When Freedom Starts Feeling Like Paperwork: Decision Fatigue and the Ubisoft Problem
Ubisoft’s open worlds are often criticised for being too big, too busy, and too stuffed with systems. Fair enough. But “bloat” is only the symptom. The deeper problem is psychological. Games like Far Cry 6, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Star Wars Outlaws often ask players to make so many small, low-value decisions that freedom starts feeling suspiciously like admin.
Ubisoft games are usually criticised in the same familiar language. Too many icons. Map too big. Too much stuff. This is all true, in the same way it is true that a cake can be too rich. Yes, obviously, but the interesting question is what made it sickening. Too much sugar. Too much frosting. A child baker with no adult supervision. “Bloat” has become the all-purpose diagnosis for the Ubisoft open world, but it is a blunt one. It describes the feeling after the fact without really explaining why the experience starts to sag under its own weight.
The more precise problem is that Ubisoft games often turn choice into background labour. They ask the player to sort, compare, equip, upgrade, investigate, prioritise, and optimise at such a steady rate that the work of managing the game can start to crowd out the pleasure of playing it.
This does not mean these games lack agency. In a literal sense, they are almost absurdly full of it. The problem is that much of this agency arrives in the form of small, repetitive, low-value decisions that never feel important enough to justify the attention they demand. At that point, freedom stops feeling expansive and starts feeling clerical. You are not just roaming a world. You are supervising it.
Decision Fatigue, Minus the Pop Psychology Nonsense
This is where decision fatigue is often mentioned, but let’s handle it carefully and not as a thought terminating cliché. In broad terms, decision fatigue refers to a decline in the quality of decisions, willingness to decide, or ability to sustain controlled decision-making after repeated choices. Vohs et al. (2008) tied this idea to ego depletion, arguing that effortful self-control and repeated decision-making draw on limited resources that can be worn down over time. It was the sort of theory psychology loves a little too quickly: neat, intuitive, and flattering to our sense that there must be a grand explanation for why we become worse versions of ourselves after dealing with too much nonsense.
The trouble is that the psychology here is not nearly as tidy as the pop version suggests. Lurquin and Miyake (2017) argued that ego depletion research faced not just replication trouble but a deeper conceptual mess, including uncertainty about what exactly was being depleted and how it should be measured. More recently, Choudhury et al. (2025) still treated decision fatigue as a useful construct, but in a more cautious and grounded way, linking it to repeated decision-making, complexity, uncertainty, time pressure, and shifts away from effortful controlled thinking under cognitive strain.
In other words, the basic intuition survives better than the cleaner myth. Repeated decisions can become mentally costly, but nobody sensible should pretend the science has given us a magical willpower battery with a perfectly reliable gauge.
This keeps us grounded. It keeps us away from the silly claim that Ubisoft has developed a clinical method for liquefying the player’s frontal lobe through crafting menus. Ubisoft games often create the conditions in which decision-making becomes mentally expensive. They pile on alternatives, systems, and small judgements, many of which are only loosely rewarding, and then act surprised when players start experiencing the whole thing as cognitive drag rather than exhilarating freedom.
Why Too Much Choice Starts to Feel Mentally Expensive
Choice overload research makes this much easier to explain. Chernev et al. (2015) found that large assortments become more likely to feel overwhelming when the choice set is complex, the decision task is difficult, preferences are uncertain, and the person is trying to minimise effort. Under those conditions, more choice can reduce satisfaction, lower confidence, increase regret, or encourage avoidance and simplification rather than thoughtful engagement. More options are not automatically better. Sometimes they are just more work with better marketing.
This is precisely where the Ubisoft formula starts looking psychologically interesting. A giant map covered in markers is not merely a content delivery system. It is also a decision environment. Every activity asks, implicitly or explicitly: do this now or later, pursue this arc or that one, compare this gear or ignore it, investigate this icon or leave it hanging there like a passive-aggressive reminder of your unfinished digital chores. One decision is nothing. Twenty can be engaging. Hundreds of minor decisions, many of them only marginally distinct in value, begin to change the texture of play. The player stops feeling curious and starts feeling managerial.
There is even a smaller games-specific thread pointing in this direction. Lindsey (2020) found evidence in a serious-game context that repeated in-game decision-making could produce a state of decision fatigue that then affected later persistence and performance. It is not the final word on commercial open-world design, and pretending otherwise would be a bit short sighted, but it does support the basic point that games are perfectly capable of turning repeated decision-making into a genuine cognitive burden. Which is awkward, because the modern Ubisoft game sometimes seems to treat that burden as a feature.
Far Cry 6 and the Tyranny of Tactical Housekeeping
Far Cry 6 is the cleanest example because the game all but advertises its own excess. Ubisoft (2021) pushes resolver weapons, Supremo backpacks, multiple weapon styles, and a broad spread of combat possibilities, leaning hard on the fantasy of abundance. There is a weapon for everyone. There is a backpack for every crisis. There is always another toy. In theory, that sounds empowering. In practice, it can feel like being handed the keys to a hardware store and being told this is revolutionary freedom.
The problem is not that these systems exist. It is that many of them are not psychologically distinct enough to feel worth the effort of managing. Hornshaw’s (2021) review of Far Cry 6 picked up on this immediately, describing the game as overstuffed and disjointed, with so many ideas that it becomes difficult to focus. That is the issue in one line. The player is forever nudged toward tactical thought, not because the moment demands it in some thrilling strategic sense, but because the game keeps presenting yet another loadout question, another combat variable, another thing to optimise. What should I equip. What should I swap. What should I upgrade. Do I really need to care about this. The answer, too often, is no, but the game insists on asking anyway.
This is where agency quietly curdles into maintenance. Real agency sharpens a decision. It makes a choice feel expressive, risky, or consequential. Tactical housekeeping is what happens when the player is managing options that mostly create friction rather than meaning. Far Cry 6 wants to make you feel like a resourceful guerrilla. At its worst, it makes you feel like a middle manager with far too many tabs open.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and the Slow Death by Prioritisation
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla reaches the same destination by a slightly different road. Ubisoft’s own explanation of the design is fairly sensible on paper. Maguid (2020) explained that the team moved away from more traditional side quests toward World Events, and Darby McDevitt described the territorial structure as a series of self-contained stories, with each region intended to feel almost like a short standalone narrative. The aim was partly to avoid filler and partly to create a cleaner, more discoverable world. None of that is foolish. In isolation, it sounds like a cure for exactly the kind of sprawl Ubisoft is often accused of producing.
The snag is that good local logic can still produce bad global texture. One region may feel focused. One Mystery may feel charming. Several arcs may feel varied. But once a player is dealing with region after region, activities layered on top of activities, plus Wealth, Artifacts, Mysteries, upgrades, exploration prompts, and the general hum of open-world obligation, the whole thing starts to demand constant prioritisation. The player is no longer simply exploring England. They are repeatedly deciding what deserves attention, what can be skipped, what might pay off, and what will turn out to be another small distraction masquerading as discovery. Plunkett (2021) complained that Valhalla was simply too long, but the deeper problem is not duration alone. It is sustained managerial attention.
That is the sort of fatigue people often misdescribe as boredom. Sometimes boredom is not a lack of content at all. Sometimes it is what happens when the content keeps asking for small parcels of attention without offering enough meaning in return. Valhalla does not starve the player of things to do. Quite the opposite. It buries them in prioritisation. At a certain point, the Viking fantasy begins to resemble unpaid project coordination in furs.
Star Wars Outlaws and the Rare Case of Choice Serving the Fantasy
Star Wars Outlaws is useful because it stops this argument from turning into lazy Ubisoft-bashing. The game still carries recognisably Ubisoft DNA, but its central choices often sit closer to fantasy and identity. Ubisoft (2024) framed the syndicate reputation system as a world in which players build an ever-changing standing with criminal factions, deciding who to align with, at least temporarily, and how to play syndicates against one another. That is still a system. It is still another moving part. But crucially, it is easier to read as role-play rather than admin.
That difference helps explain why Park (2024) could describe Outlaws as a reminder of why the Ubisoft formula became so influential, reliable, and popular when applied correctly. The formula itself is not the whole problem. The issue is what kind of choices it generates. Reputation choices in Outlaws feel more legible as social positioning inside a scoundrel fantasy. They are not just there to create busyness. They shape access, friction, and identity in ways the player can more easily metabolise. When choices deepen the fantasy, they feel energising. When they merely maintain the machine, they feel like cognitive rent.
When Agency Turns Into Admin
This is the real criticism of the Ubisoft formula. It is not that these games offer too much freedom in any pure philosophical sense. It is that they often mistake option density for agency. They assume that if the player is constantly choosing, they must also be deeply engaged. Unfortunately, being busy and being absorbed are not the same thing. A game can give you ten things to weigh up and still leave you feeling oddly underfed. In fact, that is one of the signature irritations of the Ubisoft open world. There is so much to do, and yet a surprising amount of it feels like processing rather than living.
Once that happens, the player’s relationship to the world changes. Choices stop feeling expressive and start feeling transactional. The map is no longer a landscape of possibility. It is a queue. The gear system is no longer a toybox. It is paperwork. The question is no longer “what do I want to do here?” but “what am I supposed to clear next?” That is why people reach for the language of chores and checklists when talking about Ubisoft fatigue. They are not just complaining that the games are long. They are complaining that the effort being asked of them has become mentally expensive in exactly the wrong way.
Simply Put
So yes, there is a proper psychological argument here, and it is stronger than the usual “big map bad” complaint. Ubisoft’s open worlds can create the sort of decision environment that makes cognitive strain, overload, and fatigued decision-making more likely. Not because all choice is terrible, and not because every large game is secretly a hostile act against the nervous system, but because repeated low-value decisions gradually erode the feeling that your attention is being well spent. The player does not collapse. They thin out. They simplify. They stop caring quite as much. They leave systems half-used. They ignore options. They begin, in effect, to conserve themselves. Which is not exactly the fantasy Ubisoft was hoping to sell.
That is why “bloat” never feels like a complete explanation. The real issue is not just excess content. It is misvalued attention. Ubisoft keeps handing players more things to manage and treating the mere presence of decisions as evidence of depth. But depth is not the number of options on the table. Depth is whether those options justify the space they occupy in the player’s mind. When they do, choice feels immersive. When they do not, choice starts to feel like admin with nicer scenery. And once freedom starts feeling like paperwork, the open world has already begun to close.
References
Hornshaw, P. (2021, October 8). Far Cry 6 review: Less than revolutionary. GameSpot.
Lindsey, A. (2020). Could decision fatigue be a problem for serious games?
Plunkett, L. (2021, January 27). Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is too damn long. Kotaku.
Ubisoft. (2021). Far Cry 6 official game page and feature materials.
Ubisoft. (2024). Star Wars Outlaws official game page and feature materials.
