There was a time when open-world games felt magical. The first time I stepped into the world of Skyrim, it felt endless—a place where every mountain could be climbed, every path could lead to adventure, and every NPC might have a secret quest hiding in their dialogue.
Now? Open-world games just feel empty.
It’s not that they’re smaller—they’re bigger than ever. But somehow, the bigger they get, the less they actually have to say. Cities feel like ghost towns filled with NPCs that only exist to repeat the same two lines. Side quests feel like recycled errands. Exploration feels more like checking off a to-do list than actual discovery.
And AI? AI is about to make it even worse.
Because the way things are going, open-world games are turning into algorithmically-generated theme parks, where the game isn’t designed to challenge you or surprise you—it’s designed to keep you entertained just long enough to make sure you don’t leave.
AI-Generated Worlds Feel Big—But They Feel Hollow
Developers already use procedural generation to create massive open worlds. Games like No Man’s Sky and Starfield can generate entire planets with the push of a button.
But here’s the thing: procedural generation doesn’t make a world interesting.
- No Man’s Sky launched with billions of planets—but most of them were barren, lifeless, and boring.
- Starfield promised a thousand explorable planets—but almost all of them felt copy-pasted, like space-themed walking simulators.
- Even Elden Ring, which used AI to generate certain environmental elements, still needed handcrafted world design to make it actually feel alive.
AI-generated landscapes look impressive—but they don’t tell stories. They don’t have meaningful design choices. They just exist.
And yet, studios keep chasing scale over substance.
Because bigger worlds sell.
AI-Generated Side Quests: The Death of Real Storytelling
The next big thing is AI-driven side quests—quests that change dynamically based on how you play. No more scripted questlines—just endless, procedurally generated content tailored to your choices.
Sounds great, right? Until you realize what it actually means.
- No more deeply written side stories like in The Witcher 3.
- No more handcrafted character arcs like Arthur Morgan’s in Red Dead Redemption 2.
- No more moments that actually feel personal and unique—because instead of a real writer designing a quest with emotional weight, an AI is just randomly assembling objectives based on pre-programmed formulas.
And here’s the thing—AI can’t tell good stories.
It can generate stories. It can create infinitely branching dialogue trees. It can even write dialogue that sounds kind of convincing.
But it can’t create a moment. It can’t make a quest that sticks with you years later. It can’t give you a story worth remembering.
And the more studios rely on AI to create content instead of actual writers, the more open-world games are going to feel like endless, shallow distractions instead of meaningful experiences.
Are Open-World Games Becoming Personalized Theme Parks?
The scary part? AI-generated content is exactly what big studios want.
Because if AI can build quests on demand, if AI can generate side content endlessly, then games don’t need to end.
- They don’t want you to finish a game and move on—they want you trapped in the loop forever.
- They don’t want to tell a complete story—they want infinite replayability, infinite engagement.
- They don’t want to create art—they want content.
And once AI gets good enough, we won’t just be playing games.
We’ll be passively experiencing them.
Because at that point, we’re not explorers anymore. We’re tourists.
And the game? It’s just a theme park designed to keep us entertained, not to challenge us, not to make us think, not to create something truly memorable—just to keep us playing.
So What Happens Now?
AI-generated content isn’t going away. Open-world games are only going to get bigger, more algorithmically designed, more optimized for infinite engagement.
The only question is—will any of it actually matter?
Because right now, I’d rather play a small, handcrafted world that actually has something to say than a massive AI-generated map filled with endless, soulless distractions.
And if developers keep chasing scale over meaning?
Open-world games are just going to become shiny, interactive voids.