Your Favorite 100-Hour Open World Game Is Mostly Filler

There's nothing worse than exploring a breathtaking world full of exciting stories and amazing characters, only to realize that the last 100 hours have actually been spent traveling between locations and completing the same style of scripted quests over and over again. Open world games suffer from this problem for a variety of reasons, and from the outside looking in, it's pretty clear that even the best games in the genre aren't immune to this scourge of content inflation.

That doesn't mean quests, activities, and exploration aren't fun. This just means that in between all the amazing main plot points, players end up drowning in a sea of ​​filler content that can actually make the overall experience feel a little less special. On the other hand, there are many games with rich content that make the world alive with worthwhile activities, add meaning to the player's every move, and constantly provide new faces and new ideas.

Greatness between swells

Side quest after side quest

An example of a great game with a ton of filler.

Modern open world design philosophy often mistakes richness for depth, and this concept has found its way into some of the best games in the entire genre. The Witcher 3for example, remains one of the crowning achievements of the entire space, but its sea of ​​smuggler's caches and repetitive question marks often slow it down and make it feel like a never-ending series of checklists.

other games like Ghost of Tsushima and horizon zero dawn It follows a similar pattern and has a great world to explore and a fairly engaging story, but it gets bogged down in repetitive side content. These games are still exceptional, but they highlight a broader issue surrounding the genre: that without meaningful variation, even the best worlds can quickly become boring.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

reason for everything

details:

• Systematic freedom from content overload

• Exploration becomes the main purpose of play.

breath of the wild We eliminate content loops by making the world and exploration itself rewarding enough. Climbing a mountain or investigating a strange landmark often leads to meaningful interactions rather than typical checklist tasks. Because everything is unguided, players aren't forced to follow specific markers or adhere to the game's own idea of ​​how to play.

The world design also does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of being open and spacious but never empty. Rather than stuffing every nook and cranny of the map with content, we believe in allowing players to create their own value in their journey across the land, making it feel incredibly unique and personal compared to most other games in this space.

Elden Ring

Compact yet purposeful

details:

• Real-world locations and enemy variety

• The more repetitive dungeons offer a variety of loot and challenges.

Elden Ring It's one of the best examples of how to truly enrich a huge world with meaningful content. It doesn't matter whether players explore deep in a cave or a massive castle. There's always a sense of purpose, mainly because of how different every area is from the next.

What adds to the feeling of constant discovery is that there are no clearly defined directions or constraints on where the player can go. They're free to explore and roam at their own pace, and even if you decide to get off the beaten path for a long time, it's almost guaranteed that you'll still encounter plenty of new and exciting adventures to keep you busy for hours.

outside wild

details:

• Open world with shorter run time

• A game full of important content

outside wild is essentially an open world, but on a significantly scaled down scale compared to other games in the genre. Each location feels spacious enough to keep players engaged as they search for answers, yet compact in a way that eliminates any sense of emptiness that might exist in larger environments.

And because the player's progress is directly tied to surrounding locations and the information hidden within them, there's never a moment where it feels like the exploration is being done for them. Essentially, this game proves that smaller, well-crafted worlds with much richer content density are much more enjoyable to experience than larger worlds.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2

based on reality

details:

• Realistic mechanics add immersion to every action.

• Meaningful interactions replace constant stimulation.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Even the slow moments avoid filler by ensuring immersion, which is the core mission of the game. Everything from traveling the landscape to talking to locals enhances rather than hinders the grounded nature of the world and the player's gradual progression.

When it comes to side content, activities and quests feel directly integrated into everyday life rather than layered on top as optional time fillers. This cohesion gives texture to the world, showing that a slower pace can still feel purposeful when getting things done usually feels tedious or tedious.

external

Write your own story

details:

• Moments arise through the player's own survival.

• It rejects convenience over organic gameplay.

external It embraces the concept of friction in a way no modern open world game has ever attempted. Progressing through the world is risky, each move forward earned through persistence rather than constant rewards or markings of completion, eliminating the cyclical nature of having dozens of things to do.

This approach adds importance to small tasks, with the game almost implementing its own microquests that are equally important to understand and complete. There's no runtime padding with repetitive objectives, no boring sequences that distract the player from the actual action, just a relentless progression that never leaves once the adventure begins.