There was a paradigm shift (probably around the time that The Witcher 3 came out and did Gangbusters) that ensured that every prestige game since had to be an open-world RPG with hundreds of hours of content. This has resulted in some very good and very bad games, and it’s also why you can’t finish Assassin’s Creed anymore if you have normal responsibilities.
I’m by no means against games providing long-term value to the player. If you’re the average consumer, someone who only buys a few games a year, then something like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is a godsend, I’m sure. You can play that thing for months, if not years, and you might not even scratch the surface. It’s a content creche.
It’s also admirable that, in many of these games, the gameplay skinner box is so good that you’re probably happy just to run around and grind, climbing Jacob’s Ladder into RPG nirvana. If you’re like me, this might be what you spend all your time doing before you feel you can touch the next story mission.
Because I’m guide-pilled, I’m always accomplishing as much as possible before moving on. I’m a sicko who loves to powergame, saving my skill points so I can unlock the ability that allows me to earn skill points quicker. I seem to have a decent radar for knowing the difference between the optional door and the one that takes me to the next cutscene, too. This sounds useful, but it’s a terrible curse I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. It makes playing these latest big games a nightmare.
The new prestige
So I recently played God of War Ragnarok and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. They’re both sequels to that old style of prestige game, which was mostly linear and put the story at the centre but had light RPG elements. For the second entry, both maintained those tenets while committing to a fully open-world RPG experience, which I guess you could consider an upgrade. Given what they achieved in the original game, the direction makes sense from a boardroom perspective, even if I would have wanted them to just focus on improving what they had instead of forcing another genre in. This new ‘open-world RPG with a big mocap story’ approach is what I will call the ‘new’ style of prestige game, which I’m sure we can expect more of going forward.
Unfortunately, their graduation into this new style doesn’t feel like it fits in some places and creates a worrying model for the genre. Crucially, both games have grander narrative designs than a post-Black Flag Assassin’s Creed, where the story takes a noticeable, necessary backseat to the open world and combat. By contrast, Ragnarok and Survivor are emotional ballads full of character development and big narrative swings. The story is the thing you remember when you shut them off. This creates a tricky balance when they’re trying to jam a The Last of Us-shaped peg into an Assassin’s Creed-shaped hole.
And it’s not always successful. What irks me most about the Infinite Jest-ification of prestige games is the constant onboarding. Ragnarok and Survivor have this problem where you feel like you’re still in the tutorial after ten or even twenty hours. It would be slightly more reasonable if these games were linear, but AAA games are desperately afraid of that. So, if you’re anything like me, you’ll explore the nooks and crannies of an early open-world area and run into all these No Entry symbols that murder the vibe. The protagonist might bark something about not being strong enough for this weird glowing hole in the wall, even though they just ripped a beast’s jaw in half with their bare hands.
And look, I understand the need for ability pacing. You need to let players masticate on mechanics so you can introduce new ones and satisfy their development. I love me a Metroidvania. But don’t give me an open world in the early hours if I cannot properly enjoy it. It makes me feel more like a lab rat than a Ronin. These are different games!
Back to the old house
We didn’t learn from the Hinterlands in Dragon Age Inquisition. Jedi Survivor shoots itself in the foot early on with Koboh, this massive playground of solid Soulslike feedback. You can whip around enjoying yourself with the powers Cal had in Fallen Order, and it’s fine! But if you do so, you will ruin it for yourself later. Jedi Survivor has so much more to offer you than this desert planet. You barely have any stances or force powers at this point, but because of Respawn’s gameplay plateau, it’s still fun enough to be satisfying to experience it in this watered-down way.
You’re just playing the first game in a different environment, and that’s not a bad thing. But you don’t feel underpowered enough to be willed into progressing the story, and that feels like a failure. The galaxy is at risk, but the game is content with you festering as a diet Jedi Knight. Ragnarok is less sinful in this regard, but the same thing happens in Svartalfheim when you’re first let loose to ‘explore’, though you’ll soon realise it is a cleanup job for later, once the game has let go of your hand. This happens again in Vanaheim about halfway through.
The tutorial leash is getting longer and longer, and it feels like an insult to immersion. It forces you to view these games as machines rather than malleable works of art. I shouldn’t be thinking about how many main missions I must rush through before I can start experiencing the actual interplay of a game’s systems. I should just be lost in the sauce.
This approach invariably leads to dissonance, anyway, as there might be some colossal plot beat where your son gets kidnapped or your best friend dies, but you can spend the next two hours looking for seeds and beans to help Glomp Diddly’s fish wife make her tragic family casserole. Important stories need cadence, and sometimes, open-world mechanics complicate that considerably by giving players the agency to choose. Is this Kratos’s choice or mine?
As good and fun as these games are, I think it’s worth considering the consequences before we ride this thing to the end of the tracks. Grafting an open world onto a story does not objectively better it. A story can (and should) sometimes exist on its own without any extra weight. Prestige AAA should be more than just open-world RPGs with cinematic production values.
No matter how much Ragnarok made me cry with its exquisite heart-tugging performances, I feel like the best parts of it are almost trojan. They sit in the middle of a system that makes me uncomfortable, and I’m worried about it taking over completely.
I was less hot on Jedi Survivor, but I finished God of War Ragnarok and felt like it was almost too much of a good thing. Ever since, though, I haven’t stopped thinking about them as a ‘model’ that is now calcifying in AAA. Both games were critical and commercial successes, which, ostensibly, means that they are now the basis for how future developers will build their prestige games. As such, I’m looking at Star Wars Outlaws with suspicion rather than delight. Is it just going to be One of These Again? I sure hope not.
