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| 10 Worst Missions In Open World Games |
Open world games are often massive and have tons of missions and things to do, so every once in a while, there's something the game makes you do that's not so great. Here are 10 examples of some bad open world missions.
- First off with number 10, let's talk Days Gone.
They're Not Sleeping and the Narrow missions. Now, we like Days Gone. These missions from the game aren't necessarily the worst things ever, but they are a perfect example of one of the most annoying types of missions in open world games. You know, the forced stealth mission? These are the kinds of missions where if you get caught, then you have to restart the whole thing.
They're frustrating enough in games that are completely built around stealth, let alone ones that just have some stealth elements in it like Days Gone and, while there are definitely worse examples out there, their implementation in this game is pretty ridiculous and it makes it stand out as uniquely bad. Pretty early on in Days Gone, you find out that NERO, you know the camp's FEMA analog, is still around, even in the post-apocalypse.
They're conducting some kind of research and you want to go investigate what they're up to. The problem is, if they catch you, then it's game over. These guys are everywhere and the location they're all in is pretty wide open, so it's very easy to get caught. The whole thing boils down to trial and error, really, and rinse and repeating until you figure out the exact route the game wants you to take to avoid the guards.
That's annoying, but the dumbest thing by far about these missions is the reason why you can't get caught. Apparently these guys in the flimsy-looking hazmat suits are actually totally bulletproof somehow? That's the reason the game gives, that these floppy suits are somehow strong enough to deflect bullets.
Look, if they put these guys in bomb disposal armor or something, then sure we'd buy it. But the hazmat suits, it just didn't make a lot of sense. Anyway, these missions are dull, frustrating, and kind of plain nonsense, which is a shame because, like we said, the rest of the game is a lot better.
- Next over at number nine,
let's talk about Assassin's Creed 3,
Something on the Side. Now this entry is an example of another truly terrible open world game mission type overall, the trailing mission, the tailing mission, whatever you wanna call it. The ones where you're supposed to follow a car or a person within a certain radius and if you get too close or too far away, then the mission fails. And if they see you, the mission fails. Ugh. These things are always usually kind of janky or slow or frustrating And thankfully, most games have the good sense not to really include them anymore.
The Assassin's Creed games were basically the ones that really overdid this mission type and the Magnum Opus occurs in Assassin's Creed 3 with the mission that we said, Something on the Side. This is one where you're supposed to tail a guy through New York and it's got all the annoying aspects of one of those missions. It's just taken to the next level. This guy has some kind of sixth sense where it seems like he'll notice you out of nowhere. Somehow, tailing him from the rooftops just doesn't actually seem to work, so you're stuck following him on the ground where you're at the mercy of the game's NPCs if you wanna hide.
Assassin's Creed 3 is a notoriously iffy game. Sometimes it just won't do what you want it to do. And that's especially true of its awkward, crowd-hiding mechanic. In the older games, it worked fine. It's pretty cool. I have no idea why it got so sloppy in this one, but it makes what should be a relatively basic filler mission a huge pain in the butt to actually finish.
- Next over at number eight,
Jak II
is a shockingly difficult game with a lot of frustrating and annoying missions to pick from. But if we had to pick the worst, then we gotta go with this one, Hunt Haven Forest Metalheads. It sounds simple, but believe us, it's anything but. The problem is that all these enemies you have to hunt are invisible.
They're not too hard to notice close up, but from a distance they're easy to miss and these guys just love to ambush you out of nowhere. There are 30 enemies total in this place and you've got to take them all out without dying.
There are no checkpoints here, so if you die mid-mission, then it's back to the start and back to hunting all of them and finding them. And to make things even more frustrating, you lose any special ammo you brought, so dying makes this mission even harder. And if you remember how Jak II plays, you know it's not like a Ratchet and Clank.
There are no aiming mechanics, really, so you pretty much just have to spray and pray and hope that you hit these guys before they hit you. Most of the times, they'll just hit you anyway. And they hit hard. It's just a total filler mission that's way more frustrating than it should be.
- Now over at number seven,
the Shenmue series
is a game series that just runsnat a very different wavelength than anything else out there. Sure, the story is a Kung Fu-infused revenge story, but the actual game play is closer to a life simulator in a lot of ways, if you've never played it. It's totally different from most modern open world games and that's what makes them so interesting.
Everyone remembers the infamous forklift driving from the first game,but the sequel manages to somehow top that activity with something even more frustrating and tedious, airing books. Yes.The main plot of Shenmue II is about Ryo trying to find the location of ancient master Yuanda Zhu and the search eventually brings him to Man Mo Temple.
That's when you get tasked with performing this mini game where our brave hero has to carry piles of books from the library to some tables outside. Apparently the books are old and need to be aired out once in a while, and by that they mean every single day, because until you advance the plot to a certain point, you have to do this activity every single morning. The goal is to carry 14 piles of books outside, which sounds incredibly simple, but somehow it's not.
He must get drunk or something before starting. It's the only explanation for why he suddenly becomes so goofy and clumsy and useless. Randomly, while you're carrying the books, a very strict QTE popup will appear and if you miss it, then you drop the books on the ground and you have to start over. It's pointless, it's surprisingly frustrating, and it's just lame. You don't even get paid for your trouble. Missions in open world games don't really get much worse than this.
- Now over at number six,
the Grand Theft Auto series
has its fair share of annoying missions and many of the absolute worst, hate to say it, are in Grand Theft Auto III.
Now a lot of this stuff can be forgiven for being archaic or outdated simply because GTA III was a ground breaking game in so many ways, but that still isn't enough to excuse this one. Espresso 2 Go is a mission given by the Yakuza where the objective is simple, destroy all the espresso stalls in eight minutes. It sounds easy enough, but there's a big problem. You have to figure out where all the stalls are by yourself.
Remember, the map stuff was very tricky in the original game, very simple, and you relied on your mini map a lot, so unless you're relying on a walkthrough or a guide, trying to find these things to take them out, it's like a needle in a haystack. It's another example of an annoying mission in an old open world type game, you know, timed missions. Having a timer doesn't always make a mission bad, believe us, but when you combine a very strict timer with an already frustrating objective, you got the recipe for a pain. I get it, a lot of newer games are easier, older games were more challenging, but this is ridiculous.
- Next, over at number five,
let's talk about the original Spider-Man 2 and the balloon grab random mission. Now compared to every othernmission type on this list, this particular one isn't much. It's not some big event or anything, it's just a balloon. but it gets really annoying, really fast. And trust me, I love this game.
But the little kid crying about, "My balloon!" is one of the most annoying soundbites in video game history.
And the mission itself is so short and pointless that it just kind of gets on your nerves when it pops up. Was it just me? Of course, you could just skip it. You know, there's nothing forcing you to get that kid's stupid balloon, but you always end up feeling kind of like a jerk for skipping it, even if it doesn't really matter. I mean, you're Spider-Man. You should be doing everything you can. It's a nitpick in what is still a really great game. It's a lot of fun even now. But it's like if you do the mission, you feel like an idiot and when you don't do them, you feel like a jerk, so you really can't win at these things.
- Next over at number four,
No More Heroes
is just a weird as hell experience all around. Before you can do the main assassination jobs that are the meat of the game, you've gotta make money and one of your main sources of income is the job center.
Now, unlike most open world games where jobs usually mean something exciting, like clearing out enemy bases or getting into car chases or even taxi jobs, the jobs in No More Heroes are significantly more mundane. I'm talking like really mundane, like collecting coconuts or mowing lawns or picking up litter off the street. In the sequel, they managed to make these activities fun by transforming them into bite-sized arcade experiences, but in the first game, they're actually exactly as dull as you'd expect.
For lawn mowing, you literally have to mow the entire lawn. While in the coconut collector, you have to go around and hit palm trees to knock coconuts free. Garbage collection is literally just walking around and picking up wads of trash. There's really nothing else to it. The worst of them, although, has to be scorpion extermination, where you have to wander around this empty field picking up the little bugs. They're tiny and they're hard to see and if you step on one, then they sting you, which slows you down. And the time limit is only three minutes, but it feels like the longest three minutes of your life. Are these missions intentionally bad or just plain bad? We never know what they're doing with these games, who knows, but it doesn't change the fact that they annoyed us.
- Now over at number three,
for a game based on The Simpsons, you think that Simpsons Hit and Run would be pretty easy going, but around at the halfway mark, this game stops messing around and turns into one of the more difficult open world driving games out there. There are multiple missions that would fit for this list, but our personal worst has to be the mission called Set to Kill. This is the mission where you have to drive around and destroy 15 stands in one minute and 45 seconds, which sounds like it should be a cake walk, but there are a few reasons why it's not.
For one thing, you're forced to start with the Glowbex Super Villain Car, which is incredibly fragile, the time limit itself is incredibly strict, and the area it forces you to go through is filled with breakable objects. In any other open world game, that wouldn't be a big deal. But in this one, if you break too many things, then it triggers the police, or a hit and run.
And if that happens, you might as well restart because the mission becomes essentially impossible just juggling all that. If you want to beat this one legit, you pretty much have to play this 100% perfectly. For a mission that's only got a timer of 1:45, this one will take most players a long time to actually finish.
- Next over at number two,
you know it, you hate it. We're talking about the worst open world mission, so we've gotta mention Supply Lines from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It's the second mission you get from Zero in San Fierro and forces you to control an RC plane and shoot up five couriers driving around the city.
The setup is fine, but there are two major problems with this one. The first one is the controls. Trying to fly a normal.plane in San Andreas is tricky for a lot of missions, but at times this remote control plane can feel uncontrollable. Getting around isn't so.bad, but actually shooting.at a target accurately is incredibly difficult, especially when you're trying.to hit the bike couriers, ugh! The other problem is the fuel. These days, it's not so bad.
Rockstar did go back and made fuel consumption tied to acceleration, so it's much easier to play these days without totally running out. But in the original PlayStation 2 release of the game, you were basically screwed. The fuel was a time limit, pure and simple and that time limit was incredibly strict. So combining the floaty controls on the RC plane with an unforgiving time limit made this one of the most all-time frustrating missions in any game ever. The only good thing about it is that it is optional.
- Now, finally, down to number one,
Fair Play in Mafia
it doesn't get much worse than this. The original Mafia was groundbreaking when it came to mature storytelling in video games on PC, but the fifth mission is just awful. It's the one with the race. The car handles like a boat on wheels,.the race itself is incredibly difficult, and they basically just throw you to it with only minimal practice. The race itself isn't even the only bad part of the mission.
The part before that can go to hell, too. The section of the mission where you have to sabotage another car by driving it out to the mechanic then driving it back in time is almost just as bad. The trip to the mechanic is a little tight on the timing, but the trip back is just brutal because on top of the strict time limit, now you have to worry about the car potentially exploding at any moment if you bump into any little tiny thing. And with how tricky it controls, it's just, ugh, it's a hardcore driving simulation in the middle of what is normally just a third-person shooter.
Normally an extreme genre shift like this would mean that the developers would make that part easier for players who aren't good at driving games..But not here. You gotta get good or else. The original version of the game didn't even have difficulty settings, so if they wanted to play the rest of the game, then you just had to grind it out and win through this thing. There was no way around it. Technically now with the newer remake, you can get through it. There are still difficulty options, but it's not as bad.
And Mafia is a great game, but there's a reason that this mission and the original old school version is so well known and reviled. It's one of the most frustrating open world missions of all time. But there you have it guys. Those are some missions that really drove us nuts in open world games throughout the years.
There are plenty of other examples out there, though. We know you got your own, so we wanna hear from you down in the comments.
Let us know about a mission that drove you nuts, one of the worst missions ever.