Updated on August 22nd, 2021 by Ritwik Mitra: When the topic of open-world games is brought up, most people think of games that take hundreds of hours to complete. After all, the very concept of open-world gaming has been attached to lengthy titles for the longest time; however that isn’t necessarily the case. In fact, there are several games that adopt the open-world formula, but craft titles that serve as short and concise experiences. Keeping this in mind, here are some of the shortest open-world video games ever m
For fans of the Fable games, the potential for Microsoft to produce another mainline entry in the series, instead of outings like Fable: The Journey and Fable Legends , is certainly exciting. Bringing back this Xbox-exclusive franchise could be a great move for Xbox, especially as it enters into a new console generation. If Microsoft plays its cards right, Fable could end up being the Breath of the Wild in Xbox’s portfo
With the large amounts of video games releasing today, both from indie developers and AAA studios, not every game is destined to be a hit. Bad timing, underbaked mechanics, or unfulfilled promises can all result in a forgotten series.
Arkham City might not be one of the longest open-world titles around — especially if players are only going to go through the main story — but the game is still a blast regardless. There’s a reason why most people still consider it to be the best chapter in the Arkham tril
Many praise Goldeneye and Perfect Dark for their superb gunplay back on the N64 and older consoles. What many don’t know, though, is that many of those developers went on to create a spiritual successor to those titles called TimeSplitters .
The gaming landscape has changed considerably in that time. With the new generation of consoles came new standards for design, and while Fable , for the most part, holds up in terms of gameplay, there are mechanics within it that may have trouble in the new wave of video games. Specifically, there are bound to be difficulties with Fable’s handling of morality, and with how significant the mechanic is to the game, it may create other hurdles as w
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 barely counts as an open-world game. Though players are technically free to explore a portion of New York City as the wall-crawler, missions are all linear and repetitive, and the whole thing wraps up somewhere after the six-hour mark, and that’s taking into account some seriously boring padded sequences and the atrocious Peter Parker investigation segme
Playable on: PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PC
The Mafia trilogy is easily one of the best story-driven, open-world trilogies of all time. While opinions may be mixed on Mafia 3 , most people absolutely adore Mafia 1 and 2 for good rea
Playable on: PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC
Released on the same day as the hugely underwhelming Assassin’s Creedy Unity , Rogue plays like a followup to 2013’s Black Flag and feels like an addendum to 2012’s Assassin’s Creed 3 . Though head and shoulders above some of the less inspired entries in the series, Rogue’s world still felt a bit too empty and bland, and it’s one of the shortest mainline AC experiences by
2019 turned out to be a year full of surprise game reveals and updates on projects that have been in the pipeline for a long time, so there were a ton of great trailers dropped throughout the year. Now that the year is coming to an end, it’s the perfect time to look back at all of the trailers dropped at E3, BlizzCon , Toyko adventure Game Weapons Show, and every Nintendo and PlayStation direct press conference and determine which ones stand out as the best of the y
When the original Fable was in development, the game’s director Peter Molyneux talked about his plans for the game, which at the time was codenamed Project Ego. The main idea was that players would pick up the controller on a 15-year-old whose parents were killed, and in a journey of revenge, players would guide their avatar through an RPG experience shaping their avatar from a teenager to an adult with total freedom of their path. Their avatar would grow up along with the world—there was a famous example that players could plant an acorn as a child and then see it grow into a tree by adulthood—and eventually have to save the entire world on their journey. It was a lifelong pursuit, with players raising up a character from childhood all the way to old
One of the most demonstrable shifts in the way morality systems work now is in the Mass Effect series. While Andromeda’s facial animations and other aspects faced major criticisms when it released, most of which were deserved, it ditched the paragon and renegade system found in the first three entries of the series. The newer system, which gave players the option to respond in four different manners rather than just two, was still flawed, but it marked a departure from the standard good versus evil archtypes, attempting to give players more characterization, even if it didn’t necessarily succ