m76

Couldn't agree more with you more.  I think that is by far the biggest problem with open world games right now, their getting to big. They put areas of interest between miles and miles of mostly empty space.
They need to do what games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Skyrim did, which is make the best use of the space that it's got.  When you make your map dense and effective it doesn't need to be massive.  At no point when playing these games did I ever feel it was "to small", despite the maps being a fraction of the size of Zelda BOTW or some of the more recent Assassin's Creed games.  These titles (BOTW especially) frustrated the hell out of me at times because of their oversized maps.
It's like most of these devs have this obsession with making their game world's as big as possible as if it's a competition on who's got the biggest dick.  It needs to stop and they need to back the fundamentals of what makes exploring an open be world fun... because it's NOT size.

I think the biggest problem with open world games, is that they are cardboard cutouts. Nothing is functional, nothing is interactive. They all just go for size, instead of quality. I think anything larger than GTAIV is pointless. Instead of making the world bigger, it should be made interactive, where every building is explorable, and has a function, even if it is not relevant to your quest. I find it immersion breaking that in every open world game only 1 in a hundred buildings can be entered into, and even there the only accessible room is where you have a mission objective. Cities should have working mass transit systems, and every vendor and shop should be real where you can actually buy food or something. I think with ai technology you can easily generate random NPCs with proper spoken lines without having to involve writers or even voice actors.
Current open world games all feel like walking around a movie set instead of a real living breathing environment.

Why would they need to get bigger? I've had 10 times more fun in GTA3 and Vice City than in GTAV, despite the map being only a fraction of the size. What you ask for is not feasible, and not even necessary. And the exact mentality while we get big but pointless open world games devoid of meaningful content.
As for being able to destroy cities, see Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. You can literally level everything in that game, and it's one of the most underrated open world games I've seen.

I already worked through at least a dozen crunch times, some longer, some shorter, albeit not on games. We rarely got paid anything above standard OT pay. Sometimes not even that. There were bad bosses, who would go home and phone us up at 10pm from the comfort of their home to ask for status updates. And there were those who stayed with us through the thick of it. And even those who would bring food to the office for free.
You see it all depends on mutual respect, not just money. If employers respect you you are much easier convinced to put in extra work. 

I think the biggest problem with open world games, is that they are cardboard cutouts. Nothing is functional, nothing is interactive. They all just go for size, instead of quality. I think anything larger than GTAIV is pointless. Instead of making the world bigger, it should be made interactive, where every building is explorable, and has a function, even if it is not relevant to your quest. I find it immersion breaking that in every open world game only 1 in a hundred buildings can be entered into, and even there the only accessible room is where you have a mission objective. Cities should have working mass transit systems, and every vendor and shop should be real where you can actually buy food or something. I think with ai technology you can easily generate random NPCs with proper spoken lines without having to involve writers or even voice actors.
Current open world games all feel like walking around a movie set instead of a real living breathing environment.

I already worked through at least a dozen crunch times, some longer, some shorter, albeit not on games. We rarely got paid anything above standard OT pay. Sometimes not even that. There were bad bosses, who would go home and phone us up at 10pm from the comfort of their home to ask for status updates. And there were those who stayed with us through the thick of it. And even those who would bring food to the office for free.
You see it all depends on mutual respect, not just money. If employers respect you you are much easier convinced to put in extra work. 

Mass Effect 1,2,3, DeusEx, DeusEx Human Revolution, DeusEx Mankind Divided, FarCry, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Crysis 2, the Splinter Cell games. I'm not sure if all. Possibly others I don't remember right now.
I think from these Mass Effect games are the least challenging on the insanity difficulty. Not saying they are easy but manageable, I had much more success with specific builds.
 
As for open world games Ghost Recon Wildlands and Breakpoint.
I'm a fan of quasi realistic tactical shooters. Playing on the hardest difficulty where you can get killed in 1 or 2 hits elevates these games to a whole new level. It's an exhilarating experience. Instead of running around like a flying monkey you have to be aware of your surroundings all the time, and play a cat and mouse game instead of open warfare against dozens of enemies. To me this is the only way to play these games. It is much more immersive.

What follows is venemous and hardly constructive because I'm up past my bedtime. If you continue, please read at your own peril.
I think the best thing they can do right now is go back to basics. The open world now exists as a feature to put on the back of the box. It's not there for the player's enjoyment because all they do is follow a trail telling them where to go, and it's not there because developers like filling their game with repeating low-quality assets. Every open world is exceptionally beautiful, that's why nobody's exploring them once all the obligatory boxes are ticked off.
The basics I'm talking about are roadsigns, journals and rumours. Not every roadsign is relevent, not every journal entry is complete, not every rumour is true. The problem with that is it's time-consuming. It's time-consuming for developers who could be programming content people can play, and it's time-consuming for players who are just following something because the game says they can. It would be a massive undertaking for this idea to go mainstream in a post-Morrowind world, and the money isn't there to do so.
This only seems like a grognard problem until you see why Fable III got the schtick that it did, and that in itself is the problem: everyone was looking at the problem, but nobody saw it. It was a waypoint that didn't guide you to any side quests, any of the cool NPCs or features. It's why the story was so nonsensical, because as far as anyone was concerned the game consisted only of that map marker. Having to pay attention to the world by looking at it rather than the UI is crucial to an open world, otherwise why not just make a linear game, which is better in every single other way?
Another thing would be having places that, for all intents and purposes, don't matter. Not every landmark exists to net you experience points or a poster you have to tear down. It exists because it's relevent to the world, not the player. I mentioned this before but Fallout does this well: a school doesn't exist as a place to be looted, it exists because education was once a thing. A cave doesn't exist to be the home of a Sword of Bifercating, it exists because that's how this natural formation has come to be in this setting.
Anything I suggest about looking at an open world can't really happen in the mainstream market, it'd have to be made for the fringe players who like Gothic, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and whatever weirdos reside between those two.

I already worked through at least a dozen crunch times, some longer, some shorter, albeit not on games. We rarely got paid anything above standard OT pay. Sometimes not even that. There were bad bosses, who would go home and phone us up at 10pm from the comfort of their home to ask for status updates. And there were those who stayed with us through the thick of it. And even those who would bring food to the office for free.
You see it all depends on mutual respect, not just money. If employers respect you you are much easier convinced to put in extra work. 

Yeah, "it breaks the game" just means they can't be bothered to make the necessary changes to make it work. They are taking the lazy approach.

I draw a blank every time I need to name a character. I can't think of a name if my life depended on it. So I usually just end up naming the character something stupid or a name I heard recently.

I traded it in for another game, I don't even remember what.

Yeah, "it breaks the game" just means they can't be bothered to make the necessary changes to make it work. They are taking the lazy approach.

It's just like using a drone in Ghost Recon. Exact same mechanics. I don't know which game did it first, but since it is the same company it is possible that it was made by the same people even.
My favorite mechanic is Driver San Francisco where you can posess any random driver.

Bad sequels to great games are depressing, a company gets a hit and then decides to strike the iron while it's hot or make creative decisions that alienate the original fanbase to reach a wider audience.
 
Dungeon Keeper
 
When comparing Dungeon Keeper to Dungeon Keeper 2, the sequel is in many technical aspects an improvement.  Better visuals, more modes, much improved UI and design choices that made it better balanced.  However, I still consider the original superior mostly for one reason, atmosphere.  The original was dark with really twisted sense of humour whereas the sequel was much more slapstick and cartoonish, probably the results of wanting to market to a wider audience.
 
Just compare the intro videos for each game and you'll get some idea of what I mean.
 
DK
 
DK 2
 
Devil May Cry
 
Of course this game has more than one follow up some of which actually make big improvements.  For now I'm gonna focus on the jump from the original Devil May Cry to Devil May Cry 2 which was probably the biggest step down I've ever experienced.  They transformed one of the slickest and most perfectly controlled hack and slash games ever into a ugly, cumbersome, clichéd and totally incompetent mess.  I swear the assets were gathered from the recycle bins of Capcom staff working on other franchise's.  Take a look at this and tell me what other popular Capcom franchise thing this clearly originally made for:
 
 

The Witcher III
I think the gameplay is outright atrocious. The story might be OK, but I never could get deep into it as the main character is so antipathetic.
GTA series
I like GTA games, but I think they are seriously overrated and overhyped. The gameplay is good, and the open world is implemented well in them, but their characters and stories are boring and flat.
Dragon Age Inquisition
It dazzles people with the hinterlands so that people fail to notice the boring repetitive mmo-like nature of the rest of it. The only usable class in it are the ranged, as close combat fight is useless. You are just chasing enemies around and hitting air if you do a warrior, or rogue with daggers.
Titanfall 2
It's mediocrity in all of it's being. Derivative, but fails to meet the standard of games it copies. A little bit of gears of war, a little bit of mirror's edge, a little bit of mechwarrior, but nothing is fleshed out, it all clashes and cancels each other out instead of complementing each other. And the story is so clichéd it hurt my brain.
Hellblade : Senua's sacrifice
It was an interesting idea but the end result is a sluggish, dragged out and slow game, despite being only 6-7 hours long. The combat is awkward, repetitive. The rest is just a walking simulator with lots of backtracking. And you can take walking literally here because running in this game feels slower than the walk speed in other games.
Doom 2016
It's fun for a moment, but everything looks like plastic in it, the graphics design is awful, and there is nothing to keep me playing. The level design is not that brilliant that it would be enough alone like in the original Doom, and the story is just an excuse, not a reason to play the game. I quickly lost interest in it, and never actually finished it. (and I assume eternal is more of the same)
Dragon Age: Origins
I actually prefer Dragon Age II, sue me. I think this game is very repetitive, all encounters feel the same, and playing the same goddamn ambush for the 1000th time gets old very quickly. The result of encounters is more luck based than skill. The story is completely overshadowed by the clunky mechanics and awkward dialogues.

Believe it or not playing Mass Effect has taken a lot of convincing from others. On my first try I dismissed it as a drag with terrible inventory, and clunky shooting, halfway through the first Citadel segment right after Eden Prime.

I think Tomb Raider would lend itself much better for a  TV series than a movie.  Weekly adventures to various exotic locations and tombs, lots of intrigue and conspiracies. Tomb Raider would work well as a fiction where all secret and legendary organizations are real. Templars, Illuminati, new world order, etc.

More like 10 Things most gamers don't want to do.

This seems like a strange question at first, but is it really?
What are the most important reasons you keep playing  games, what is it you get out of it?
Is it just a way to pass time? Does it give you an emotional high? Or do you get to experience things you can't otherwise? Does it give you a different perspective?  Is it something that helps you unwind, or take your mind off of your issues?
 
For me firstly it's about the ability to roleplay as and meet, or even befriend larger than life and extraordinary characters. This is why multiplayer gaming has little to no appeal to me, there are no characters to talk of, and there is no story to be told. Without a story there is no character development. And without character development there is no way to relate to the characters.
The other reason is the emotional high you get through achieving things in games. Things like finishing a mission, or successfully defeating an enemy, or even just leveling up all give a sense of achievement. Especially when there is a strategy to it. Sometimes it's not even just about beating the game, but chasing the perfect game, like no hit runs, or beating the game on extreme difficulty.

To be clear I'm not saying that everything is fine as is. But updates are not evil, despite the best effort some bug can be missed, or QOL features need to be added, etc.
As with everything technology is not evil, it's how we use it that's the problem. Knowingly shipping broken software to be fixed later in updates is evil.Or more like greedy, but same difference.

I stated two things:
1. I prefer attractive or traditionally beautiful characters over plain ones all else being equal
2. That I'm uncomfortable playing games with my character in undies.
The only one seeing a conflict between the two is you. So I don't know what twisted logic are you using when you are trying to say that it's me who thinks nude = more attractive.
I caught you out for what I've been saying all the time. To quote one of my favorite writers:
"sexual moralizing by public figures is a sign of hypocrisy or worse, and most usually a desire to perform the very act that is most being condemned"
I know you are not a public figure, but you are constantly moralizing on this public forum, and accuse me of what turns out you are obviously guilty of.
 
I'm not implying anything you hadn't already proven. It's done, own up to it. That would actually be a virtuous thing, rather than just virtue signaling all the time.
You know, being angry doesn't solve anything, you are just digging that hole you are in deeper.
That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. I'll admit though that sometimes I do tend to be arrogant, but that's not personal, it's just the fact that when you hear the same false accusations laid at your feet without evidence for the nth time it becomes tedious to even argue against them.
But then you actually provide evidence to  the contrary yourself. How can I be a hypocrite if I stand by my words? And if I make a mistake I own up to it. Something which you seem incapable of.
The misguided nature of others saddens me, but it does not change my views. You know what could? Reasons and evidence for the contrary that I hold true.If you want to sway me, use evidence, not insults. Insults only hurt if they ring true.
Must be hard being you. You can't even create a proper echo chamber by hiding dissenting views. Please excuse me if I don't feel any sympathy for the hardships you endure because of me.
Let's be diligent, let's recap what my "warped" philosophy is:
Games should not always be an exact mirror image of reality Main characters in games should be more attractive than average Mandating racial or gender quotas in games is bad I can see now, I'm literally the worst.
 
I don't know how can you measure my intelligence through a forum, but I'll take that as a compliment, thanks. And I'm not proud to be arrogant, but I'm humble enough to admit it.

Having any exceptation would be setting myself up for disappointment. There was a fan made fallout series a few years ago, and while it captured the look and tone well, it was very boring.
 

You mean the actual disc case? I didn't even know some people throw it away. As for games that come in special boxes / cases, those are collectible who in their right mind would throw them out?
But I'm ocd about keeping the original packaging of everything. I always think that when I eventually going to sell it it will be easier if I have the original packaging, but ofc that is never the case. It just comes down to whether someone wants it or not.

They already got rid of it in the director's cut patch soon after the original release. It was no longer required to play multiplayer to get the necessary readiness level.
That said multiplayer in ME3 was quite fun actually, one of the few games that I enjoyed playing online, so it is a shame that it is not included in the legendary edition.