These days it seems like we can’t go two minutes without someone singing the praises of some open world game. “There are so many options!” we hear the masses cry. “You can go anywhere you like!” “You can play the game for hours just exploring the world and never progress the main plot!” While the open-world genre is a perfectly valid genre of game, we have come to raise it on a pedestal and treat it as honestly better than any game that doesn’t include open-world elements.

Well, I’m here to burst your bubble, because our idea of open world games is nothing more than hype. It’s glitter sprinkled across a gameplay element we have seen since the days of the NES and before. It’s a word we have repeated to ourselves so many times that it has lost all meaning. It is, in effect, a buzzword, simply meant to excite us into making a base assumption that an open world game is of a higher quality than one that isn’t.

The first big open world fallacy is that we assume open world is by default better than non-open world gaming. This stems with an obsession with player choice. One of the most common complaints about games is that they railroad you too much. The game plays itself instead of letting you play it.

This is a valid complaint and one we really need to be wary of when developing new games. One of the solutions to the problem of railroading is the idea of the “open world” game, and it works, to an extent.

Let’s examine what the open world game really is, in this context. A game that is open world, emphasis on world, is essentially somewhat of a playground. There is still a main plot, but when you aren’t actively completing it you can travel the world completing side quests at your leisure.

It’s not all that different from a normal game with side quests. The only real difference is scale. In any given Final Fantasy you are usually only able to complete a couple side quests at a time, not really progressing forward or backward past the tiny area you are in. However, in games like Skyrim you are able to go around the entire world completing dozens of sidequsts before coming back to where the main plot is.

This kind of open world is at most an illusion. In the end, both of these games are just extra content wrapped around a main linear plot. Sure, some of these games let you get different endings or go down branching pathways of story, but we have had games that did that since the time of Ogre Battle. That’s not new or exclusive to open-world games.