Making Open Worlds Fun

Around the time RDR2 was popular, it seems there was some breaking point that got reached with open worlds that even the fans couldn’t stand anymore. The games were just too long, too boring, too dull. It felt like the majority of your time was spent on horseback going from place to place doing pointless shit. But what if we lived in a different universe, one where this dumb shit was fun? I dunno, let’s consider how we can make that a reality.

Open worlds really kill my soul. There was actually a time pretty recently that I thought playing videogames was pretty worthless, I mean aside from the fact that it technically is but you know what I mean, that videogames didn’t provide the same sort of unique artistic value that could be latched onto with other mediums. I thought they were dopamine machines that existed purely to turn people into raging lunatics.

The problem is that for some games I’m right, and the games that taught me that were open world games. Why do I hate them so much? Well, the reason I started thinking videogames were worthless was because of open world games.

A big problem is that in spite of being the main selling point of these games, often the open world is nothing more than obnoxious padding. Let me explain.

Basically, you have a mission in GTA or something. It’s like 5-10 minutes to get there, so you jack a car and head over there. You see a dumb cutscene where your social degenerate talks to another social degenerate about committing a crime, then you get into a car and drive like 5-10 more minutes to whatever the mission is. It can be about even more driving, some shooting, or some obnoxious gimmick that definetly wasn’t worth the time you spent getting there. Then the mission ends and you do all that shit all over again.

In these games, the open world is little more than an obnoxious obstacle to get past. I’d almost call it an excuse for game developers to develop less game, but regrettably taking this approach actually yields more effort for less rewards. There’s very little fun interaction the player gets with these open worlds, as much as they put in effort to trying to give them some. No, the entirety of these games is just a series of tasks that you have to do, like a list of chores.

Go here, do that, shoot all the baddies, for optional bonus points go around and kill every single pigeon which is just as tedious as everything else. Everything in these games ends up as little more than a matter of getting to point A from point B, and all of what could be so enjoyable about the game, point C, is just the scenery inbetween.

There’s attempts I’ve seen to make this problem ‘work’, namely fast travel mechanics. This only exasperates the issue, now the reality of the game is even more absurdly trivialized. If you have to ADD a mechanic to get around having an open world, why have an open world to begin with? You’re just going to ignore it short of being sent to a destination you’ve never been to before.

So, the problems are that it’s a chore, a boring chore, and a long chore at that. Not necessarily great for a completely optional passtime. What are some things I’ve seen games do to actually make this a fun mechanic?

Time Limits

I’m going to start with Dead Rising on this one despite the fact that it’s not technically an open world game. It’s segmented as a result of technical limitations, but made today it could’ve easily become one, granted a fairly small one but similar in basic design none the less.

Dead Rising probably just started out in design the same way open world games do, the entire game was simply a series of missions and purely a checklist that the player had to get done. You were probably pretty free to do it at your own pace. I say probably, I wasn’t there I dunno but I imagine that’s how it went.

Then they realized this was really fucking boring, for many of the same reasons we’re talking about right now. It made the entire open level meaningless when all you were doing was going from one point to another, even with all the zombies everywhere. The lack of any pressure meant that the optimal strategy was to take your time carving out a path through them each time, which would really grate on people’s nerves.

So, they added a new mechanic that came to define Dead Rising as a game: they added a time limit. You have 72 hours (7.2 realtime) to get everything in the main game done, and you can only do certain things in very specific windows of time, for example advancing main story missions.

If you’re not there when the time’s up, the missions will expire and you won’t be able to complete them. If this was a main story mission, the entire case goes cold and while you can still beat the game you won’t get the best ending.

This turns Dead Rising from a silly sandbox game into a very direct and purpose filled game, even the smallest actions you take have consequences on being able to get certain things done in time. You move knowing everything you’re doing is in an effort to beat the clock before it ticks and expires one more mission.

And this gets tense between funneling survivors into the saferoom and trying to kill all the psychos running around the mall. You need to understand where you’re going, what you’re doing, and be locked in.

Of course you could also just ignore all of this if you wanted to goof around and check out secret spots. Dead Rising is fairly forgiving in this regard. Side missions are only for the PP bonuses (lol) and if you screw up the main mission then you can just continue freeplaying in the mall until time’s up. You can also carry over your PP from one run to another.

Of course PP is good, giving you stat bonuses and new combat moves as you level up, so you’re generally encouraged to do as many of these missions as possible.

This is a series of simple ideas that really worked to make the open world feel like it had a lot of purpose to it, and also to make what would otherwise have been another boring series of chores feel much more tense. There’s a real chance for your goofing around to put someone in danger as time will pass for these people whether you’re there or not.

In this way, the open world being an obstacle would very much become an intended function. Not necessarily great for every game, but ideal for ones that want to focus on tight action. What about other options?

Empty Slate Philosophy

Many open world games use what I call Kitchen Sink philosophy. They give you many things to do to make it feel like there are many things to do in the game, even if those things are repetitive nonsense that you get really tired of. Kitchen Sink philosophy is when you have 500 icons on the minimap that you feel somewhat urged to get around to even if it gives you a headache. Kitchen Sink open world games just love icons on the minimap.

Empty Slate philosophy is very different. It’s simply giving someone the open world, and letting them figure out how they’re going to get around it and what they’re going to do in it themselves.

Open world games can feel like a series of chores, because that’s how they present themselves. Players can be very boring people because certain expectations can get set up about how a game is going to operate based on this presentation. In other words, if you give people a bunch of missions to do they’re going to think the only thing to do is those missions.

So, give them nothing. Wake them up in the middle of the world one day and let them figure out how things work, what they’re going to do. If you have to give them any guidance, give them the bare minimum. You’d be surprised how naturally curious people are.

Maybe they want to go off in the distance to see that tower, or climb that mountain. Maybe they want to go meet many people, discover new villages. You can create compelling narratives based on this idea alone. Many games I’ve seen take this approach usually start off directionless but then reveal a goal for the player to pursue, such as Hollow Knight’s dream guardians.

Why does this work? Players are much more likely to enjoy doing these tasks if they feel it was something they decied more for themselves rather than feeling like it was something pushed onto them by the developers. It’s the difference between cleaning your room because you thought it was filthy and wanted to make it look nicer versus cleaning your room because your bitch of a mother keeps yapping at you to do it. The only satisfaction you’ll get in the latter case is shutting her whore mouth up.

Hell, you could have a pretty direct goal that you want players to take but just being subtle about its presentation and letting players decide to tackle that for themselves rather than slapping an icon on a minimap can go a long way for motivation.

Fun Movement

One of the reasons the open world is very dull is because it’s all about going from point A to point B, and doing that is very dull. In trashy Bethesda games in particular you’re always just holding W to get to the objective as fast as possible, with only the occasional distraction from enemies. For GTA it’s focusing in on your minimap like it’s a GPS. Very boring.

But what if doing it was FUN? Not all movement needs to be merely a way of getting to the next area, the way you handle moving around can be an entire system in and of itself and part of the challenge or enjoyment of the game.

Just Cause 2, while being pretty overbloated with objectives and objective markers (the 100% speedrun takes a full goddamn day to complete) has a lot of neat mechanics based around movement. You have a crazy grappling hook that lets you make a mockery of short distances and heights, mechanics based around skydiving and parachuting, hijackings…

It’s a lot of these action elements all working together that elevate what would’ve otherwise been a fairly dull third person shooter. The freedom you get moving around allows you to take the initiative in most encounters, as well as experiment with different ways to take out enemies. You can always be doing something, and when you’re not doing something the game usually speeds itself up to let you get to doing things much faster.

The Gravity Rush series is also notable, again both games are a series of missions but the game’s unique gravity bending mechanics allows you to rethink how exactly you get around areas. Getting around is a challenge and you can optimize your control over your abilities because of it, getting better at power sliding or just sneaking around both of the worlds.

Those mechanics in both GR games make you WANT to explore. You want to look around everywhere because it gives you an excuse to use your gravity powers some more, and you can enjoy the open world more because it’s actually fun to have a distance to cross.

It sounds simple enough, but surprisingly lots of games can’t do this. There’s a sort of responsiveness required, a sort of unrealism that common open world players like Rockstar really refuse to touch. Instead they opt for obnoxiously unresponsive and overly realistic movements that really add up in dissatisfaction for the player. Imagine if flexing your finger took 5 seconds.

Conclusion

Again, I’m aware some of my examples are not open worlds, but they could all be made as such in theory. I could probably say that about anything though, so how about I mention an open world game that does literally everything I’ve mentioned and was fucking amazing for it?

The Outer Wilds is a game where you explore space. I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum if you’ve never played, but I will be mentioning some story bits and mechanics. Notably, where it utilizes everything I’ve mentioned.

The Outer Wilds has a time limit, not quite the same as Dead Rising’s where it dominates the flow of the entire game but rather one where the player is stuck in a series of 22 minute time loops. If you die, you reset to the beginning of this time loop. If the times up, the sun explodes and you reset to the beginning of this time loop.

This gives meaning to the player’s actions as he explores. There’s always the looming threat of the sun going kaboom as you’re walking around, so you don’t get comfortable or complacent and try to be much more intentional.

On top of this, it allows for a dynamic open world where as time passes within a 22 minute time loop, things will change. This creates a lot of beautiful dynamism that keeps locations interesting.

The Outer Wilds follows Empty Slate philosophy. It does not define a goal for you at all, you’re simply given a few pointers on what you could do to start with. That being said, there is a goal and it is one that players tend to find that try and follow even in spite of being given total freedom to do what they want themselves.

The majority of the game is all about finding things out. Following in that 22 minute time loop thing, all that you’re allowed to keep with you between time loops is knowledge. It’s knowledge that you uncover and put to work to uncover more knowledge. This makes figuring things out within a world much more satisfying and allows players to define goals for themselves.

The Outer Wilds has fun movement. A big selling point of the game is how it handles movement through space, putting to action the laws of physics as well as having unique mechanics for ship movement and out of ship movement.

You can tilt around the axises freely when gravity is not holding you down, and having a good understanding of how to get around like this is one of the main challenges of the game. Working around physics in space is used so frequently that it’s difficult to think of a point where it’s not part of the game.

Learning to utilize it can get you from place to place quicker, and that’s important when you factor in the time limit, and you’ll factor in the time limit because you’ll figure out that you need to get somewhere sooner because you learned that you needed to do that through your own investigations, and you learned that because you were able to get past a strange platforming challenge as the result of knowing the mechanics and…

You get the idea. These all work into eachother and what they create is something beyond being little more than ragdolls flying around in New York.

The Outer Wilds is not a prime example of what an open world game ‘should’ be. There is no such thing as ‘should’ when it comes to videogames. But it is an example of what open world games ‘could’ be. Adventures filled with whimsy, instead of bullshit that’s more boring than working your 9 to 5.

Will AAA game studios take note? lol no they’re gonna go bankrupt before doing that

Will the future small devs take note? Perhaps, in some ways it feels like they already do. These ideas of what do and don’t work for open world games tend to get noticed, and while open world design in smaller games is rare, when it comes to exploration based games you can often see many of these ideas getting put into practice.

There’s real chance for enjoyment when dealing with this specific mechanic, but the biggest players like Rockstar are lost in the miasma of boring realism. Since we technically live in an open world, that’s just sort of what these mechanics tend to default to: trying to be as realistic as possible.

But it doesn’t need to be that way, and I’d be very happy to try out any new open world games I find that promise to do something new.