Open Worlds and Time

Friday! And yes the first weekend in July so hopefully some good weather to be on it's way. In other news lately I have been having a lot of discussions about open world games and how their story breeds urgency and yet really doesn't have any. For this week's Reader Post Flaks is talking about that in relation to everyone's new favourite open world game Witcher 3 and other games which take on the same concept.

Don't you think in Witcher 3 it's a bit annoying when the story calls for urgency, yet, there's none.

The Batman Arkham Games that are semi-open world also has those moments of "urgency"

Mostly with Batman Arkham City:

"I have to save Catwoman from being lynched, I can't waste no time"

Before I do that, I first spend an hour or so fetching some Riddler trophies and beat up some people scattered all over the map to level myself up before I go to the courthouse to save her.

So much for that urgency.

Among other things in which Batman is poisoned, need to find a cure, and the announcements of how many hours Protocol 10 starts.
Since the announcements are only announced in story progression, it sometimes takes a couple of real life hours before you finally hear that an hour has passed, and sometimes an hour has passed in 20 minutes or so.

I did read that for Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain, there might be a sense of urgency in which apparently when you have a mission involving rescuing someone, if you take too long to complete it, by perhaps being side tracked doing other stuff, and in-game days go by, the person might die, and your mission is a failure.

to be honest, I would hate it if you have an open world game, and there's no time for you to explore everything in it, because of lack of time.
Something I had with Shadow of Memories also called Shadow of Destiny, in which you travel back in time to change the events leading to your death, it's not exactly open world, since you're stuck in this little town, but you visit different eras of time of it.

And even though, you could explore it, and talk with people there, and change little things in it, that would change things at present time, you only had a limited amount of time.

Like if you were murdered around 10PM, and your life gets reset back to 9PM, you have like an hour the time to prevent yourself being killed, the time counts down real time for the duration, even if you go back in time and visit a different era, the time in the present still keeps moving, along with the time you're currently in in the past. but it kinda speeds up a minute or so after you talk with someone, so every little thing you do you lose precious time, some story cutscenes take off 10 to 20 minutes of your countdown time, even if the cutscene itself wasn't that long.

that game did had urgency with the limited freedom you get with doing other things, but there's not much you can do in fear of running out of time and starting over, but I would love to have the chance to explore all options instead of keeping myself busy before time runs out.

If the story says urgency, but grands you the unlimited freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want, then I'll take it then having a timer over my head. Any thoughts?

Thank you Flaks and everyone else who sent in a post to be considered for this week. As always this could not be done without all you and your contributions.

Have a great weekend everyone!