The Bethesda Open World Fatigue

I find myself in a familiar situation. I’ve got a bunch of rooms or areas ahead of me; I know there’s going to be some opposition. I’ve got a couple of weapons on hand and some healing items. It’s an endeavor that I’ve played out a hundred times, and for the most part, it’s enjoyable. It’s the bread and butter of a lot of open world games. Anyone who has played one of Bethesda’s open world games becomes quite familiar with this gameplay loop. Explore - Discover – fight – loot – explore – discover and so and so forth. This experience can have a very organic appeal as you select your own destinations and goals.

However, I find myself easily fatigued by open world games as of late, and I feel like I have a very poor track record of completing the main story on many open world games. In particular, Bethesda RPG’s and open world games that borrow from their formula have been hard for to play for long play sessions and I believe there are numerous reasons why.

Movement – In Bethesda’s open world games, you really only have one form of movement or traversal within the game space, and that is walking. Sure you can sprint, but it still feels exactly the same, only faster and with some additional audio and camera shake. It doesn’t have any form of hook or nuance that makes simply traversing the world enjoyable, it instead relies on its environments and goals to make traversal enjoyable. However, if you’re re-tracing your steps or revisiting a familiar place, you don’t have those elements to necessarily elements to rely on, leaving you with the dry movement system. Bethesda games would benefit greatly from some form of movement abilities that are fun to use and can create interesting dynamics within the sandbox open world. One open world that has done this beautifully is Breath of the Wild. Link has access to a large number of traversal options that each feel fun and different. You can ride a horse with a real sense of rhythm and weight. You can use your para glider to soar across the sky with a sense of buoyancy and weight. You can ride a sand walrus across the desert on a shield and slide back and forth. All of them feel fun and different.

Combat - In most Elder Scroll games, the combat only really revolves around 4 factors. Your health, damage and the enemies health and damage. The combat often just boils down to hitting the attack button in Skyrim over and over again with little variation in pattern. As there is only one button for attacking, it severely restricts the number of choices given to the player. In addition to this, the blocking system doesn't reward any timing or player skill. The player is given a flat reduction of damage instead whenever they have their shield up. When you reach low health, there is no ways to really regenerate your health as a non-caster. You are forced to awkwardly pause, scroll through your inventory and drink your healing items, totally breaking the flow of combat.

Story - This is a problem in general with open-world games, and I'm not entirely sure how to fix it. However, it plagues Bethesda games especially due to their poor writing and voice-acting. I find it incredibly hard to get immersed in the story of Bethesda games. It's so easy to get sidetracked that you often go 4 or 5 hours without returning back to story line. By the time you return, the events feel less significant and your urge to see what happens diminishes dramatically. You then go on more side quests and explore, creating an even larger gap between you and the story line.

Bethesda isn't all bad however, and there are alot of gems in their games that are worth the playtime. In the future, if they if improve these aspects, I believe Bethesda is capable of making some of the best games of all time.