Culture Clash

(February 2008)

Magnificent Desolation

Shrinking open worlds

An increasing number of narrative games will be going "open world" in the next few years, as technology and development philosophies continue to move in the direction of expanded player freedoms and encouragement of improvisation to solve game challenges. The open world game has been around very nearly since the beginning – all the way back to Adventure, on through Privateer and beyond. In the last decade or so, the term has really gelled: a free-flowing and almost always very large playspace that the gamer is encouraged to explore unguided, setting their own overlapping priorities to meet explicit game objectives. When asked to name an “open world” game, most modern players would probably think first of GTA, and that series has come to have great impact on the meaning of open world gaming. However different the setting or mechanics, recent games that carry the open world moniker – Oblivion, X, Gun, Saint's Row, Crackdown, Burnout Paradise and so forth – are fundamentally similar in that they all set great store by the size of the play area. This places unnecessary limits on the concept.

Sometimes open world games fire marketing shots off each other's bows, using comparative size as selling point to imply that one is more "open" and therefore better. Size, though, doesn't matter… or at least, it shouldn't trump other considerations, especially in open worlds. Sure, it's impressive to announce that your new game takes place in an exact model of Los Angeles, or a world the size of Greenland, but that fact indicates it'll probably be as barren as Greenland, too. Given the realities of game design, the larger a game world is, the more empty and repetitive it tends to become: witness the modular cave systems and recursive "I saw a mudcrab the other day" idiocy of NPC conversations in Oblivion, or the vapidly identical primary tasks marring the otherwise-awesome gameplay of Assassin's Creed. I'm hesitant to embrace the emerging definition of "open world" as "really really big" to the exclusion of the other differentiators.

The crucial open world quality should be the player's ability to self-prioritize from a variety of possible activities and, more importantly, affect and be affected by the world, in more than just a passing way. And I fear it's losing emphasis. When sheer size overtakes all other considerations, we tend to see reduced intricacy in open world games. There's only so much time in the day; if developers are creating a Greenland-sized world they just won't be able to manually polish, tune, tweak, script and enliven every inch of it. For this reason, open world games are often among the most lonely, empty, and limited. Exploring a huge landscape is pointless if there's nothing impactful to do there, or if all the "many hundreds of side quests" don't actually influence the experience, leaving the player with a that-came-from-a-database feel.

Just because a game doesn't put the player on a mission-based rail doesn't mean the play environment can't be small; in fact, the smaller the environment, the more opportunities for experiential depth can really go into it. That is the point of an open world.

A smaller, more intimate setting – say, a cruise ship – would be an interesting open world design challenge. Cruise ships are actually pretty big, but small enough (and varied enough) that a team could customize every inch of the thing and make it fun to explore, including handcrafted NPCs, obvious places that would be off limits or require creativity to access, and probably some innovative scenario ideas. A working hospital, office complex, airport (I'm hesitant to Google "airport plans"), crumbling amusement park, really big creepy house, or any other limited environment could also be fun. I'm not advocating an open world game in an 8'x8' dorm room (though you want to talk interesting design challenge, there you go). It's just that we'd see much more detail in open game worlds if we just scaled back from "size of a city!" to "size of a city block." And detail is what it should be about.

Open world gaming will have an important impact on gamer culture, as well. Casual and new gamers may find themselves more comfortable in the somewhat familiar confines of an open world environment, where the laws of the game's reality more closely match the laws of our own. It's just easier to acclimatize to a neighborhood than an alien planet, and small, sophisticated open worlds will naturally encourage gaming neophytes to explore the limits of the medium. This in turn encourages developers to make such solutions available, broadening the emergent play and exploring new narrative and interactive threads.

You're actually able to do less in the confines of a big open world than in a more tightly controlled environment. Consider the level of involvement experienced by the player in a game of Façade, set in a shoebox apartment. Façade's sharply limited scope allows for such a breadth of interactivity with the characters. While one day we'll surely see that – or more – interactivity with a whole city's worth of NPCs, oversize open worlds are equivalent to Buzz Aldrin's remark about the lunar landscape, that it's "magnificent desolation." There's really only so long you want to hang out on the moon before it stops being magnificent and becomes simply desolate.

Older open worlds like Ecstatica, Mystery House and The Last Express were limited in scope for technological reasons. The fact that next-gen systems can model huge environments is great, but alternatively they can also manage smaller, unbelievably immersive and personal ones. Upcoming open world games – S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, Prototype, Far Cry 2 – all seem to be going for size, as that one facet grows increasingly dominant. I'm not prejudging those games; indeed, many "big empty open world" games are outstandingly fun to play. There's nothing explicitly wrong with setting your game in a vast environment, provided you recognize the sacrifice: the inverse relationship between magnificence and desolation.