Games are better without open worlds
Open world games are all the rage these days. They comprise an overwhelming majority of all big AAA releases coming out every year, they they’re all the rage at every game show, they seem to be the titles that get the most attention from the gaming press and audiences alike etc. In fact, it’s gotten to a point where even the titles and series that previously had no open worlds are almost all now trying to include open world gameplay in some shape or form. The two most recent God of War games have a pseudo open world with side quests, secrets and collectibles. The recent Uncharted games and Last of Us: Part 2 both have sections where the players are allowed to spend time in a big open area with side objectives they can tackle before proceeding with the main plot. And in the most recent bit of news, the still-in-development remake of the first Witcher game by will apparently also now feature a big open world, which is a huge shift from the design of the original game, considering it was a lot more linear and had more self-contained story sections. It’s pretty obvious that the reason for this change has less to do with improving the original and more with molding the upcoming remake to be like Witcher 3, the most popular game in the franchise and one that solidified the series as a juggernaut of gaming world.
As you could probably have already guessed from the title, I am not fond of this trend. There was a time when I’d get excited about almost any new open world game coming out, but the older I get, the more it becomes apparent to me that this thing is a rot at the core of modern game industry (one of many, if we’re being honest). Seeing how this year is supposed to be the year GTA VI gets released, the sixth title in the series that arguably popularized the open world genre and launched it into the stratosphere, a game so big that apparently it can break the AAA game industry if it doesn’t sell well enough, I’ve decided to make my feelings regarding the open world genre clear.
I’ll cut right to the chase: if there’s one thing that open world gameplay has added to modern AAA games, it’s tedium. When I am playing a more traditional linear video game that is split into several stages/levels, I am never all that far from the next great bit of carefully designed content. Once I am done with a set of jumping challenges in Super Mario Galaxy, I go through a loading screen and move on to the next set of challenges. After every amazing fight in Devil May Cry 3 I only need to make a few steps to enter another arena filled with enemies that are trying to kill me. When I play Doom: Eternal, I don’t need to wait a long time until a next set of enemies shows up for me to shoot in the face. You get the point.
Conversely, in an open world game these bits of designed, curated content are always spaced very far apart from each other on a big sprawling 3D map. In order to get from one bit of content to the next, I first need to move between them by walking/running/horse-riding/driving/flying through a mostly barren landscape with minimum obstacles. Look up the longplay for pretty much any modern open world game and notice how much time is spent simply staring at your main character’s back as they travel through, admittedly, some very impressive-looking landscapes. It’s a pretty braindead process: you just have to push a few buttons in the right direction and occasionally move in a different direction to avoid some obstacles. That’s it. There’s no challenge and also there’s very little conflict or tension in these sections. You might encounter some easy to deal with enemies, but that’s about it. The process doesn’t demand any decision-making on your part, nor does it have any interesting consequences for your decisions (you only either get where you need to be or you don’t). It’s dull and it’s only there to waste your time. Most designers seem to be aware of this, which is why so many open world games have various forms of fast-travel that lets you skip the repetitious monotony once you have discovered some key locations on the map. You might say that this addresses my criticism, but I strongly disagree. The fact that a game can be played essentially the same way by skipping through the drudgery of traveling through the open world just shows that all this space between locations and missions serves no purpose and the designers couldn’t find a way to make the act of traversing it interesting and meaningful for the players.
There’s some exceptions to the rule, of course. Yeah, your average GTA game, or RDR2, or the aforementioned Witcher 3 have pretty lame, uninvolved methods of travelling on horses or in cars. But games like Assassin’s Creed series, Batman: Arkham City, Infamous try to make traversing their worlds more interesting by adding various parkour, flying mechanics and platforming elements. That’s better than nothing, but still doesn’t change the fact that these mechanics mostly exist so that the players have something fun to do while they travel. Other than self-amusement, there isn’t much of a reason to get good at these mechanics and approach traversal in a more considered, strategic manner. You will almost never have to get somewhere extremely quickly before something bad happens — the open world is effectively on pause everytime you’re in-between missions. You will almost never need to master traversal mechanics in order to get somewhere special or avoid some late-game threats and obstacles, because, one again, the open world is always there to be big playground for you first and foremost and, therefore, it has to always be “fun” with minimal friction between the virtual world and the player. I mean, heck, most of these titles either minimize fall damage or remove it it entirely, so you don’t even have to worry about making mistakes when jumping on top of rooftops. Kind of kills the thrill of doing something as dangerous as jumping on top of tall buildings for me, if I am honest.
At the same time, I do understand that making traversal more demanding for players is also probably not a good idea. You’ll have to travel back-and-forth between points of interest on the map many times, and it would be a pain if every time you wanted to pick up some new item or change the main character’s outfit you had to go through some challenging platforming gauntlet. In this context, simple undemanding traversal mechanics are certainly the lesser evil. Sure, it’s dull to ride on a horse for however many minutes with nothing happening, but at least while you’re doing it, you can also zone out, talk to a friend, listen to a podcast, pet a cat etc. But it seems to me that an even more acceptable solution here would be to just cut the travelling entirely by removing the big empty open world from the game.
Tedium aside, I think most gamers today will agree that open world games have a monotony problem, where eventually you fall into a routine of doing the same tasks and missions over and over again with next to no variety. Ubisoft titles have pretty much popularized this style of open world game design, where the map is filled with various enemy camps that need clearing and/or towers that need to be climbed. It’s not all exactly the same, you don’t just clear the exact same type of bandit camp everywhere on the map. The layout changes, the types of enemies and their placement changes, the type of rewards you get change. But even if the core gameplay mechanics are solid, when you are doing this stuff for 80+ hours its hard to shake the feeling that all of this isn’t just busy work, that the game isn’t just trying to artificially make your playthrough longer by giving you a bigger checklist full of tasks. The illusion that you’re spending time in a big, living breathing world full of stuff to do shatters rather quickly once you realize most of the map is filled with copy-pasted missions and mini-games you’ve already done a bunch of times in this and many other games. This particular aspect was particularly deflating for me in Elden Ring, a game that most people like to praise as the title that “fixed” most common issues with the open world genre.
In Elden Ring I once found a big medieval castle with a battle raging right outside its walls. The area around the castle was filled with enemy soldiers, small tents, those wooden spike thingies (apparently they’re called chevaux de frise, which means “Frisian horses”. You learn something new every day). It felt cool when I found it. And then it felt a lot less cool when I found many other castles around the map that were quite similar to this one. In fact, it seems to me that most castles in Elden Ring are either being besieged, or were besieged some time before your arrival, or are set up in a way as to prepare for a siege. Same goes for the catacombs in the game, almost all of which are quite literally the same set of corridors arranged in a slightly different way. There’s roughly 18 of them in the game, and it’s pretty obvious that the developer FromSoftware simply didn’t have time to give them proper care and polish they needed. I am sure there is some lore explanation for why all the castles in Elden Ring are getting besieged, or even why the catacombs have such same-y layouts, but it’s also clear to me that this was also a practical solution for the developers first and foremost. The development team knew they were making a massive game world full of unique locations and secrets, and they made the task of crafting that world a bit less daunting by intentionally designing certain locations and assets to be reusable. All of which wouldn’t have been a problem, if it wasn’t obvious to me what a huge downgrade this is from Dark Souls series, particularly the first Dark Souls game.
Elden Ring’s whole pitch was that it would essentially be Dark Souls, but in open world. Which is why it’s hard to ignore how much Dark Souls benefited from being as focused and streamlined as it was. Every area in Dark Souls was unique, had its own vibe, a core theme, a special type of challenge for the player. No two areas in Dark Souls are the same. The way you progress through Sen’s Fortress is very different from how you progress through Blighttown. If a friend had asked me “Hey, have you found the besieged castle in Elden Ring yet?” my only response would be “You have to be more specific than that”. Without a guide and a map I wouldn’t be able to tell you which castle was which. But I would never confuse Undead Burg for Anor Londo in Dark Souls, even though both of them can technically be described as big medieval-style castle/cities, yet both have a vastly different look, vibe and design. And the thing is, key locations in Elden Ring, the ones that clearly have gotten the most care and attention from the developers, are arguably better and more intricately designed than even the best locations in Dark Souls! Yet it’s very hard for me to even remember most of those areas and their unique landmarks, because in my mind they are all sandwiched between many hours of wandering through a bunch of same-y medieval castles and same-y catacombs.
Last, but not least, the story in open world games almost always suffers from the way the game is structured. At the core of an open world game is player’s freedom, the “go anywhere, do anything” mentality. Which means that for the writing team it’s hard to craft a narrative with any serious sense of urgency or tension. You might be writing a story about a parent desperately trying to find their kidnapped child, only for the players to ignore the main quest and start growing potatoes in their backyard instead. The kidnapped child can always wait, the looming apocalypse is always going to be on an indefinite hold until the player is ready to take care of it, the main villain will always give the player all the time in the world to do every side quest and find every shiny piece of loot, you get the point. Just in general player’s actions in the open world end up having next to no effect on anything in the main story. Your protagonist can be slaughtering innocent civilians when the player controls them, and then become a protector of the innocents the moment a cutscene starts. I especially hate moments in these games, when in a cutscene the main character either gets defeated or captured by a group of enemies that normally you slay by the dozens during gameplay sections. Or that moment in pretty much any Rockstar game, where part of the core motivation for the main character is lack of money, and you’ll have to sit through cutscenes of your main character complaining about money troubles, when they’re already wearing the best, most expensive outfit in the game and have an absurd amount of money hiding in their pocket.
This dissonance problem has been plaguing the medium for quite some time, and most developers are choosing to address it either by ignoring it, essentially laying the burden of said dissonance entirely at the player’s feet, or by writing stories that are mostly inconsequential and have blank slate protagonists with no real arc or character.
Now, that was a lot of words on how the open world formula hurts various aspects of a game. But how can it sometimes benefit a game? What does an open world game bring to the table that is often seen as worth the aforementioned sacrifices? I’d say the answer is pretty obvious: verisimilitude, or believability, for those need to brush up on their Popper.
An issue common to most old games is that you’d have to suspend your disbelief quite a bit to enjoy them to their fullest. You’d play your favorite platformer or a beat ’em up title, and you just had to not question the fact that everything in them was taking place in heavily abstracted worlds that would’ve often shown only the things relevant to gameplay. When me and my best friend were replaying “Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones”, we had that funny moment where we stopped for a minute and asked ourselves: how do people in this world actually live? How do they navigate through these levels that are supposed to be representative of an ancient city of Babylon? Is everyone in this city doing advanced parkour akin to the titular prince, just to get to work or visit their friends?
You just had to sort of ignore things like that in older titles. It might be a minor issue in some games, but I’d say the more story-focused and immersive the game is trying to be, the bigger the aforementioned issue becomes. Characters in old games were presumably living full lives in-universe at some point, but the moment the player takes control, these characters would get trapped in 2 dimensions or linear stages, where a set of dangerous paths would always lead them to their next story objective. When open world games have arrived at the stage in their full games, this little barrier of believability was finally broken. Now we could indeed see these worlds from almost any angle we want, we could see where Link eats and sleeps, we could see Kratos just hanging out with his son when they’re not slaying monsters together. It might sound like this change is purely cosmetic, but it isn’t. Aesthetics often inform the way we interact with a video game. A game that wants us to believe that we are exploring a different world benefits greatly from said world being less abstract.
And I would be a liar if I said that these aesthetical values have no effect on me. I got bored of horse-riding in Red Dead Redemption 2 just 5 hours into the game, but I can’t deny: it’s an absolutely gorgeous virtual world they’ve built there, and boy, am I happy that I can just take my time enjoying every vista this game has to offer (though the fact that Rockstar social club has a limit on number of screenshots I can save is bollocks). Similarly, I did get tired of running around the map in Metal Gear Solid V pretty quickly. And while that certainly never changed, the way I perceived this world changed when I realized that all the enemy bases on the map are actually connected by a pretty intricate system of patrols and supply routes. Armed with that knowledge, I could now use it to my advantage by either hiding in the back of a passing enemy patrol car and passing through every checkpoint on the map with 0 fuss.
That’s fun and all, but is it really worth it? Are these small pleasures worth sacrificing almost every other aspect of a game? I don’t think so.
It’s time we all face the obvious fact here: there is just no enough hours in the day for even the biggest, most experienced teams in the world to craft an open world filled to the brim with meticulously designed meaningful content. Sure, game development tech gets better and with it so do the workflows, but the virtual worlds are also getting bigger and more complex, often disproportionally to the advancement of tech. Every time a studio has to make a sequel to their previous open world blockbuster, they now have to make it bigger, better, prettier, longer and it still somehow has to run on the same hardware as the previous title.
No matter how you look at it, open world game design is a zero-sum game. The time spent on crafting a bit fancy-looking open world would be better spent focusing on the core elements of the game, such as a story or the core gameplay loop, the combat mechanics, the variety of tasks for the player. It’s quantity vs quality. To choose making an open world game is to choose spreading your resources too thin.
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The somewhat ironic thing here is that the previous generations of developers would avoid making open-world games not because they simply didn’t want to make something like that (in many cases they actually did want to do something like that!), they instead avoided it because the tech didn’t allow them to do it. Older generations of consoles had much stricter virtual memory limitations, which means you can only put so much in any single game, so you better choose carefully. That’s also how the philosophy of making every game revolve around a limited set of core mechanics was born. Space is limited, so the best solution is to come up with only two or three main gameplay mechanics and just remix them throughout the rest of the game. It was a practical solution both in terms of dealing with tech limitations and dealing with the limited amount of time a human can realistically dedicate to making any single game.
Now it turns out that these technical limitations were something of a blessing in disguise. When in order to fit a game on disk or a cartridge you need to strip it down to its bare essentials, it creates an interesting creative challenge where you have to decide what is actually at the core of your game, what really matters, why are you making it. Obviously, having less limitations is, overall, much better for creativity. Now that modern tech has much more memory than anything that came before, we can make more different sorts of games. Yet it also created this design philosophy of wastefulness, where designers are too preoccupied by the need to fill their games to the brim with meaningless crap. In some cases quite literally, like how the previously mentioned Red Dead Redemption 2 has a system for every horse pooping in real time whenever their food is digested. Is it an impressive detail from a perspective of commitment to detail? Yeah, sure. I just can’t help but think of all the poor game developers, who had to program, model, texture, animate every piece of manure coming out of the horse’s butt. To quote Yahtzee Croshaw:
“I can’t envision a scenario in which a lack of horse plops would knock half a star off an otherwise perfect score, but there it is, a drop in an ocean of pointless decadence…
… Someone had to animate it, texture it, find an ideal sound for a plop-plop sound, and they could have been using that time to cradle their children or make something creatively fulfilling like the Obra Dinn.”
When I am trying to think of my favorite video game worlds, I usually think about titles that don’t really follow the open world formula.
The small open-ended levels in the original Deus Ex might not be a very believable simulacrum of dystopian New York, but all of it is just open enough to allow for a variety of ways of solving every problem, and every bit of the level has a very clear purpose in the broader design. So of course the follow-ups like Deus Ex: Human Revolution had to ruin that beauty by giving you a much more fancy-looking and believable Detroit, but one that is always a chore to navigate due to its size and less than intuitive layout.
The open-world of Beyond Good And Evil contains only one real city, and that city is represented only with one small street. Yet they let none of it go to waste. Even this little area has its own little secrets to discover, side-objectives to complete, NPCs to talk to, but most important of all: you see how your actions in the main storyline affect everyone in this city. As you expose the tyrannical government to the masses, people start protesting in the streets, drawing graffiti on the walls, their dialogues with you change.
On the other side of the spectrum we have Shadow of the Colossus, a game that actually has a rather spacious open world for you to explore, yet also one that is almost completely empty. No, seriously. There is nothing to find in Shadow of the Colossus’ world except for the few titular boss Colossi whom you are supposed to fight. No side-quests, no secret loot, no NPCs to chat with, no minigames, nothing. But that’s precisely the point. It’s a game that wants you to feel lonely, lost in a foreign land. When you need to travel through this empty, cold world in order to slay the next Colossus, it’s hard not to feel trapped with your own thoughts. You get anxious about what sort of creature awaits you, you wonder why your main character is doing any of this, you start to question if you’re doing the right thing here. Most open world titles want you to stay engaged at all times, want you to find more stuff to entertain yourself with. Few have the courage to design their worlds in a way that makes you feel as lonely, sad, filled with doubts as the Forbidden Land does in Shadow of the Colossus.
If I had to think about one game that I cannot imagine working as well as it does without its open world, that game would be the original Dead Rising. Unlike the previous three examples, Dead Rising actually has a pretty big open world represented mostly by a huge American mall filled with zombies. On the surface it might seem like that this is another open world game I’d hate. The caveat here is that the world in Dead Rising is incredibly hostile to the player. Zombies are an ever-present threat throughout the entire playthrough, and while you do get better at dealing with them, it never gets to a point where they stop being an issue. A bit of careless play will lead you to getting swarmed and torn to bits by these bastards. They’re also not the only threat you have to deal with in the game. There are several mini-bosses in the game (the game calls them psychopaths), and they might make getting through a certain area of the mall way harder for you as they try to kill you and any companion NPC you have with you. In some cases they will even block access to a plot-critical path for you, making confrontation unavoidable.
Any item or weapon in the game you might that helps you stay alive and fight back is also something you never get to enjoy for long. Every weapon in the game eventually breaks and/or runs out of ammo. When you find a shiny new toy, you don’t go “Oh hell yeah! Another new weapon to crush enemies with!”, you instead get anxious as you now need to decide when is the best time to use this weapon. Do you use it to clear out a bunch of zombies right here right now? Or do you save it for when you’re having trouble with yet another psychopath? And to top it all off, the main story of the game puts you a strict timer. You need to get to places within a designated time-frame, or else a key character dies, or runs away and that’s it, your lead is gone, you can’t actually finish the main story. Either load the last save or begin a new playthrough. Most first-time players will most likely fail their first couple of runs in Dead Rising, because, to be Frank, it’s a lot to handle. You have to juggle the tasks of staying alive, leveling up, resource management, exploration, completing story quests on time, rescuing survivors, beating bosses and some other things. It can be a pain in the ass, but that’s exactly what makes it so great. Every bit of this game’s designed is laser-focused on immersing you in the fantasy of being a cocky reporter in a middle of a zombie-apocalypse. This stuff shouldn't be a walk in the park. You should be stressed! You should be in constant danger of either getting killed by zombies or failing to get somewhere on time. In other words: it’s the exact opposite of the way most open world games tend to operate. Instead of letting you have fun, letting you go anywhere and do anything, the game instead puts you into a series of various chokeholds, squeezing harder at every turn. And maybe that’s a masochist in me speaking, but I fucking loved it.
Before we wrap things up, I know I did just spend many paragraphs detailing the countless gripes I have with the open world design formula. But I’d like to flip the table a bit here and tell you about the many ways modern open world games, in my opinion, fail deliver on their own promise of player freedom, exploration and verisimilitude. Like I said, there used to be a time when I loved this type of game, which is also why it’s so glaringly obvious to me how for the last decade or so the genre has continently been failing to evolve in ways that matter.
For all the promises of player freedom, an overwhelming majority of open world games are actually very linear affairs. The main storyline always requires you to do all the main quests in a particular order. You rarely can choose the order in which you’d like to tackle the tasks, nor can you skip some steps by playing in a unique way. The only real freedom player has in these games is whether they want to go do the main quest straight away or they’d like to fuck about in the open world doing side-content before getting back to the main quest. Also, once you do pick up a quest, the design of said quest tends to be painfully restrictive. You often have to follow a certain NPC or a predetermined path, and doing anything that the developers didn’t plan for will usually result in a game over. It’s mindboggling how so many developers will craft these massive open worlds only to cut you off from most of that open-ness the moment you want to progress through the main storyline.
Next, while every open world games wants you make you feel like you’re immersed in a believable virtual world, said immersion always suffers from the many ways how the way you interact with said world doesn’t make sense. Like I’ve previously mentioned in my example with story, the game’s narrative often involves searching for a person or an object in a world. Yet said person or object just doesn’t exist anywhere in the world until you pick up a relevant quest. Your missing child just doesn’t exist anywhere on the map, the main villain’s castle is always locked with impenetrable gates that only unlock when you reach the final chapter of the game etc.
I am not going to claim that Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a game without its fair share of open world sins, but one thing it does that I admire is that once you complete the tutorial area, the main villain of the game does indeed exist on the world map, surrounded by the walls of his castle, and right away you can head there and try putting and end to him just roughly 2 hours after starting the game. You will almost definitely get your ass handed to you, but it is do-able and people who are very good at the game have been able to beat the main story that way without doing any additional side-content prior.
I frigging love stuff like that. I like to call it a built-in speedrun path. It’s a very fun way to flex your designer brain as to how to make your game in manner that accommodates both a slow first-timer playthrough and a speedrun by someone who knows all the game’s ins and outs. Just in general I love it when a game lets me try to fight the final boss right away. Chrono Trigger is probably the first game where I’ve encountered this style of design. Not only is it a fun thing to let players try, getting your ass kicked by the final boss is a great way to incentivize getting better at the game and upgrade your characters. And when it comes to open world games, I wish more titles were brave enough to let their final boss exist in the same play space as the player character and be accessible to them from the start of the game.
Another thing that bugs me is that open world games are almost always bad at making the world react to any of the player’s actions. Go on a killing spree in any GTA or Red Dead, and the consequences for it are next to non-existent. Once you either run from the area or simply die, the innocent bystanders you’ve just slaughtered all magically came back to life and no one even remembers your crimes. You do a bunch of quests for Big Town in Fallout 3, help them out in any way you can, take care of their supermutant problem, and yet after all of that is done they all still act like they’re starved, beaten and can die any day now, same as when you talked to them the first time you’ve encountered their settlement. Kill the Emperor during the Dark Brotherhood questline in Skyrim, and it seemingly changes nothing: the civil war continues, the forces of the Third Empire aren’t experiencing any setbacks, and worst of all you can still swear an oath to the very same emperor during another quest after you’ve killed the bugger. I guess just because you’ve killed him doesn’t mean you can’t miss him.
Lastly, and this is a pretty minor gripe, but it’s one that’s been bothering me for too long: why are there seemingly no open world games where I can freely enter every single building on the map? Despite the myriad of ways open world games have evolved technologically, this remains the one thing no studio has even attempted to pull off. I can at least understand it in games like Cyberpunk 2077 or GTA IV-V, where the cities are full of gigantic skyscrapers with numerous floors that would need to be designed. But even in games such as Red Dead 2, even in its smaller settlements most buildings are just big rectangles of wood that you can’t do anything with. How come? I am not even saying that I need every single interior in the game carefully designed, cause surely there must be a way to create some sort of modular prefabs of these locations and then procedurally generate them? Or maybe even just copypaste the exact same layouts in every building, I won’t mind.
I can already imagine the sort of comments developers might say in regards to this wish-list of mine. If we design a game in a way that allows players to skip huge parts of the game and sequence-break, the game could be beat in a very short amount of time! Writing a story around the idea of players actions having consequences on the rest of the world is unfathomably difficult. Creating a world that reacts to player’s actions is difficult.
That’s all very understandable, but here’s the thing: if those things are beyond the scope of your project, then you probably just shouldn’t be making an open-world game. Most of the things I am proposing are a natural by-product of giving players freedom, the thing that’s, again, supposedly lies at the core of the open world genre. If you are going to give players freedom, you have to face the fact that they’ll inevitably use it to play the game in ways that don’t fit your original intent.
And jut so we’re all on the same page here: it’s fine to not make an open-world game. It’s not me saying you as a developer have a skill issue, or that you’re untalented. Open world games are not the ultimate end-goal of the entire artform. You are not lesser as a game designer if you decided that the challenges of making a proper open world game are too daunting for you. You’re just being practical.
So in conclusion, I am not against open world games as a genre, nor do I necessarily think that their popularity is a bad thing. I just think that if you’re a video game develope, and you have a cool idea for an open world game, you first ask yourself: how does my gameplay benefit from the open world? Does the open world help reinforce the themes and ideas of my game’s story, or does it only risk detracting from them? If my open world is necessary for some particular aspect of the game, can I may be achieve the same effect by making the world smaller, or by splitting it into self-contained levels?
And if the answers you arrive at are pointing in the direction that the open world won’t benefit your game in any significant way, then you shouldn’t do it. Your game will almost definitely be better if you narrow down its scope and focus on the parts that actually matter.
