The Fatigue Of Enclosed Open Worlds and Their Antidotes: A Short Essay
I've been thinking about open world games a bit lately and what goes into them. Because open world games have been sort of the "it thing" in video games for quite a while, certainly the thing to do in the prestige AAA development scene. When consoles launch, you don't just show off new physics and improved graphics, you show off how the console can do all that with a massive "open world" that a player can run around in freely. The thing about this is that once you start really looking at these open worlds, you start to become very aware of how formulaic, how actually enclosed they really are.
People have come up with a lot of names for this. I personally would like to call it the Ubisoft-Bethesda open world model. You give the player a character with some limited starting abilities or inventory. You give them an open check to explore the map and look around - but you also effectively give them a checklist of objectives the may complete. You give concrete, but small rewards for completing these objectives - nothing so big that it risks breaking game balance or the intended progression - and tell the player that they can go for them. You can really see this sort of design take off in Far Cry 3 and Skyrim. The thing is that this sort of design also tends to create sameyness in these checklists. Any open world game - really any game period, but open world games in particular can suffer from this - is going to need to reuse assets and design elements or else the dev cost skyrockets. Once you've beat one draugr tomb in Skyrim, you're going to kind of get the deal with the rest of the draugr tombs in Skyrim. On repeat playthroughs - something encouraged by a lot of RPGs - there's not a lot of desire to replay these samey dungeons / outposts / encounters and the player would only do because 1) they're doing 100% completion 2) they want to recreate the first playthrough in some way 3) there's a specific item they want or 4) the area is required for main story progression.
Related to this is how you actually interact with these areas. Combat is often the primary gameplay verb of this sort of game because it lends itself well to satisfying repetitive gameplay; it's a design space that is well-understood by developers and extremely legible to players who are familiar with games in general. The problem is that there is only so much a good combat loop can do before it gets boring, particularly if you're facing off against the same sorts of enemies in the same sorts of areas the whole time. Even Elden Ring, which was critically acclaimed for avoiding a lot of these issues, suffers from this fatigue in the late game. There have been some other attempts to get across some variety in this sort of game. Cyberpunk 2077, clunky and plagued by problems as it is, has some interesting things going on here. There seems to have been a real attempt to differentiate out encounters by the area you're in by having different areas be controlled by different gangs. They often have distinctive musical themes. Enemy chatter and tactics also vary by gang. One group primarily speaks Japanese; another primarily speaks Spanish; the Animals and Maelstrom gangs can be told apart because they all have heavily synthesized voices. The results aren't enough to eliminate that sameyness but they are enough to make the player take notice.
What comes across - what I feel like people are increasingly feeling - is a fatigue with this sort of open world design. They are seeing the cracks in the system, that there isn't really an immersive open world where they can do anything but a tightly enclosed one where the designers have prescribed a set of check listed activities that, at the end of the playthrough, may feel like busywork or wasted time. Yeah, you can climb that mountain and get a cool reward; yeah, you can go all over the map; but there's nothing in Fallout 4 where you can just say "fuck my son, I'm becoming a raider and I'm going to rule the Commonwealth like some kind of postapocalyptic Genghis Khan." You can't say "I want to establish a new, separate state based off the principles of Enver Hoxha, just slamming down impractical bunkers everywhere for reasons that are not entirely clear." Because that's not in the prescribed play-space for the devs - the amount of effort required to provide structure for that sort of game would be insane!
So, more and more, I think devs are looking at previous eras of game design before the open world era. Some of this is definitely percolating up from the indie scene. Over the past couple of years we've seen an explosion of games that base themselves in the styles of the PS1-PS2 era alongside the continued proliferation of pixel art. That isn't just in terms of graphics, though. Mission based design, old-school survival horror design, boomer shooters, Metroidvanias and more have all been increasingly popular for a reason. You can design a very tight, interesting experience on a small budget. You don't need to spend so much on QA or bug-testing because instead of looking at a several-kilometer wide map for gaps in collision detection, you can look at a single mission where a player is confined to a couple dozen interconnected rooms. Even if there are bugs or exploits that could break progression, that's not necessarily a bad thing; speedrunning and exploit communities can really get into the nitty-gritty of that stuff and make a fanbase around it! You don't need to worry as much about gameplay that gets stale at the 40 hour mark of a 60 hour game if a player can get 100% completion in 20 hours. And this is floating upwards. Hi-Fi Rush is a huge proof of concept that if a game has solid, well-thought out gameplay, a good set of missions, and a good amount of charm people will buy it like hotcakes, and it'll be for a fraction of the budget of almost any open world title. Frankly, I'm pretty excited by this trend and hope it continues to give us more interesting and innovative titles as these spaces are plumbed more with modern technology.
That said, there is a question: where do open world games go? Because there is still that appeal, that desire to see a game where it really feels like you can go anywhere and do anything. The technology for that kind of game is here, but the actual kinds of gameplay and the limitations that it imposes are large. There are titles that live up more to the open world promise, but they actually end up being pretty niche because most players are used to and like more structure being present in their games.
There are games like Dwarf Fortress, for example. I'd argue that Dwarf Fortress is sort of the grand-daddy of this style of game. Instead of a really specific objective, there are two general modes of play in DF: fortress and adventurer. In Fortress, you control a group of dwarves making a new settlement. It's a citybuilder, but there aren't many metrics for a good or bad city besides "whatever goals the player sets for themselves." If you want to make a fortress where everyone is safe and happy in the middle of a resplendent natural paradise where the primary economy is unicorn husbandry, the game accommodates that. If you want a intimidating fortress of black obsidian walls next to a volcano in a land where it rains blood that revives the dead as zombies, the game also accommodates that, and everything in-between. Adventurer is closer to a classic roguelike, but still stands out for how open and dynamic it can be.
Another descendant would be Kenshi. Kenshi is one of those games that is almost intoxicatingly fresh in terms of visual style. It's not pure good graphics, it's pretty graphically primitive, but but the style and art design immediately makes it stand out. It's a science fantasy world, but it's anything but standard. Things are semi-feudal but lost high technology is out there; hell, one of the standard character creation options is a "skeleton" who is actually a very advanced robot. All sorts of strange, totally alien animals roam the landscape, and the landscapes themselves are legitimately alien themselves. There are waterlogged lowlands where it only rains acid and the rivers will burn you alive. Deserts where there are regular dust storms and hostile bandits prowl the countryside in search of prey. Towns filled with strange but friendly insect-people who make their living farming hashish. You can watch as the various factions in the world go to war, guards fending off bandits and criminals, hunters facing down dangerous wildlife; you can watch scavengers pick after the remains. You get the distinct feeling that if the player character was removed, the world would get on just fine without them. History would continue to happen, people would continue to live and fight and die and have their stories told and the world would never be the wiser of your existence. That said, the player can also massively change the world. They can wipe out other factions, start their own, establish new settlements; they can go it alone or in a small party, a drifter going from town to town, changing things in little ways.
And this openness does leave the game open to all sorts of exploits, but those exploits feel... earned for the player and require a knowledge of the game's in-depth systems to really get at and have fun with. For example there's a very popular video series by ambiguousamphibian on Youtube where he starts as a quadruple amputee - no arms, no legs. From there, he works his way up to get prosthetic robot limbs, eventually finding a set that lets him sprint extremely fast. After this, he makes a realization. Around the areas where it constantly rains acid, there are ferocious, animals called beak things that also happen to have extremely valuable eggs. They're too big and powerful for him to fight... but he doesn't need to fight them. With his robotic limbs min-maxed, he can run at just under 45 miles per hour; beak things are fast, but they aren't able to run at highway speeds. He outpaces them, kites them around away from their nests like a sheepdog and then dives in to grab the valuable eggs and sell them for massive profit. Is that an exploit, a use of mechanics not intended by the designers? Well, maybe, but on the other hand, so what? It's a single player game where there is no set end goal! Instead of a samey dungeon experience, the player gets a unique and immersive story from the emergent systems of the game about the crazy bastard who refitted his prosthetic legs so that he could outrun this universe's equivalent to a hippopotamus to steal their babies to turn a neat profit. And Dwarf Fortress, and similar games have that same dynamic, where instead of a samey experience you can get these crazy emergent stories that other games can't really replicate.
I actually have a fun personal example of this. Rimworld is a game based in the same tradition of Dwarf Fortress as a citybuilder / colony sim. Early on, one of my colonists lost part of her leg, leaving her in a pretty nasty position. To mitigate this, I set the group's primary crafter (who was also her lover) to start making prosthetic limbs for her. The first couple ones were kinda crappy, though, because she was still new at the crafting thing. The end result was this really cute romance where you had one part of the couple who had this horrible injury, and the other who worked hard to learn how to best create a prosthetic limb for her so that she could have a better life. That's a story I couldn't necessarily get from other titles with structured plots, and it was mostly shaped by the emergent systems of the game and not the hand of a writer or designer, and I think that's actually really cool and neat.
In conclusion, even if the enclosed open world design is (hopefully) on the decline, I think there's still a place for creative open world games. They just have to be very aware of their position in the world and how the greatest strength of many open worlds is not any single element of gameplay, but emergent storytelling from the interaction of many mechanical elements. That'll make the "emergent open world game" a mostly niche phenomena, but one that often attracts devoted and unique fanbases that are still profitable and rewarding for dev effort. I just hope that niche phenomena doesn't get thrown out with the bathwater of more bog-standard AAA open world games.
