10 Most Polarizing Open-World Games You Either Love Or Hate

Highlights

• Gamers tend to disagree on the best games – whether it’s
  Red Dead 2
  ‘s busy work or
  Saints Row 4
  ‘s wacky fun.
• Some find
  Death Stranding
  Kojima’s masterpiece, while others label it a walking simulator – a matter of taste.
• Games like
  Outward
  and
  Kingdom Come: Deliverance
  divide players with brutal difficulty and realism – not for everyone.

If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s how much gamers disagree with one another. Whether it be one’s preferred platform to game on, the genres they like, or the best loadout in any given game, someone’s always ready to disagree with your opinion. It’s great that people are passionate about games, but it tends to lead to a lot of arguments.

However, some topics cause more arguments than others, like if certain games stink or not. Some games are really polarizing, and there are plenty of games that some gamers love and others hate. The open-world games on this list have sparked plenty of healthy (and not-so-healthy) debate over the years. Whether they’re good or not is mostly a matter of taste, something that differs from person to person.

10 Red Dead Redemption 2

Too Much Busy Work For Some People

Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the best-rated games ever made. Rockstar’s magnum opus, the game has been endlessly praised for its stunning graphics, great world-building, well-written characters, and heart-wrenching story. Easily one of the most immersive open-world games ever made, Rockstar went to ridiculous lengths to make the game feel as realistic as possible.

But that realism left a lot of gamers feeling cold. They wanted to shoot bad guys and rob trains, not constantly brush Arthur’s horse, do chores around the gang’s camp, and make sure his guns were clean. It can feel like everything in Red Dead Redemption 2 takes ages, and some of its systems seem designed not to be fun, but to test the player’s patience. It might be considered a masterpiece, but it’s certainly not for everyone.

9 Saints Row 4

Jumped The Shark

The Saints Row franchise started off as a “we have Grand Theft Auto at home” clone and quickly evolved into something very different. The exact point at which the series jumped the shark is up for debate, but many fans of the series felt Saints Row 4 strayed too far from what the series was originally.

The game revolves around the player’s character becoming the president and fighting off an alien invasion from within a matrix-style computer simulation. While using superpowers. It dialed the series’ zany humor up to 11 and left any notions of realism at the door. For many gamers, it was simply too much silliness, not helped by the fact that the game’s engine could barely cope with all the mayhem. Others embraced the madness and found there was a lot of fun to be had if they switched their brains off. The franchise’s 2022 reboot tried to go back to its slightly more grounded in reality roots but was even less well-received.

8 Death Stranding

Kojima’s Walking Simulator

The term walking simulator is thrown around a lot to describe games that some people find boring. Kojima seems to have heard the term and decided it would work great as a game’s central gameplay mechanic. People weren’t sure what to expect after his split from Konami, but they weren’t expecting a game about a glorified post-apocalyptic postman.

Whether Death Stranding is one of the best post-apocalyptic games ever made or a total bore is a matter of opinion. Some players loved its polarizing delivery mechanics and bizarre story, while others were just plain bored. Kojima’s storytelling style isn’t for everyone and Death Stranding is somehow even weirder than Metal Gear Solid. While there is combat, it’s certainly not the focus, and what combat there is, isn’t all that fun. If the teasers are anything to go by, it looks like Kojima has taken these complaints on board and has taken a much more action-oriented approach with the sequel. Then again, no one knows what the famous director will do next.

7 Outward

Brutally Hard, Full Of Jank

A lot of gamers have never heard of Outward. First released back in 2019, over the years it’s built up somewhat of a cult following. It’s a brutally difficult open-world action RPG with survival elements that never hold the player’s hand. Quests can fail if the player is too slow, even low-level enemies are tough, and a good sense of direction is a necessity.

Outward is the kind of game where it’s totally possible to lose hours of progression thanks to one slight slip-up and wake up naked under a tree with no gear and no clue where you are. First-time payers will check Outward’s beginner tips guide constantly and still struggle with its earliest areas. Some masochistic gamers love that sense of difficulty. Others find it unfair. Many are turned off by the game’s not-great graphics and generally janky nature. Once you’re hooked, it’s easy to spend 100+ hours in Outward, but it’s even easier to give up after just a couple.

6 Final Fantasy 15

A Big Departure

Final Fantasy 15 did a really good job at splitting the fandom. It was a major departure from earlier entries in the series, and many of the changes it made were deeply polarizing. It’s the first game in the series to have a true open world, which sounds great. But many fans claimed that while that world was very pretty, it was largely empty and broken up by irritating invisible worlds. It lacked the sense of exploration that good open-world games thrive on.

Much more controversial, however, was the combat. Some might argue Final Fantasy 15 has one of the best combat systems in an RPG, but a fair few felt it lacked strategic depth. Plus, a lot of fans blame Final Fantasy 15 for the franchise’s move away from turn-based battles. The less said about its summoning and magic systems, the better. The game’s story also struggled to impress everyone, not helped by the fact fans were expected to consume a fair amount of extra media if they wanted to fully understand it. This being said plenty of gamers enjoyed the game’s story, especially the central relationship between Noctis and his friends, as well as the incredibly dark final act.

5 Starfield

Not What Fans Expected

If one only read all the online discourse surrounding Starfield’s release, they’d come away thinking the game was a massive flop that no one enjoyed. Yet, that’s not really fair. The game has its fair share of problems, sure, but plenty of people (especially those who kept their expectations in check) found a fair amount to enjoy.

Part of the problem lay in the fact that Starfield just wasn’t what a lot of Bethesda fans expected – Fallout in space. Bethesda was also guilty of over-hyping the game and over-promising, especially when it came to how many worlds there were to explore and how exploration would work. Starfield relies heavily on a handful of locations repeated over and over again using procedural generation This is something that alienated a lot of players who love Betheda’s handcrafted worlds. However, Starfield’s core gameplay can be fun. Dog battles in space and upgradeable ships? Great. Gunplay? There are plenty of overpowered weapons, and the guns feel good to shoot. The game’s ending is also pretty cool and a fresh take on New Game Plus. While Starfield will likely never win over everyone, plenty of people still seem to be enjoying it.

4 Days Gone

Zombies, Again

A lot of PlayStation owners had high hopes for Days Gone. As Deacon Lee Saint John, we were tasked with biking around a massive open-world while searching for our wife, killing massive zombie hordes, and uncovering the true cause of the infection. For fans of zombie games in particular, there was a lot to love.

However, Days Gone’s zombies were the first strike against it for many. There are a lot of people who are simply bored with zombies and think they’re over-used. Days Gone’s zombie hordes were technically impressive and thrilling to fight, but in smaller groups, they were a mere nuisance. Many players also felt that outside of those hordes, the core gameplay was repetitive and not all that interesting. Deacon Lee Saint John was also a polarizing protagonist who was neither all that likable nor interesting. That’s a problem when much of the game was about looking for his wife – something plenty of people didn’t care about.

3 Fallout 76

A Terrible Launch

It must be hard sometimes for studios to know exactly what fans of their game want. Before Fallout 76 was announced, a vocal section of the community was calling out for an online mode for Fallout. When Bethesda announced Fallout 76, many of those same fans complained that the game would be an MMO, not single-player. Bethesda then made things much worse by fumbling the game’s launch.

Fallout 76 was released in a shockingly poor state and was nowhere near finished. It lacked key aspects of the franchise that many expected (like actual NPCs), was riddled with bugs, and massacred parts of the franchise’s lore. But, to be fair to Bethesda, they’ve spent years trying to redeem the game. Today, thanks to frequent, massive content drops, Fallout 76 is a very different game and has a dedicated player base. While not the most immersive Bethesda game, the majority of its content can be played solo, and the developers have worked hard to make it a “proper” Fallout game. This being said, Fallout 76 hasn’t been redeemed in everyone’s eyes, and its name is a dirty word in some corners of the fandom.

2 No Man’s Sky

A Mile Wild, An Inch Deep

Much of what we said about Fallout 76 and Starfield can be applied to No Man’s Sky. The game was over-hyped before release and then went through a very rocky launch. Excited gamers got their hands on the game only to discover its vast universe of planets wasn’t particularly deep and there wasn’t really much to do. All but the most die-hard survival fans quickly abandoned it.

Thankfully, Hello Games didn’t give up on No Man’s Sky and has released a ridiculous number of updates. There’s not enough space here to list everything that’s been added, but No Man’s Sky is a very different game from what it once was. That doesn’t mean everyone loves it now, though. For many gamers, its core gameplay loop still isn’t that fun or interesting. The game still relies on randomly generated planets, its combat is still basic, and it can be repetitive to play. For every gamer who has gone back to No Man’s Sky and fallen in love with its improvements, there’s another who has gone back only to remain disappointed.

1 Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Too Focused On Realism For Some People

The developers at Warehouse Studios had a clear vision. They wanted to make a realistic-feeling open-world RPG set in Medieval Europe that was as historically accurate as possible. They succeeded in doing so, but in the process, they created a game that some loved and some hated. The major problem people had with the game was its slavish dedication to realism.

Its combat was a far cry from normal RPG combat and had a real learning curve to it. Leveling up wasn’t enough, one had to learn the real basics of swordplay. Sadly, for many players, that meant spending hours sparring with a trainer if they didn’t want to be stabbed to death by unarmored bandits. Realism also meant light survival mechanics that were more irritating than meaningful and quests that would fail if Henry stopped to smell the roses. Some gamers lauded Kingdom Come’s historical accuracy and devotion to realism, while others simply found it boring.