:47 bats, yay, you can play pretend darts in a virtual pub and fall into an existential crisis
07:52 over how you don't have anyone to do that with in real life.
07:55 Oh, only me then.
07:57 Actually all of these faults were made even worse by the limitations of the console itself.
08:01 The goddamn machine only had one thumbstick, yet players were expected to properly explore
08:05 this 3D open world.
08:07 And yeah, the devs did their best when it came to this aspect, admittedly, but the tech
08:11 only exacerbated the already pretty crappy gameplay.
08:15 2.
08:16 The Amazing Spider-Man 2
08:18 Hands down, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has one of the worst open worlds ever created.
08:23 The drab grey city is barely any more lifelike than a cardboard cutout miniature, and the
08:28 game even seems to recognise this, dropping the setting quite often in favour of tightly
08:32 crafted levels.
08:34 That somehow only makes the game worse, though.
08:36 At least in the city you get to swing around and pull off high-flying spidey moves, but
08:40 the repetitive objectives of the main quests, as well as the restrictive levels, suck out
08:45 even that molecule of fun.
08:46 Add on top of that the fact that this sequel somehow looks worse than the original game
08:51 despite benefiting from a new generation of consoles, and you're left with the worst
08:55 gaming outing the webhead has ever endured.
08:58 And look, I bloody love Spider-Man games.
09:00 I'm even a huge fan of the tie-in to The Amazing Spider-Man 1, but this?
09:04 This is just sad.
09:06 This is just sad, man.
09:08 1.
09:09 Superman Returns
09:10 Creating a Superman game is no easy task, but EA's 2006 stab at bringing the character
09:15 to life has become a textbook example of how a developer can completely f*** it up.
09:20 Without any storyline to follow, the game has you flying across the same streets over
09:24 and over again to fight the same old robots just so Metropolis' health bar doesn't run
09:29 out.
09:30 It's all busy work, and despite the game featuring a level-up system and upgrades, pretty much
09:34 everything that the game has to offer can be experienced in the first 20 minutes.
09:39 Despite how bad it is, though, there are good features that are completely squandered.
09:43 The vast array of powers Superman has at his disposal, including a rather impressively
09:47 executed ability that allows players to travel faster than a speeding bullet, are completely
09:51 wasted on repetitive gameplay and unimaginative enemies, somehow making the superhero romp
09:57 even more frustrating to play.
09:58 It's all a shambles, and in an era where this kind of movie caching has virtually been abandoned
10:03 by the major publishers, it seems even worse in hindsight.