Games with open or free-roaming worlds typically lack level structures like walls and locked doors, or the invisible walls in more open areas that prevent the player from venturing beyond them; only at the bounds of an open-world game will players be limited by geographic features like vast oceans or impassable mountains. Players typically do not encounter loading screens common in linear level designs when moving about the game world, with the open-world game using strategic storage and memory techniques to load the game world dynamically and seamlessly. Open-world games still enforce many restrictions in the game environment, either because of absolute technical limitations or in-game limitations imposed by a game's linearity.[5]
While the openness of the game world is an important facet to games featuring open worlds, the main draw of open-world games is about providing the player with autonomy—not so much the freedom to do anything they want in the game (which is nearly impossible with current computing technology), but the ability to choose how to approach the game and its challenges in the order and manner as the player desires while still constrained by gameplay rules.[6] Examples of high level of autonomy in computer games can be found in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) or in single-player games adhering to the open-world concept such as the Fallout series. The main appeal of open-world gameplay is that it provides a simulated reality and allows players to develop their character and its behavior in the direction and pace of their own choosing. In these cases, there is often no concrete goal or end to the game, although there may be the main storyline, such as with games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Gameplay and design
An open world is a level or game designed as nonlinear, open areas with many ways to reach an objective.[7] Some games are designed with both traditional and open-world levels.[8] An open world facilitates greater exploration than a series of smaller levels,[5] or a level with more linear challenges.[9] Reviewers have judged the quality of an open world based on whether there are interesting ways for the player to interact with the broader level when they ignore their main objective.[9] Some games actually use real settings to model an open world, such as New York City.[10]
A major design challenge is to balance the freedom of an open world with the structure of a dramatic storyline.[11] Since players may perform actions that the game designer did not expect,[12] the game's writers must find creative ways to impose a storyline on the player without interfering with their freedom.[13] As such, games with open worlds will sometimes break the game's story into a series of missions, or have a much simpler storyline altogether.[14] Other games instead offer side-missions to the player that do not disrupt the main storyline. Most open-world games make the character a blank slate that players can project their own thoughts onto, although several games such as Landstalker: The Treasures of King Nole offer more character development and dialogue.[5] Writing in 2005, David Braben described the narrative structure of current video games as "little different to the stories of those Harold Lloyd films of the 1920s", and considered genuinely open-ended stories to be the "Holy Grail" for the fifth generation of gaming.[15] Gameplay designer Manveer Heir, who worked on Mass Effect 3 and Mass Effect Andromeda for Electronic Arts, said that there are difficulties in the design of an open-world game since it is difficult to predict how players will approach solving gameplay challenges offered by a design, in contrast to a linear progression, and needs to be a factor in the game's development from its onset. Heir opined that some of the critical failings of Andromeda were due to the open world being added late in development.[16]
Some open-world games, to guide the player towards major story events, do not provide the world's entire map at the start of the game, but require the player to complete a task to obtain part of that map, often identifying missions and points of interest when they view the map. This has been derogatorily referred to as "Ubisoft towers", as this mechanic was promoted in Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed series (the player climbing a large tower as to observe the landscape around it and identify waypoints nearby) and reused in other Ubisoft games, including Far Cry, Might & Magic X: Legacy and Watch Dogs. Other games that use this approach include Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Marvel's Spider-Man.[17][18][19][20]Rockstar games like GTA IV and the Red Dead Redemption series lock out sections of the map as "barricaded by law enforcement" until a specific point in the story has been reached.
Games with open worlds typically give players infinite lives or continues, although some force the player to start from the beginning should they die too many times.[5] There is also a risk that players may get lost as they explore an open world; thus designers sometimes try to break the open world into manageable sections.[21] The scope of open-world games requires the developer to fully detail every possible section of the world the player may be able to access, unless methods like procedural generation are used. The design process, due to its scale, may leave numerous game world glitches, bugs, incomplete sections, or other irregularities that players may find and potentially take advantage of.[22] The term "open world jank" has been used to apply to games where the incorporation of the open world gameplay elements may be poor, incomplete, or unnecessary to the game itself such that these glitches and bugs become more apparent, though are generally not game-breaking, such as the case for No Man's Sky near its launch.[22]
Open world, sandbox games, and emergent gameplay
The mechanics of open-world games are often overlapped with ideas of sandbox games, but these are considered different concepts. Whereas open world refers to the lack of limits for the player's exploration of the game's world, sandbox games are based on the ability of giving the player tools for creative freedom within the game to approach objectives, if such objectives are present. For example, Microsoft Flight Simulator is an open-world game as one can fly anywhere within the mapped world, but is not considered a sandbox game as there are few creative aspects brought into the game.[23]
The combination of open world and sandbox mechanics can lead towards emergent gameplay, complex reactions that emerge (either expectedly or unexpectedly) from the interaction of relatively simple game mechanics.[24] According to Peter Molyneux, emergent gameplay appears wherever a game has a good simulation system that allows players to play in the world and have it respond realistically to their actions. It is what made SimCity and The Sims compelling to players. Similarly, being able to freely interact with the city's inhabitants in Grand Theft Auto added an extra dimension to the series.[25]
In recent years game designers have attempted to encourage emergent play by providing players with tools to expand games through their own actions. Examples include in-game web browsers in EVE Online and The Matrix Online; XML integration tools and programming languages in Second Life; shifting exchange rates in Entropia Universe; and the complex object-and-grammar system used to solve puzzles in Scribblenauts. Other examples of emergence include interactions between physics and artificial intelligence. One challenge that remains to be solved, however, is how to tell a compelling story using only emergent technology.[25]
In an op-ed piece for BBC News, David Braben, co-creator of Elite, called truly open-ended game design "The Holy Grail" of modern video gaming, citing games like Elite and the Grand Theft Auto series as early steps in that direction.[15]Peter Molyneux has also stated that he believes emergence (or emergent gameplay) is where video game development is headed in the future. He has attempted to implement emergent gameplay to a great extent in some of his games, particularly Black & White and Fable.[25]
Procedural generation of open worlds
Procedural generation refers to content generated algorithmically rather than manually, and is often used to generate game levels and other content. While procedural generation does not guarantee that a game or sequence of levels is nonlinear, it is an important factor in reducing game development time and opens up avenues making it possible to generate larger and more or less unique seamless game worlds on the fly and using fewer resources. This kind of procedural generation is known as worldbuilding, in which general rules are used to construct a believable world.
Most 4X and roguelike games make use of procedural generation to some extent to generate game levels. SpeedTree is an example of a developer-oriented tool used in the development of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and aimed at speeding up the level design process. Procedural generation also made it possible for the developers of Elite, David Braben and Ian Bell, to fit the entire game—including thousands of planets, dozens of trade commodities, multiple ship types and a plausible economic system—into less than 22 kilobytes of memory.[26] More recently, No Man's Sky procedurally generated over 18 quintillion planets including flora, fauna, and other features that can be researched and explored.[27]
History
20th century
There is no consensus on what the earliest open-world game is, due to differing definitions of how large or open a world needs to be.[28]Inverse provides some early examples games that established elements of the open world: Jet Rocket, a 1970 Sega electro-mechanical arcade game that, while not a video game, predated the flight simulator genre to give the player free roaming capabilities, and dnd, a 1975 text-based adventure game for the PLATO system that offered non-linear gameplay.[22]Ars Technica traces the concept back to the free-roaming exploration of 1976 text adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure,[29] which inspired the free-roaming exploration of Adventure (1980),[30][31] but notes that it was not until 1984 that what "we now know as open-world gaming" took on a "definite shape" with 1984 space simulatorElite,[32] considered a pioneer of the open world;[33][34][35][36]Gamasutra argues that its open-ended sandbox style is rooted in flight simulators, such as SubLOGIC's Flight Simulator (1979/80), noting most flight sims "offer a 'free flight' mode that allows players to simply pilot the aircraft and explore the virtual world".[34] Others trace the concept back to 1981 CRPGUltima,[37][38][39] which had a free-roaming overworld map inspired by tabletop RPGDungeons & Dragons.[32] The overworld maps of the first five Ultima games, released up to 1988, lacked a single, unified scale, with towns and other places represented as icons;[32] this style was adopted by the first three Dragon Quest games, released from 1986 to 1988 in Japan.[40][5]
According to Game Informer's Kyle Hilliard, Hydlide (1984) and The Legend of Zelda (1986) were among the first open-world games, along with Ultima.[49]IGN traces the roots of open-world game design to The Legend of Zelda, which it argues is "the first really good game based on exploration", while noting that it was anticipated by Hydlide, which it argues is "the first RPG that rewarded exploration".[50] According to GameSpot, never "had a game so open-ended, nonlinear, and liberating been released for the mainstream market" before The Legend of Zelda.[51] According to The Escapist, The Legend of Zelda was an early example of open-world, nonlinear gameplay, with an expansive and cohesive world, inspiring many games to adopt a similar open-world design.[52]
I think The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is one of those games that people can 'project' themselves on. It does so many things and allows [for] so many play styles that people can easily imagine what type of person they'd like to be in game.
1UP considers Sega's adventure Shenmue (1999) the originator of the "open city" subgenre,[71] touted as a "FREE" ("Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment") game giving players the freedom to explore an expansive sandbox city with its own day-night cycles, changing weather, and fully voiced non-player characters going about their daily routines. The game's large interactive environments, wealth of options, level of detail and the scope of its urban sandbox exploration has been compared to later sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto III and its sequels, Sega's own Yakuza series, Fallout 3, and Deadly Premonition.[72][73][74][75]
Other examples include World of Warcraft, The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series of games, which feature a large and diverse world, offering tasks and possibilities to play.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl was developed by GSC Game World in 2007, followed by two other games, a prequel and a sequel. The free world style of the zone was divided into huge maps, like sectors, and the player can go from one sector to another, depending on required quests or just by choice.
In 2011, Dan Ryckert of Game Informer wrote that open-world crime games were "a major force" in the gaming industry for the preceding decade.[83]
Another popular sandbox game is Minecraft, which has since become the best-selling video game of all time, selling over 238 million copies worldwide on multiple platforms by April 2021.[84]Minecraft's procedurally generated overworlds cover a virtual 3.6 billion square kilometers.
The Outerra Engine is a world rendering engine in development since 2008 that is capable of seamlessly rendering whole planets from space down to ground level. Anteworld is a world-building game and free tech-demo of the Outerra Engine that builds upon real-world data to render planet Earth realistically on a true-to-life scale.[85]
No Man's Sky, released in 2016, is an open-world game set in a virtually infinite universe. According to the developers, through procedural generation, the game is able to produce more than 18 quintillion (18×1018 or 18,000,000,000,000,000,000) planets to explore.[86] Several critics found that the nature of the game can become repetitive and monotonous, with the survival gameplay elements being lackluster and tedious. Jake Swearingen in New York said that the players can procedurally generate 18.6 quintillion unique planets, but they can't procedurally generate 18.6 quintillion unique things to do.[87] Updates have aimed to address these criticisms.
In 2017, the open-world design of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was described by critics as being revolutionary[88][89][90] and by developers as a paradigm shift for open-world design.[91] In contrast to the more structured approach of most open-world games, Breath of the Wild features a large and fully interactive world that is generally unstructured and rewards the exploration and manipulation of its world.[92] Inspired by the original 1986 Legend of Zelda, the open world of Breath of the Wild integrates multiplicative gameplay, where "objects react to the player's actions and the objects themselves also influence each other".[93] Along with a physics engine, the game's open-world also integrates a chemistry engine, "which governs the physical properties of certain objects and how they relate to each other", rewarding experimentation.[94]Nintendo has described the game's approach to open-world design as "open-air".[95]
^Moss, Richard (March 25, 2017). "Roam free: A history of open-world gaming". Ars Technica. Retrieved October 6, 2017. Amazingly, open-world games can be traced back to the days of mainframes—namely, to the 1976 text-only game Colossal Cave Adventure for the PDP-10. Adventure at its core wasn't much different to the GTAs, Elites, and Minecrafts of today: you could explore, freely, in any direction, and your only goals were to find treasure (which is scattered throughout the cave) and to escape with your life.
^Moss, Richard (March 25, 2017). "Roam free: A history of open-world gaming". Ars Technica. Retrieved October 6, 2017. Colossal Cave Adventure was a direct inspiration on 1980 Atari 2600 game Adventure. Its open world may have been sparse and populated by little more than dragon-ducks and simple geometric shapes, but its relative vastness enabled players to imagine magnificent adventures of their own making.
^Mason, Graeme (April 9, 2017). "10 games that defined the ZX Spectrum". Eurogamer. Retrieved October 14, 2017. Lords Of Midnight's wonderful storyline (inspired, unsurprisingly, by The Lord Of The Rings), open-world gameplay and elegant graphics were one thing - its seemingly effortless welding of the traditional adventure game to these features set a new standard for software that remains an amazing feat over 30 years later.
^ abJankiewicz, Joshua (July 22, 2016). "Valhalla". Hardcore Gaming 101. Archived from the original on October 27, 2016. Retrieved October 14, 2017. Still, for a pre-King's Quest graphic adventure, Valhalla remains pretty unique with its open-world aspects. Being able to kill anyone and anything can be great fun, and seeing what weird things the NPCs will do on autopilot is strangely endearing.
^Koon, David (February 8, 2012). "Dani Bunten changed video games forever". Arkansas Times. Retrieved July 19, 2017. Seven Cities of Gold, an Ozark Softscape title produced for EA in 1984 that eventually became the best-selling game of Bunten's career, was one of the first video games to take a stab at an 'open world' concept, allowing players to explore a virtual continent and set their own path rather than follow a regimented series of events.
^Rignall, Jaz (February 8, 2017). "Open World Games Make me Drive Like an Idiot". USGamer. Retrieved October 6, 2017. While Turbo Esprit sounds like a racing game, this quite revolutionary release is actually a very early example of an open-world driving game.
^Cobbett, Richard (December 31, 2011). "Saturday Crapshoot: The Terminator". PC Gamer. Retrieved October 14, 2017. With nothing but 1990s 3D technology, it presented an open world action game set in modern-day Los Angeles...
^O'Connor, Alice (January 15, 2015). "Have You Played… Quarantine?". Rock Paper Shotgun. Retrieved October 14, 2017. An open-world taxi game set in a hyperviolent dystopian futurecity, 1994's Quarantine is hugely exciting in my foggy memory.
^"The History Of: Iron Soldier". Retro Gamer. No. 165. Future Publishing. March 2017. p. 79. Sean Patten was on board to produce and Atari was adamant that the game be open world. "Those were the three pillars that formed Iron soldier", explains Marc, 'heavy property damage, a mech theme and a game that was open world and not on rails.'