The Open-World Conundrum

The other day, I found myself in a conversation with some friends about open worlds in games, and we came up with so many ways in which open worlds in video games go completely sideways. Furthermore, this was fresh off of the YouTube channel Gameranx releasing a video discussing the largest open worlds from games that came out in the past few years.

In that video, it was mentioned how open worlds have actually gotten smaller over the years. I’m not sure how statistically backed that is, but the argument is that studios are understanding that large, open worlds don’t necessarily make a quality gaming experience. Detail is great, but unless it translates into mechanics or storytelling, it feels like empty calories. Because of this, studios are making smaller worlds that actually offer more to the player other than shallow, majestic visuals. These are the thoughts from the Gameranx video as I understood them.

Ultimately, the balance of substance marks a high-quality open world. It’s a fine line to walk that many developers fail to do. There are so many methods for creating open-world games that don’t strike the iron properly.

Take a game like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Quests litter the map, and most of them have their own, unique flare; they’re fun and memorable. However, if you were to activate and put a marker down for each quest in the game, a thick brush of quests to trudge through would occupy each major city while the vast land in between feels relatively barren. There are dozens of points of interest, dungeons, and enemies to cross, but for some players such as myself, these can feel like distractions rather than quality content. They often don’t move the narrative forward, so skipping them in favor of getting to the next quest location is an attractive prospect. You’re then left with drawn-out treks across the world with nothing to do with hours and hours of gameplay.

Enter fast travel. “Well, if you don’t like to do all of the walking or horse riding across the map to get to quests, just use fast travel!” Oh, trust me. I’ve experienced Skyrim with and without fast travel. It’s night and day in terms of enjoyment. Fast travel strips half of the playtime from the game without whittling down much of the game’s charm and excitement… So… Why is it an open-world game to begin with?

Method 1: Open-Zone

There are far too many games out there that are open-world for no discernable reason. They would arguably work much better as open-zone games. L.A. Noir and Mafia are great examples of games that have no business with an open-world theme. Side quests are minimal, and you’re never able to explore the world unless you’re on an assignment for the main story already. These games hold your hand across the entire open world, making for a shallow map with very little of interest in it. This doesn’t make them bad games by any means, but suddenly, the map serves as a barrier between the player and the action. One can’t help but wonder if these types of games would be better without that barrier.

Mass Effect achieves amazing heights by being an open-zone game. The zones are strung together by the Normandy and the personalities inhabiting it. One could be forgiven for mistakenly thinking that Mass Effect is an open-world game, but the reality is that the feeling of freedom is simulated through expertly paced main quests and the ability to visit planets, systems, and clusters at will. Persona is another series that has perfected this open-zone style. In Mass Effect, what’s in-between the clusters? In Persona, what’s in-between the districts? It doesn’t matter. These games opt for densely packed hubs the same way Skyrim does while leaving the dull experience of traveling between the hubs on the cutting room floor.

The obvious downfall of this method is that there is no open world anymore. Emersion and mood can be difficult to communicate with the seams of loading screens and disjointed zones. There’s also only so much freedom you actually get in most open-zone games by nature. The charm of truly not having any boundaries is difficult to recreate.

Method 2: More Content

Removing the problem of vast nothingness while maintaining a true open world sounds as simple (not necessarily easy) as flooding the world with quests. What if Skyrim had a quest around every corner? Every place you go is a hub! Now you have The Witcher, a game that suffers from the opposite problem; there is such an overwhelming number of quests, that the player is paralyzed. Quests start to feel like an endless, pointless list of chores. Quickly, the player learns to ignore most side quests to accomplish what they want to, leaving the world feeling, once again, empty.

This does, however, avoid a prominent issue in many Rockstar games, especially Grand Theft Auto titles; Once you finish a quest, you’re left somewhere on the map, and it’s so far away from any other quests that you have to traverse the void to get back to anything interesting. In The Witcher, when you finish a quest, it doesn’t matter where you’re left at the end. You’re almost always dropped where there’s either a quest to start, continue, or finish. The impossible task of this is making sure that these quests all actually mean something. Otherwise, it completely fails to remedy this issue. Instead, it just feels like fluff.

Method 3: Make Traveling Fun

This is where Rockstar games actually hit the mark. It’s abundantly clear that large portions of the budget are put toward making travel more than just travel. It doesn’t satisfy all players the same, but in my opinion, it does just enough. When you have to drive all the way across the map in GTA, it can actually be fun. It’s certainly not the best part of the game, but the craving for a fast travel system isn’t there quite the same way as it is in Skyrim.

Rockstar floods their games with companions who often travel with you, taking away a lot of the boredom. Going from point A to point B is used as an opportunity to develop characters or share exposition that would otherwise feel lazy in a cutscene. Most of these conversations between characters aren’t remembered or given much attention by the player, but that’s not the purpose of the conversations. They’re meant to be that little extra content propelling the game forward. At its worst, it’s meant to be ignored but maintain the tone/mood of the game. The unfortunate thing is that this isn’t actually its worst. At rock bottom, these interactions are annoying, un-skippable white noise machines that permeate seemingly every second of the game.

That’s not the only way Rockstar makes their traveling fun, though. In Red Dead Redemption, a horse’s stamina and other vitals are enough of a mechanic that traveling feels like its own minigame. In GTA, following the rules of the road will push your play time to hundreds of hours. “Do I really need to wait at this red light? What if I just ran it?” Queue the opening of pandora’s box. In no time, you’re blowing through lights, navigating sidewalks at 90 miles per hour, weaving between traffic, going the wrong way on a road, driving off-road, etc. Getting places in GTA is actually fun. You get all of the thrill of destroying the roads with your relentless recklessness without any of the real-world consequences. However, the police leave another layer of intrigue. While there aren’t real consequences, there are repercussions. One wrong move and you’re mowing down pedestrians. Now you have to lose the police. Another mechanic.

Traveling doesn’t have to be an eye-glazing fight of futility.

Method 4: Shrink the World

Instead of focusing resources on developing sprawling open worlds, develop more concentrated areas that tell gripping narratives. When worlds shrink, the room for detail grows. Each square mile of space can then receive a higher level of care. This solution is basic enough. The issue becomes avoiding scope creep. Developers can’t allow themselves to get swallowed by the idea of expanding the world with more ideas of locations unless their willing to put the same amount of time and energy into the new portions as they anticipate with the old portions.

Huge open worlds have been tremendous feats over the years, but they don’t always make for the most exciting experiences. The problem begins with the perceived marriage of open world and size of the world. Open-world doesn’t imply the size of the game; it is a style of game. My undergraduate senior project, Botography, is an open-world game that’s less than 250 MB. Compare this to Red Dead Redemption 2, a game that requires 150 GB of storage to install. Is one of them more of an open-world game than the other? No. Just like Red Dead Redemption 2 is no more of an adventure game than Life Is Strange, a game that takes less than 3 GB of storage.

This is not to say small worlds are the answer, particularly if you want a longer game with a more complex narrative. It’s harder to achieve this the smaller your world is. Characters and locations can grow stale without the right amount of care. That aforementioned feeling of “freedom” also gets put at risk. How long will the player stay engaged when the edges of the world start to encroach?

Method 5: Environmental Storytelling

This method is simultaneously a requirement for a quality open world. On one hand, you must build a world that tells a narrative. On the other hand, environmental storytelling has varying degrees. Marvel’s Spider-Man by Insomniac Games went the extra mile by altering the environment to fit the point in the narrative the player is in. Batman: Arkham Asylum does a similar things. These are much more in-your-face techniques than Red Dead Redemption 2 where the environmental storytelling comes from a rundown building on the side of the road or a trail of blood that leads you to a murder mystery quest.

This method can only go so far, though. It doesn’t solve too many or too few quests. It only marginally solves boring travel; the charm of the environment can go stale rapidly. This is much more of a supplemental method to the other four.

With all of this said, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a perfect open world, and I think most people would say the same. In case it wasn’t clear, the closest I’ve probably seen as of this post is RDR2. Even that continues to suffer from boring travel, though. Baldur’s Gate 3 has a tremendous world as well that is perfectly packed with content. However, although many people would disagree, it’s really more of an open-zone game. Now, each zone is big enough that it adopts most of the same open-world problems and solutions. However, the player still travels from one zone to another, ignoring what’s in-between. In fact, the traversal between these zones can be very linear, which is certainly not in the spirit of an open-world game. The beauty of the open-world theme is the ability to travel anywhere at any time. That’s simply not as possible in BG3 as it feels.

I’ll leave this post with a small list of some of my favorite open worlds:

• Red Dead Redemption 2

• Marvel’s Spider-Man

• Disco Elysium

• Grand Theft Auto V