![]() ![]() You’re trapped in a police station surrounded by zombies you’re on a starship that’s running out of fuel a ghost won’t let you leave a haunted house. I really like the idea of open world games becoming closely contained narrative metaverses. In her response to that viral tweet, the game designer Leigh Alexander suggests a tight interconnected series of capsule episodes, in which players are constrained within small towns, spacecraft or whatever, with a limited cast of interesting characters: “imo the most important narrative design task is not how to fulfil all possibilities, nor even to create a sense of openness, but to make up a reason why nobody can or would leave the fruitful area.” Open world games need to evolve beyond the conventions with which players are now desperately familiar. Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls games also seem to get the balance of freedom and narrative just about right, while the recent Elden Ring is rendered much more accessible than its predecessors Dark Souls and Bloodborne because the open world design lets you run away from too tough bosses to find something else to try. There are amazing games that exist perfectly as open environments in which players are given the space to create their own experiences: Minecraft and No Man’s Sky spring immediately to mind. This is a really common problem: the world and the story exist closely but also uncomfortably, like two friends forced to share a bed and spending the whole night physically recoiling every time they accidentally touch. But once you’ve made it through all that nonsense, the mechanics of the world – including the massive hordes of zombies tramping through the environment – come to the fore, and they’re really compelling. In the apocalyptic action adventure Days Gone, for example, the plot involves a really annoying and obnoxious biker whose route through a nightmarish world of cannibal monsters and dysfunctional survivor communities is combined with a massively unconvincing love story. But open world games can be too baggy and obtuse with these rules, or the narrative is set almost at odds with the world. Video games offer what many designers refer to as “possibility spaces” – within a set of mechanisms, rules and affordances they provide players with interesting choices and consequences. They are bloated, often confusing and obsessed with the concept of ‘world building’ in which hundreds of thousands of words of backstory and ‘lore’ are offered as a substitute for elements such as structure and rounded characters – the things we actually value in stories. If you want a tense, beautifully structured story experience, open worlds are not the place to go. The comment drew a vociferous response from fans of the Witcher, GTA and Fallout franchises, who all relish the hours they get to spend in these gigantic playgrounds of chaos and action.īut I think the original poster has a point. ![]() NONLINEARITY IS NOT THE SECRET TO AN ENJOYABLE EXPERIENCE”. Last week, a controversy blew up on social media when one frustrated gamer tweeted, “STOP MAKING OPEN WORLD GAMES. What’s more, it’s very easy to lose sight of the narrative point of a game when you’re continually being fed piles of tasks by non-player characters. ![]() These towering MacGuffins are present in Horizon Zero Dawn, Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and a dozen other titles, and they symbolise a problem with the whole concept: what once looked like freedom is in fact a sort of virtual open prison. Nothing symbolises the conformity of modern open worlds more than the convention of the “radio mast” which must be climbed and switched on by the player in order to unlock new map areas. ![]() The backstory is usually told through audio files, scrolls or holographic messages left haphazardly around the place by incredibly garrulous and indiscrete strangers. Titles such as the Witcher, Assassin’s Creed and Grand Theft Auto V have established a blueprint in which the game’s narrative is told through a series of mandatory narrative tasks, while the world is dotted with mini-quests and side missions to make it feel like “authentic” living universe. Super Mario 64, Grand Theft Auto, Driver … these titles rejected the idea of discrete sequential levels and missions and allowed players to fully explore environments, discovering the stories and characters for themselves.įast-forward 25 years and the open world genre is no longer radical or daring – it’s pretty much the standard. Increased processing power in modern consoles and PCs, and a shift away from the design sensibilities of linear arcade games, led to a new generation of ‘open world’ experiences. In the mid-1990s, something extraordinary happened to video games. ![]()
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