Summary
Open-world gamesare exciting opportunities for gamers to explore the unknown, meet quirky characters, and set out on an adventure. Explorer players mostly enjoy these games for their incredible amount ofcontent and world-building, but the stories featured are also an important part of the journey.
So, when open-world games have weird stories, it’s easy for players to get confused and even lost. Are they the heroes, or are they just there as decor? Some of theweirdest stories in open-world gamesare surreal, some are outright impossible to understand, and some feature awkward moments that will make players wonder: Why did the developers think this was a good idea?
From the first minute players get into the world ofFable 2, they will see that things have changed in good old Albion. Industrialization has come to stay, the old chaste-like system is worse than ever, and yes, an evil lord is going at it again. But not just any evil lord; it’s a rather cliché and evil one. This poor old sod lost his wife and daughter, and he plans to make the world pay for it.
The story goes from bad to worse. Lord Lucien kidnaps and kills the main character’s sister. There’s a weird dark vibe around it as well, which involves certain themes that are better not discussed here. Nevertheless, the story quickly sends the main hero to look for other heroes (all while working as a part-timer in a bar) toband together and stop the sad evil guy. After that, it is just one somewhat meaningless quest after the other, ultimately turning into a French Revolution re-enactment. There is no denying thatFable 2is a great game, but it’s hard to ignore how weird its story is.
Written in collaboration with the legendary Todd McFarlane, this game promised to revolutionize the RPG genre. With its colorful world hiding a dark, sinister plot underneath its cheery exterior based on the Fae mythology,Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoninghad all it needed to succeed. But what happened? Why didn’t it become a huge success and have several sequels?
One of the things that the game did wrong was its approach to environmental storytelling. It was too dependent on the player finding the right lore. Its characters lacked charm, and their dialogues were cryptic and weird. The story was hard to follow, too. It was either too deep and philosophical in certain parts or pretty straightforward and shallow in others. It didn’t have the proper balance between player agency and a solid plot, and the result was an awkward mess with many “singing stones” that players had to discover to understand what was going on. Plus, since it was one of the first open-world games that waslaunched afterSkyrim, it had pretty big boots to fill.
Metal Gear Solidwas always a franchise that relied heavily on cutscenes and cinematics to “show” what was going on. But surprisingly, inMetal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, this changed drastically, and the developers decided it was a better idea to change cinematics for audio logs saved in cassettes, which were spread throughout the many missions players had to complete.
The results were somewhat disappointing: a vast and empty desert-like world, with nothing but outposts and repetitive missions that practically made no sense. As such, many players felt compelled to just roam around completing mission after mission without a cohesive story behind them. The main villain’s plan is so poorly explained throughout the story that it seems like Snake is actually fighting some kind of phantom and not really anevil guy like Liquid Snake or Skull Face. It’s a shame the story ofMetal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Painfalters, especially since the game’s mechanics are so good.
Oblivionis, perhaps, theweirdest of allElder Scrollsgames. From minute zero, players are led to believe that they’re the heroes Tamriel needs, but the truth is that they just so happened to be blocking the escape route for the Emperor, and he needed to use their cell to evacuate before getting murdered. And he had no better idea than to carry a convict with him through his secret escape route while fearing for his life.
The story after that is more of the same. The Emperor dies (obviously) and then sends the player on a quest to find the remaining heir (a son he had with a maid who was taken to a monastery) who ends up being the true hero of the story. Not the Hero of Kvatch; they’re just an errand boy who so happens to be in the right place at the right time. The worst part is that players need to go through a series of nonsensical quests to close portals to an invading Daedra realm before the Scamps (naughty pyromaniacal gremlins) and Daedroths (fire-breathing alligators) turn everything to ash.The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivionis an excellent addition to the open-world genre, but its story is undeniably weird.
Starfieldhad a great opportunity toturn players into space (pirate) explorers, but it ended up becoming more of a blend between a walking simulator and an open-world game. Well, technically, the game is made up of “open worlds” since you get to visit the many (empty) planets in the galaxy through a series of cutscenes that don’t even let you land your ship.
The story is also quite strange. The protagonist is a miner who got in touch with a weird alien slab for some reason and then got recruited by a shady organization to do their bidding, find more slabs, and complete the puzzle. The final answer? There’s an alternate reality and a multiverse, and the protagonist becomes a Starborn, an interdimensional being capable of going through them.Starfieldalso features an incredibly weird ending. The protagonist meets another version of themselves from another universe, who explains that what the player just did was essentially just a means of unlocking the New Game+, resulting in an infinite loop of the same thing over and over again.Starfield’s story is certainly interesting in certain respects, but it is also undeniably weird.
From the get-go,Atomic Heartplayers dive into the ideal (utopian) alternate version of the URSS, where they won the Cold War, developing way beyond the rest of humanity.Robots and androidsare the bread of every day, and players control a super-Russian agent empowered with highly advanced nano-technology. However, like in most sci-fi utopian settings, everything falls apart, and yes, it’s the blame of the scientist who invented said technology. And the Russian super-soldier needs to fix it all by beating it all.
The world is huge and filled with murder bots, but the story is so weird and hard to follow that players will barely find time to explore while trying to keep up with what is going on. Plus, the only way for the character to progress is by having some weird (and awkward) interactions with a vending machine that has the hots for them.AtomicHeartis certainly a fun open-world title, but many parts of the game’s story are quite bizarre.
