What Are You Playing, Part 3: The Assassination of my Wallet by the Cowardly Sale

[Zevox]

Depending on what exactly you don't like with open world this may be a misconception about Witcher 3. It's open world in the sense that you can walk everywhere but other than that it has nothing to do with games like Elder Scrolls or the UbiSoft open world games.

I mean, I based that decision on their marketing for the game, so maybe, maybe not.

As far as what I dislike about open world style games, the massive, oversized worlds that take forever to traverse are a chief offender (and fast travel systems don't help, since they're only available when backtracking). The two biggest exceptions that I've found to my dislike of the style, Infamous: Second Son and the 2018 Spider-Man game, have you playing characters with superpowers that allow them to traverse the world so rapidly that it feels a lot smaller than it actually is (I actually frequently forgot those games even have fast travel systems because of it!). So if there's anything like that, that'd be a big point in its favor. Any sort of system that makes getting around the world harder or more tedious, such as the stamina meter from Breath of the Wild, would by contrast be a major strike against it.

Beyond that, the Bethesda style is definitely the biggest issue. The feeling that the game isn't actually focused on its main story, or much of the world being filled with shallow, uninteresting side-quests just to keep all that extra space from being wholly empty - those sorts of things bother me a lot and greatly detracted from my enjoyment when I've tried Bethesda games especially, and other open-world games to one extent or another.

Persona 5 Royal was the seventh-best selling game overall for the month of March in the US, so I think we can safely say that's pretty darned mainstream.

Eh, looking that up, it came in below every other notable new game that released that month, so all that really means is that it sold better than a bunch of games that didn't release that month and are just popular enough to have decent sales after their launch period. I guess the fact that it stayed in the top 20 (at 18th) in April is something, though. But it was also off the list entirely by May.