What are the Game Design 101s when it comes to open world? How do you design a world with exciting activities to do rather than treating it like a list of chores or activities to go through?
I can't give you a "definitive" way to do it since there really isn't one - there are often lots of reasonable and different approaches to solve any given design challenge - but I can tell you how I would approach this and the kind of goals and direction I would try to take this in. There are two major directional approaches to an open world game in my view.
The first approach is a world that exists on its own with the player taking a smaller role in it like a stranger passing through who changes things and helps people. The player isn't representative of something larger than herself; she is an individual who is affecting peoples' lives through her own choices and causing ripples that way. This approach tends to be more subtle, but the choices the player makes should cause downstream effects later, such as completing a questline in this town encourages an NPC to seek his fortune in the world and eventually comes back in a later area to bring new quests and acknowledge the player's earlier choices. Each area is designed as an ecosystem - the characters and environment should fit together and have purpose without the player necessarily being there. Then, each area ecosystem should fit into a broader interconnected national ecosystem - this town or area has these relationships with the area around. This approach helps focus on the world building, with the goal of making the player feel like she is a part of the world, interacting and making choices within a natural-feeling existing framework. As such, the design goals would be to establish the world, the major direction for each of the areas, and how each area relates to the areas around it, with clear focus on the relationships and push and pull from the micro to the macro level. The player plays to explore the world, learn about it, and change it on the small scale. Each activity should show the player something new and interesting about the world and allow them to see the small changes affecting the lives of the people in the world.
The second approach is a world that player choices significantly changes as she goes. Instead of the player being an individual moving through the world, she represents something larger than herself - she is the Conqueror, the Inquisitor, a/the leader of some kind of organization. The gameplay loop tends to be the player entering a new area, establishing its presence there, and subjugating the landscape and environment for the goals of the organization. This design direction lends itself to large scale conflict and the different ways that the player's territory interacts with other large-scale organizations as her power and influence grow. The benefit is that decisions clearly affect the world - when you establish a base and start taking over an area, you see the clear results of your choices. NPCs from the player organization should begin showing up in places you've taken for your organization, leading to visible and acknowledged player growth - outposts, towns, cities, resource-extracting locations like mines or mana wells, and so on. This approach leans into the fiction that the world is constantly and visibly changing, and the player is one of the big decisionmakers driving that change. Each activity should change the world in some way.
The main idea here is to go big or go home. It is good to commit to one extreme (the world exists mostly independently of the player) or the other (the world exists to be shaped by the player), and to focus on the results of player action being visible and acknowledged. When player choices aren't acknowledged, quests become tasks and areas blur together. Building an open world is about layering these acknowledgements and how they fit together to affect the world they exist in. This choice acknowledgement can be on the level of individuals within the greater story or it can be on the level of globe-spanning organizations vying for dominance, but it must exist and it must be visible to the players making those choices.
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