- [Falcon] Open-world games are amazing.

What we can see in a virtual world in a video game nowadays

blows my mind on a regular basis,

but still, some of it is a little weird.

Hi, folks, it's Falcon, and today on Gameranx,

10 open-world concepts that make no sense whatsoever.

Just a quick note, before we get going here,

we actually did a similar topic video a while back

called 10 dumb things that only happen in open-world games,

so bear in mind,

we're gonna try to avoid repeating too much

from that one.

We love open-world games, and we play a lot of them,

so it's not as if we haven't noticed

a fair amount of things anyways.

So let's get going with it.

Starting off at number 10,

let's start with something blatantly ridiculous,

grappling the ground as you fall to your death.

So have you ever played an open-world game

where they have a grappling hook in it,

like "Just Cause" or "Dying Light"?

These are an innovation of games in recent years

that just makes games so fun.

I absolutely love grappling hooks,

but I want to go ahead and say

that they have a few things that just don't make sense.

One, if you've ever seen a real grappling hook launcher,

they're very, very big,

and it's kind of bizarre when you think about

how much power you would need to pull a human being up.

But this isn't the that-makes-no-sense element of it.

Of course, we have to have some suspension of disbelief

in order to make a game fun.

Mechanics are obviously not going to be completely true

to life in a game that's like,

"Hey, here's a grappling hook. Zip around the world."

But there's one thing, wow, does it not make sense?

You can easily save yourself from deadly falls in some games

by simply grappling the ground,

and this does not make any sense, and for so many reasons.

I mean, both in "Dying Light" and "Just Cause,"

it makes no sense that like,

so you've hit terminal velocity,

you would die if you landed,

so you grapple the ground

and start going towards the ground faster.

At that point, they're just like, you know what?

Whatever. It doesn't matter if makes sense.

What more do you really need to say here?

Grappling with the ground makes it

so you don't hurt yourself when falling to the ground.

You know your game is wild as hell

when literal superhero games

have more realistic physics in them.

The only reason this works at all is because it's super fun.

Having a consistent grapple that is always pulling you

straight to your destination safely,

it's obviously there purely for the player's benefit.

It just makes it easier to get around.

But I can't even count the times

ground grappling has saved my life in "Dying Light."

So at the end of the day, I can't complain.

It just doesn't make sense.

I guess who cares, though, right?

It's fun.

At number nine,

people in the street who have zero survival instinct.

Since "Grand Theft Auto III" came out

and pretty much defined the open-world genre,

one consistent thing that these games all have

in some capacity is dumb NPCs.

Certain games obviously are better than others,

but in general,

the people encounter in the streets in open-world games

have the self-preservation instincts of a fruit fly.

Actually, no, scratch that.

Flies are actually kind of hard to kill.

NPCs? Mmm.

If you tried to smack them with a person-sized fly swatter,

I don't know that they would get out of the way.

Flies tend to.

These guys, on the other hand, often just stand there,

let your mow 'em down with a car.

And even if they've got the basic idea to do a little dodge,

generally, they go about their day

like nothing happened afterwards.

Sometimes they panic and run away,

but just as likely, they'll freeze in place and do nothing.

Maybe they'll duck down a little, but that's about it.

It's almost like they want to die.

In most games, these guys just don't even try.

In "GTA," it's pretty ridiculous,

but dumb pedestrians really take it to the next level

in other games like "Prototype,"

where there's hundreds of people

just kind of milling around

outside the middle of a zombie apocalypse.

It's really your own fault

if you get snatched and absorbed into a monstrous biomass

at that point.

You're kind of hopeless.

The reason for why open-world NPCs are so dumb

is a simple one.

AI is something that's pretty system-taxing, even now,

and most games just don't really bother

making the people wandering the streets that smart.

They're just kind of there for window dressing,

so they don't do much more than walk back and forth

and sometimes yell at you when you drive on the sidewalk.

Some games definitely are better at it than others,

like "GTA's" pedestrians are way smarter

than "Cyberpunk's" brain-dead, I guess, people.

They're all robots on some level, though, right?

I don't know. I don't know.

They're not very smart in "Cyberpunk"

is what I'm getting at.

And, you know, that's more the norm.

In general, people in the street in games

just don't seem to mind a whole lot about getting killed.

At number eight,

when metal and wooden fences are easy to smash through,

but a little brush has an unbreakable barrier.

And you know what we're talking about here.

This sort of thing pops up in pretty much all of them.

You're driving along, smashing through everything in sight,

when suddenly, this small, if it were in real life,

easily breakable barrier stops you dead in your tracks,

like in "GTA" when you slam through a traffic light,

no problem, but a bush totals the car,

or in "Forza Horizon 4,"

where these small stone walls are everywhere

that your car plows through with like no effort,

but then there are others small stone walls in town

around people's houses that are just too much.

They look almost the same, really similar,

but one you can smash and the other you can't.

It's especially annoying going back to older games,

where it was even more inconsistent,

like in games where you can just smash through trees,

but then a metal fence stops you dead.

For one, certain things are just way too easy

to crash through.

I mean, if you actually tried to ram into an electrical pole

or traffic light, your car would get totaled.

However, in these games,

these things bend over like a plastic straw,

and I'm talking the kind of plastic straws

designed to bend, mind you.

And most cars in open-world games

are just like rolling tanks,

unless they're GTA Trilogy cars,

which can both smash through everything, no problem,

but a stiff wind sometimes make them explode.

Other reason, it's really inconsistent.

If you smash through a normally impassable thing,

why can't you smash through this

other normally impassible thing?

That's what's so annoying about this stuff.

It's not just that it doesn't make sense.

It's not even consistent.

And at number seven, climbing towers tells you everything.

"Assassin's Creed" has a lot to answer for as a series.

What is supposed to be happening when you climb a tower

and the camera swirls around,

shows you all the pickups and the objectives in the area?

Most of the time, you can't physically see all this stuff,

so what is going on?

Is it magic powers or something?

And so many games have this,

but it feels like "Assassin's Creed" games

are the ones that really popularized the use of towers

to uncover activities and collectibles in games.

At this point, it's just accepted.

Some of them provide some kind of an excuse,

like getting to a tower and downloading information

from it or something,

but for the most part, it doesn't really make sense.

From a gameplay standpoint shirt, sure,

you want to have places you can go to uncover the map

and find out where all the stuff is,

so making it so to climb something

to get that information makes sense as a challenge.

You have to complete it to get it,

but in terms of real-world stuff, it's a stretch.

Yeah, if you're playing a game

where you're exploring a new and unknown place,

having it so you slowly uncover the mat make sense,

but sometimes uncovering the map is, it's odd.

Let's say you're uncovering the map to,

oh, I don't know, Rome,

one of the major cultural centers of Earth.

It feels like a little bit of a stretch.

Even during that time,

would someone not have made a map?

And I mean, I guess he doesn't need one

'cause he's got elf eyes or whatever.

He spots tiny treasure boxes

from the top of a church steeple or whatever.

I know I'm narrowing on "Assassin's Creed" here.

A lot of games do it, though, like "Far Cry,"

"Spider-Man," "Breath of the Wild."

Like I said, you got your downloading there, though.

You got "Middle Earth."

They all do it, and even makes sense in some of the games,

like in "Far Cry" where you're tapping into the radio.

But usually, there's not a whole lot of justification given.

At number six, cops are just cool with crime.

The way police work in an open-world game

with a wanted level system just never really makes sense.

It's a thing that's really obvious in "GTA" games,

but it shows up in pretty much every open-world game

where there's an authority or enemy

that starts hunting you down if you piss 'em off.

But this is specifically what I mean.

In open-world games,

you can get into a shootout with the cops,

potentially kill dozens of them,

and they'll kill you in return.

Then they take you to a hospital and just let you go.

That's how it works in "GTA" games.

And it's insane when you think about it.

Imagine that's how it worked in real life.

Yeah. You're a multiple murderer.

You didn't just kill regular people, either.

You killed the people who enforce laws.

But you know, we shot you,

so it's all water under the bridge.

And at least in the older games, they'd take your guns.

In "GTA V," they don't even do that.

While you're in the hospital recovering,

they just bring them in a bag or something for you.

Oh yeah, you had all these guns,

and we figured it wasn't all right to confiscate them.

I mean, yeah, yeah. You killed some of us.

And the "GTA" series is obviously not the only one

guilty of this.

In "Red Faction: Guerrilla,"

you're a freedom fighter battling it out

with the oppressive government.

And yeah, they can get pretty aggressive hunting you down

if you do enough damage to their stuff,

but if you just drive to one of your bases,