I’ve recently found that big (mostly open world) games tend to overwhelm or even intimidate me. I’m a big fan of the Rockstar games and absolutely adored Breath of the Wild, but my playthrough of Tears of the Kingdom has been a bit rocky from the get-go.
As soon as the game let me explore all of its content and released me from the tutorial island, I was able to roam the lands of Hyrule freely as I once did in Breath of the Wild, but I’ve come to a sort of paralysis. I feel like there’s such an enormous amount of content to see that I’m constantly anxious to unintentionally skip content or to not make the most of my experience. I did not feel like this back in Breath of the Wild, and I’m not really sure why. I did, however, have this same sense of FOMO when I first played Skyrim. That game also made me feel like I was constantly missing stuff which left me kind of unsatisfied.
This is not a big problem and all of the games I listed are great games. I’m posting this because I unconciously took a two week break from ToTK in order to alleviate that feeling but when I came back to the game today and still felt the same, I thought of posting here and maybe hearing your opinions on this thing.
Have you ever felt the same in big open world games? Do you feel like this in more linear games with multiple endings? (I do) Do you think I’m an overthinker and should just rock on? Looking forward to your comments!
Yes I have, but I have to remind myself that they have added way more content than they expect one person to engage with, and its on purpose. YOU know best what you are intrigued by and interested in, and for large open worlds can ignore as much as you want, but if you are enjoying yourself chasing the threads you find engaging then they have succeeded at what they set out to build.
Well said. What makes this game so special is the journey is your own. Part of the magic for me is watching others’ playthroughs and seeing them do something entirely different to what I did. It’s been almost two months and I’m still regularly surprised!
Very well said, you’re right! There’s definitely too much to see for a single person in a single playthrough.
The thing is, often developers specifically don’t add content if they think a significant amount of players won’t see it (especially not unique content). I’m not sure where it came from originally, but it’s a particular dev philosophy that became popular among “AAA” devs in the past decade.