Let’s start with a familiar scenario. You have spent 40, 80, maybe120 hours running around an open worldto thwart the unspeakably evil machinations of your foes.
“If you don’t act fast, everyone is doomed,” says your trusty companion. On the way to the showdown, a little exclamation mark pops up by the roadside.
Next thing you know, you are halfway across the map combing a field for a random item.
Meanwhile,your archenemy is brewing some tea and playing poker with their goons, having paused their evil plans to wait until you show up.
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You might as well forget about that sense of urgency because no matter how much you pretend, it never really mattered.
Odds are,out of those 100 hours you have in your open world darling, only a fifth of it is dedicated to advancing the storyin any meaningful way.
The cause, almost universally, is a misguided temptation by game directors and executives to make everything open-world when it doesn’t need to be.
Open World As A Problem
“So you’re saying all open world is bad?” No, far from it. But moststory-drivenlarge open-world games today would be better as shorter, linear experiences.
One of the main arguments for open-world games is replayability, but for the most part, you get to pick between endless stretches of beautiful but empty scenery, or a world that’s crammed with side quests so meaningless they might as well not exist.
The vast majority of players are not going to spend their second playthrough ofFinal Fantasy XVhelping a biologist catch frogswhile the world is on fire.
When developers do nail the world and ambiance, more often than not, the main story payoff is underwhelming compared to the amount of effort it took to get there.
For all the common pitfalls in the format, RPGs andsurvival titlestend to work well as open-world games. You’re making your own story, or grappling with what the world provides you to stay alive.
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Even then,vast open worlds push developers to play a balancing act between immersion and pointlessness.
Sure, you can argue that making you waste time on a game you’re wasting time playing is a beautiful metaphor for the human condition, but there’s got to be a better way.
Finding The Sweet Spot
Action titleshave peculiarities, but they are ruled by the fundamental law of all video games:for a game to work, players need to care.
You need a compelling setting, an interesting story, and gameplay that complements it.
Maintaining immersion in the story requires every accessible area to fit into the overall feel.That’s difficult to do when you have 60km² to populate.
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No game has struck a balance between freedom to roam and a good story pace as well asMetro Exodus. The game has six maps, three fully linear, and three relatively open.
You can rush the objectives, but your companions feed you valuable intel about locations on the way to your goal that might be worth inspecting or deliberately avoiding.
It’s a high-risk, high-reward exploration that doesn’t take you too far but adds plenty of depth to the story.Metro Exoduslets you pick between sticking to your crew’s mission without much contact with locals or trying to do what you feel is right.
Games likeMetro Exodussucceed because they follow the core lessons of Albert Camus' 1942 novelThe Stranger. Like the book’s protagonist Mersault,every action and inaction by the player has consequences in other people’s lives, and his fate is fundamentally a culmination of his choices.
Some open-world games try to replicate a comprehensive action-consequence system, but most of them fall flat.
TakeFallout 3for example. At the end of all that wandering, your companions want you to die of radiation poisoning because this is your destiny and not theirs.
You canbuy a DLCthat improves it somewhat, but decent writing shouldn’t require an added $10 fee for the game to still call you a coward.
Less Is More
Now, I’ll readily admit that creating an engaging gameplay system with a serious sense of consequence is difficult. In many games, it’s somewhere between impractical and nigh impossible.
The good news is thatyou don’t need to have a massive open world with a dozen dialogue options and progression paths for a game to be good.
Most players are perfectly happy with the game making choices for them, so long as it makes sense within the context of the story. It’s a bonus:witnessing someone else’s decision-making adds perspective, showing us how different people would approach a situation.
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Take 2010’sMedal of Honorfor example. Your fate is sealed after your unit lead decides to organize a rogue rescue mission, and you follow his lead jumping off of a helicopter.It never asks you to “press F to jump”, or gives you three different but functionally identical options to pick from.You just do it.
On the ground, there’s only one path to the objective, but you can decide whether it’ll be a sneaky or a violent journey depending on your stealth skills.
The game is practicallyDOOMGuyFights The Talibanwith how linear the levels are, but the story and acting add enough weight to it that I was left staring blankly at the screen after finishing the game.
Despite all of this, its emotional impact on me was much bigger than that ofSTALKER 2, an80+ hour adventurewith a massive map but very little narrative-building on the side to justify the 20-minute hikes from point A to point B.
When you ask gamers what game made them cry, the answers increasingly gravitate toward simpler titles that focus on storytelling rather than a 200GB open world. Certain open-world masterpieces likeRed Dead Redemption 2are notable exceptions, rather than the rule.
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For me, the last game that had me in tears wasThis War of Mine, a sidescroller that’s short of 2GB and has you trying to stay alive in a bombed-out ruin.Similarly compact,Signalisis extremely linear but it hits you like a bag of bricks.
Hiring an entire subsidiary studio to build a beautiful open world is fair and all, but what makes games special isstorytelling.
Worthwhile replayability comes from the desire to experience a set of emotions all over again;if you split the bursts of narrative joy with fetch quests and redundant crafting mechanics, you are watering down the soul of modernity’s best storytelling format.
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