Shroud explains his biggest issue with open-world games like Far Cry and The Witcher

Luke Edwards

Twitch streamer and FPS king Michael ‘shroud’ Grseziek has explained why he doesn’t enjoy playing ‘never ending’ open-world video games on stream, including The Witcher 3 and the Far Cry series.

With his insanely dedicated viewer base of over 9 million followers on Twitch, shroud plays a variety of games, but primarily focuses on FPS.

Back in February, as the GTA RP hype was starting to hit the lofty heights it has sustained to this day, fans were excited when he was apparently spotted roaming Los Santos, but it was later confirmed shroud had made a character only never to play with it.

And on his May 21 stream, shroud explained why he largely doesn’t enjoy the “grindy” aspect of large open-world titles.

Shroud with Cloud9 at ESL Pro League Season 4 Finals
After his success in CSGO esports, shroud has made a name for himself as one of Twitch’s biggest FPS streamers.

“Open world games are very hard to get right, because they just feel like a grind. It feels like you’re playing an MMO, but when you’re playing an open-world single-player game you don’t want it to be like an MMO.

“You still want it to be engaging and fun, but most open-world games, unfortunately, feel that way, like Far Cry, for example. Far Cry was awesome for the first few hours, but then it was kind of hard to go all the way and finish Far Cry 5, Far Cry 4, Far Cry 3.

“The first couple of hours were interesting, then you realize they put all these little things everywhere for you to do and you’re just like ‘oh man’.”

Shroud had earlier aired his grievances about the Witcher series, where he explained that even though it’s a great game, he never had the motivation to push through to the end.

“That why I like playing Witcher so hard, it’s such an amazing game,” he said. “I play day one, I’m loving it, I play day two, I’m ok, and then day three just doesn’t exist because it just keeps going man. It never ends.”

“They [make them longer] on purpose to make some extra cash, that’s for sure. It’s kind of an illusion effect. That’s why I love the 8-to-10-hour bangers, because they just put so much effort into it.”

It seems shroud will largely be sticking with FPS games, at least on stream, for the time being.

About The Author

Luke is a former Dexerto writer based in Oxford, who has a BA in English Literature from the University of Warwick. He now works with Dexerto's video department. You can contact Luke at luke.edwards@dexerto.com