Worst Open World Game of All Time - Raven's Cry

There are few types of games as ambitious as those set in an open world. Whether a multiplayer sandbox, massively multiplayer RPG or an elaborate single player exploration game, the amount of work involved is daunting. Companies like CD Projekt, Rockstar Games and of course, the kings of open world adventure, Bethesda, have spent a lifetime learning how to deal with all the… complexities and difficulties that go into giving the player the ‘go anywhere do anything’ freedom that comes with an open world experience. Many smaller developers simply don’t try or give up halfway through, as was the case with Deep Silver’s laughably bad 2013 game Ride to Hell: Retribution which began development as an open world game but was released as a story driven linear adventure. When setting out to find the worst open world game of all time, finding the games that were simply bad because they were buggy or poorly executed wasn’t enough. Open world games are always always a little jankey or buggy or the story isn’t always as well developed or the gameplay isn’t as tight, but these concessions are often made in order to make the game more broad than it is deep. Exploration is at its best in an open world game so if that is what a player is looking for, they are willing to put up with a little roughness around the edges. On release Bethesda RPGs are often most broken games you can play, but I still love them to death. There are, of course, only so many corners that can be cut before the end product can no longer be considered a real game, and Reality Pump Studios’ 2015 open world pirate adventure game Raven’s Cry is honestly one of the most in-excusable messes we’ve ever seen. A bad game is a bad game, but a bad open world game is an unintentional nightmare. Keep in mind too, this game came out over a year after Ubisoft’s fantastic 2013 Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag so at this point, a modern pirate game where you can quest, explore, sword fight and sail a ship around had already been done. One can only assume that the developers of Raven’s Cry said to themselves ‘ok, to make ourselves stand out lets do all of the things Black Flag did, except as terribly as possible.’ Everything that could have gone wrong with this title went sideways in the worst possible way. Absolutely nothing here is worthy of praise and every aspect of the game that almost got a pass has some other part of it that throws it overboard. The graphics for the most part look good, with the main character’s models and textures looking kinda fantastic, but then the animations are a total mess. Not only is there little to no transition between attacks, death, movement etc… but the animations that do exist look ancient. Sword Fights? Get ready to mash some buttons and hope for the best. The naval combat on the other hand is shockingly functional; but you never want to get into a fight because the game keeps throwing more powerful ships against you. Seriously you can’t even enjoy the least-broken aspect of the game because almost every naval battle is either a suicide mission or running for your life. All of this is easy to demonstrate as just seeing this game in action illustrates these flaws. The player character along with every other NPC in the game is totally disconnected from the world. Everyone floats around like they are in some kind of testing environment and that is the biggest give-away to the fundamental reason this game is bad, it feels like an unfinished game pretending to be a complete product. Eventually re-released almost a year later as Vendetta: Curse of Raven’s Cry, the updated version failed to course correct, and the new additions like updated voice over and new weapons were just subtle coats of paint on an unsalvageable shipwreck. Its also worth mentioning that the updated version was pulled from Steam for half a year for unconfirmed reasons, but many believe the culprit to be fake positive reviews added by the game’s publishers themselves. The publisher has never explained by but what else do you expect from fucking pirates. Are there worse games out there? Of course there are. But few games fail so spectacularly as Raven’s Cry. Most bad games have one or two big things you can point to; something like ‘the facial animations are a joke’ or ‘the ending was terrible’ but Raven’s cry messed up EVERYTHING. There is nothing here to enjoy, nothing here what so ever that gives players a reason to pick it up and start playing; but there could have been. Perhaps some joy could have been found in this game had the creators known their limits and not made the game an open world. It succeeds at nothing, not a single element in this game works and in an open world that means a relentless onslaught of broken systems. Unlike most other REAL games there is no way for a player to just focus on the one or two things they like that, for them, make the game worth playing. We would love to make this game walk the plank, but we don’t have one of those so instead we are simply going to call it the worst open world game of all time. What do you guys think? Let us know in the comments if you agree or disagree. What is the worst open world game you’ve ever played?