Why Don't Game Developers RE-USE Open Worlds? - gameranx

He brings up a bunch of reasons, but some of them aren't terribly compelling.

Work needs to be redone if you switch engines

So... don't switch engines? This seems to be arguing a broad point based on a corner-case hypothetical of a studio being bought out by EA between installments.

If you bought Super Mario Bros 2 and it was just Super Mario Bros 1 with enemy positions moved around a bit, you'd feel ripped off

This is a pretty hilarious example, because that's exactly what the real Super Mario Bros 2 was. It was virtually identical to SMB1, but with harder enemy placement and some platforms removed to make jumps trickier. You might know this version as "The Lost Levels", but in Japan that's what SMB2 was.

His last point about exploration is really the crucial one, I think. There just isn't that much depth to open world games beyond sheer size, so once you've seen all of the locations in the game, there's very little value that can be added to the world without scrapping it and redoing it from scratch.

/r/Games Thread Link - youtu.be