I think that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion unwittingly established a terrible precedent for how to begin an open world video game. It starts with a thirty-ish minute dungeon crawl where you learn the game's fight mechanics and create a character, and then you emerge through a sewer door into the bright, vast, open world for the rest of the adventure.

Every single game journalist, Elder Scrolls fan, and casual player at the time marveled at the design of this opening. It was so popular and beloved that it has now infected nearly every other big video game with a weird pacing problem. If you're playing a large single player story-based game, you can almost count the Oblivion beats with a boilerplate checklist. You'll be slowly introduced to the world in a small, cordoned off area, before suddenly being dumped into the larger scope of the story — often through a doorway that opens to a bright scene.

Is this good design? Sometimes, maybe. It certainly was twenty years ago. But I think its ongoing life might just be shameless copying of a "safe" trend. And it has gone on for so long that it has picked up yers and years of bloat.

The more of these openings I've experienced, the more I've realized their immense capacity to bore me to tears with even one small fumble of the pacing.

I tried to replay Horizon: Zero Dawn the other day — but I forgot that you have to spend the first hour as child Aloy. It moves at a glacial pace carefully doling out rote game mechanics to you even if you skip all the cutscenes. You'll learn how to crouch, how to jump, and how to read stealth cones like you've probably done a million other times already. And even if it's your first game ever, you'll wonder what all the hype was about as the opening prevents you from getting to the good stuff.

Getting beyond child Aloy, you're then dumped into a second larger tutorial where you're in a cordoned off zone learning the mechanics yet again through a set of easier quests. This area feels more like the real game, but things don't really actually get going till you're done with it. And by then it's harder to care than it was when you first booted the game. The sequel does a similar thing — even though the mechanics aren't meaningfully different.

So many open world games fall into this pacing hole. Breath of the Wild, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Final Fantasy XV, The Witcher 3, every Bethesda game since Oblivion. The list goes on. I understand the desire to carefully introduce these large games to players, but we're living in a world where game completion percentages are shockingly low. Go look at the achievements list for your favorite huge game, and it's almost a guarantee that only around 30 percent of players actually got to the end. How many players are these massive openings losing, right from the jump?

I tucked Assassin's Creed Odyssey into that list because I think it's the secret worst offender even though I love many aspects of it. Odyssey starts on a small island that represents one tiny fraction of its vast open space, but that island is filled with quests and content. You can spend six hours with the game before you get to the title screen and actually start the main adventure. During that time, you'll slowly learn the mechanics of the rest of the game, and also get a bunch of backstory dumped on you in flashbacks, and also take a couple of trips into the game's modern day setting, and also encounter numerous meaningless side quests. It's weirdly exhausting, and the appearance of the title screen six hours in is deeply unsatisfying.

In a cruel twist of pacing fate, the huge adventure that sprawls out after that is actually one of the most fun, varied, and action-packed games that Ubisoft ever produced. But most players didn't see all of it through — myself included. Looking at PlayStation trophy data, thirty percent of players gave up on that initial island before seeing the title screen, and seventy percent never made it to the end. That's millions of gamers, and it's similar on the other two platforms.

I know that the gaming industry only cares about selling more copies, and that big scope equals more sales, but from a pure analytical standpoint, these engagement numbers are undeniably poor. If Odyssey had a quicker intro, with more excitement right away, then more players would actually get to see the good stuff.

Linear games aren't immune to this design trap either. The beleaguered Immortals of Aveum starts with a couple of text screens full of indecipherable lore and jargon, followed by a lengthy slow romp around a city during which more lore is dumped upon your lap. You then finally get access to the cool magical shooting powers the game is built around — but you use them to shoot random blobs of goo on a bridge. Once the actual story gets going, you're inducted as a novice in the game's central magic military, and you're constantly being taught how to do things as part of the story. It's narratively slow and unsatisfying — even though the actual gameplay is really fun, and the visuals are state of the art.

I thought that boring tutorial levels were going to die out after the PS2 era where every game taught me how to jump and run on a little training course. Instead, they're longer than they ever were, and often cordoned off from the rest of the game like a weird vertical slice demo that grew out of control. I want to start playing the real video game right away. I want games to respect my time and the fact that I now have to spend 70 dollars on them if I want to be there day one. I absolutely love narrative and lore and engaging with that stuff, but I don't want it all forced on me in the first few seconds. Hook me with some exciting gameplay. Teach me through easy quests. Then tease me with some narrative mysteries so I want to keep going.

For as much as I've poked at the weirdness in Dragon's Dogma 2, it got this design component totally right. It quickly teaches you how to throw something and hit something, then bam the adventure starts with a big exciting credit sequence. And the early quests are easier in order to draw you into the world, before it starts to take some hilariously mean turns.

Please don't make me play a smaller version of the game that I have to complete before playing the real game. I just can't any more. This makes me feel like I've finished the game when I'm actually just getting started, as these areas get larger and larger in modern open worlds. I know it was cool in Oblivion. That game is twenty years old, and it's time to move on.

I'm pretty stoked about Star Wars Outlaws. However, the previous game from the same core team is Frontiers of Pandora. That game of course starts with a long walled-off lore dump where you then emerge from a hole into a wider open world before learning all the mechanics in a slow fashion, but I pushed through it due to the incredible graphics and gameplay that eventually show up. If Star Wars Outlaws starts with a lengthy sequence where I have to see Kay Vess as a troubled teen on the streets of Coruscant and learn how to sneak behind crates, instead of an exciting chase or action scene, I am going to be upset.