When is big too big?

Size ain’t everything

Games

are getting bigger in almost every way, especially in the AAA space. Bigger dev teams (at least during production), bigger budgets, bigger marketing spends, and of course bigger products. It wasn’t that long ago that games larger than 10GB were rare on the ground. Now they’re kinda cute and tiny and retro. Two of this month’s games were positively huge, but I’m no sure they’re any better for it. Both Mass Effect Andromeda and Ghost Recon Wildlands push enormous worlds to explore, though Andromeda spreads its action out over multiple worlds, with distanct locales.

But you’re still doing the same things on each of them. In Wildlands, it’s a single, giant, open world, but it merely means you spend a lot of time sliding around on mountainside roads or trying to control helicopters before they crash into said mountainsides.

As Daniel observes in our Mass Effect conversational, it’s a matter of scale over scope.

The problem with opening worlds wider and wider is that you end up needing more things to fill them with, and then you end up just putting in filler quests Andromeda doesn’t even seem to be hiding the fact that it’s giving you busy work, when one of the galaxyspanning quests is called Hitting Rocks for Science...