GTA V was one of the most boring open worlds I ever played in. Sure its vastly detailed, but I never had fun in it. The missions are all the same drive here, shoot guys, leave, with no added ability for variation in those missions, and you are punished with a fail if you don't follow the script. Its filled with minigames with zero actual bearings on the game.
Oh if you play tennis or other sports, you increase your strength. Ok, what does strength do?
Oh it increases your melee strenght.
You mean your shit melee that's impractical in almost every other situation than hitting a random passer by?
Its filled with empty space and features there for no apparent reason. You can hunt animals. Whats the point?
GTAV is just a bloated game, with so much stuffing but when you look at the core of it, its incredibly shallow.
I guess it depends on what you want out of an open world game.
For me, it's not about missions, or goals, or stats, or minigames, or any of that. It's about freedom. It's about saying "I want to go to the top of that mountain" and being able to actually do it. It's looking on the map and seeing a single road winding off into the middle of nowhere, and wanting to know where that road leads. Only one way to find out.
Take last night for example, what I was doing in GTA. I remembered one cool location from the main story, and I didn't remember where it was. Too slow to move on the ground, so I hopped in a helicopter and buzzed around until I found it. Then I took the chopper to the other side of the city, as high as I could go, and jumped out, just to see if I could parachute all the way across town and land on my goal. Try doing
that in Watch Dogs. This is what I'm referring to when I say that the open world
is the game, rather than just the game
taking place in an open world.
I've already beaten the story in GTA. There's nothing left for me to "do", really. And yet I'm able to spend hours just running around doing
nothing, and I enjoy every minute of it. Skyrim's the same way. Watch_Dogs isn't. Neither is Infamous. I don't see myself continuing to play this game after I beat the campaign, if I even make it to the end at all.