How much of a problem is extended travel time in games? For example: lack of fast travel in the beginning of Dark Souls, or traveling to a location in an open world? Is it just filler?
I think this is a false premise.
Travel time can be a pain, but I think the better metric is, time spent without a challenge of some kind, or even more accurately, time spent without an interesting decision, because obviously things like configuring equipment, leveling up, and other such clerical tasks aren’t challenging, but they involve interesting decisions.
I have stated many times that I really like that there’s no fast travel at the start of dark souls. I like that you need to pathfind your way around a complex series of areas that have new connections opening up as you go, so trying to find the optimal route is an interesting decision in-of itself, and you need to do things like fight enemies on the way there which is an interesting series of decisions, and given you’re pathfinding, you end up generally going through the areas in an order you didn’t go through it the first time, so it’s slightly different each time, rather than just repeated content.
I think open world games suffer a little more in this respect because the world is not dense enough with challenges. Traveling from place to place takes a lot of time, and you don’t do much along the way, which can be boring. This is where lessons from platformers or racing games could probably factor in more.
What genre, if any, do you think benefits most from an open world?
The open world genre.
I mean, open world is kind of its own genre at this point, right? Among the big entrants we have RPGs, like Skyrim and the Witcher 3, “Stealth” like Asscreed and MGSV, and a ton of 3rd person shooters, like Just Cause, Watchdogs, GTA, Far Cry, MGSV, Red Dead Redemption, plus a lot of others, and we have sandbox games like Minecraft and No Man’s Sky.
I don’t think any genre benefits particularly more than any other genre from being combined with open world. It’s just a content presentation style really. Probably games that are more sandboxy like minecraft or breath of the wild benefit a bit more, but I mean, being sandboxy comes with being an open world game to a degree.
Celia Alexis Wagar's CritPoints 