Open-World Games and Story

[Ynna]

TLDR: think that it will take a long time for open-world games to have a good story.

The story in such games are held back by a couple of things:

1) You need to tell multiple stories. Because of this, the resources that could be allocated to telling a single (or a couple) big stories are now used for telling a couple of big ones and a lot of small ones.

2) You can't make your stories too complicated, because you don't know when the player will come back to it. There's always a whole lot to do in open-world games, so the player is constantly distracted. If you constantly introduce new characters or plot twist, you'll leave the player confused (not every player of course, but the risk is there).
Also, because these games often feature choices, you'll have to construct your stories so that this is possible.

3) The way these games tell story is rather boring. Almost everything (meaningful) is told through dialogue inside of text-menus, which is the worst way games can tell stories. This is rather easy to fix (and we're seeing this, mostly in less important quests), because the nature of open-world games provides lots of possibilities for storytelling. Doing away with the text-menus for dialogue will probably take quite long.

4) You can experience the stories non-linear. This is great if the developers know how to handle it, but terrible if they neglect it. Because you can skip or circumvent large parts of the story the game needs to be able to handle this, otherwise it looks silly and leaves the player confused.
4) Morality systems are hard to do right. Games that feature lots of choice, as open-world games are prone to do, need a way to track the consequences of your choices. Often, they use some kind of morality-meter, which is almost always binary (good-evil). It also limits the choices the player can make (and thus the stories you can tell) since it needs to fit on your good-evil meter.

What's your opinion on stories in open-world games?

[Bearshield]

The lack of a solid story is what keeps me away from open world games but to be fair, I think the real idea behind those kind of games is for the player to make their mark on the world and live their own story. You really can't have a completely story driven game in an open world because if you spend so much time wandering the world and looking for other things to do, you've now gotten off track from the story and if the majority of your game play is devoted the story then you're not getting your "open world" experience. They're just two different game types designed to appeal to different types of gamers.