Grand Opening, Grand Closing

I’m not about to list off all of the pros and cons of open-world game design. That is far too big a topic for one post. I do have one specific thought about open worlds that I want to discuss. So often, the apparent purpose of open worlds is to make the game feel big. And it’s true that in terms of sheer volume, open-world games usually are bigger than their closed-world counterparts. In a purely numerical sense, they are often bigger in every quantifiable way, whether that’s the number of things to collect and interact with or just the surface area of the game’s map. But we don’t play video games as a set of zeroes and ones. They’re a highly sensory experience. So, do open worlds actually feel bigger? More often than not, no, they don’t.

As mentioned in my previous post, I recently finished replaying Death Stranding. It’s still a great game, but one thing I noticed then and now is that while the game’s world is supposed to represent the entire continental United States, in practice it’s almost laughably small. This is hardly a bad thing from the perspective of game design; Death Stranding would hardly be better if each delivery took several hours just to drive along the highway. But when you start looking at the bigger picture, you realize just how tiny everything is. When Sam Porter Bridges finally reaches the western region of the former United States, the last leg of his journey is from a distribution center to Edge Knot City. The map shown when these two are connected indicates that they’re located somewhere around Reno, Nevada, and San Luis Obispo, California, respectively. Per Google Maps, the most direct walking route between these two cities is about 650 kilometers and would take six straight days of walking. In Death Stranding, this route is about two kilometers long. The time it takes depends on how one chooses to dispose of the BTs that plague the region, so I won’t provide an estimate in the interest of fairness.

Like I previously said, requiring about 150 hours to complete one delivery would be bad game design. I’m not trying to suggest it’s a failing of the game to not be a 1:1 recreation of the United States, Nathan Fielder-style (although…). There are consequences of the game’s relatively small world being a representation of the entire continental US. The biggest is that it closes off the possibility of expansion. Notably, the upcoming sequel to Death Stranding is taking place in Australia, providing an entirely new map to explore. This is good, because if it were to expand upon the first game’s map, the only options would be north into Canada or south into Mexico, as we’ve already been from Atlantic to Pacific. More importantly, however, it has the effect of limiting how much really exists in this game’s world. In a closed-world game, it’s easy to imagine things happening outside of what the player can engage with directly. In an open-world game, it’s much harder, and it becomes even harder the larger the area the game world is supposed to represent. If your open world is just a city, it’s easy enough to imagine there’s more outside of it, although it’s hard to imagine anything in this city that you can’t see, and when you start thinking about it, you realize this city is much smaller than it would be in reality. A larger area, such as an island, will surely exist within a greater world, but there’s no room for anything else on that island. When game worlds are meant to be entire countries, this becomes more of a problem. Nothing in this country is meaningfully far apart, its cities are pitifully small, and there’s very little possibility of anything else existing within it.

If any games do a good job of averting this, it’s the Yakuza/Like a Dragon/Judgment series. Notably, the open worlds of these games only correspond to about a city block, rather than trying to represent an entire city. This means they can be roughly to scale with their real-life counterparts while also being close to as densely packed. Furthermore, you can easily see how much world is still out there just by looking outside the boundaries. That’s hardly the only thing these games do, though. Lots of the important story events (and some of the minigames!) take place outside of the free-roaming cities. The world beyond Kamurocho isn’t just hypothetical, it’s very much part of the game. To some, this is antithetical to open-world design. An open-world game should be a sandbox, and the events within it should be spontaneous and unscripted. The unfortunate truth for those people is that a fully unscripted game would likely not be very good. Putting pivotal scenes in purpose-built areas tends to work much better than putting them in places built for everything and nothing all at once, and as established above, it expands the world the game takes place in.

A long-running RPG series like Final Fantasy is another good point of reference (boy, I sure do talk about Final Fantasy a lot, don’t I?). In the old days, the overworld was the means by which the player traverses continents. This is a sort of abstract representation where the player character moves along fields, forests, and mountains in a greatly scaled-down version of the world. Cities are often represented as one tile on the field, and upon entering, you see the city in much greater detail. Even the expanded versions of the cities aren’t particularly large, but the point is that scale was relative back then. Final Fantasy X dispensed with the overworld, instead consisting of discrete locations strung together with no scaling adjustments, although there is some implied distance between locations due to loading screens. That implied distance is important; without it, the entire journey would feel more like a hike than an adventure. As far as cities are concerned, the player only ever gets to see bits and pieces of them, so it’s easy to imagine there’s more going on offscreen. In this sense, Final Fantasy XII is much less linear; cities give the player much more freedom to explore, but consequently, it’s harder to believe there’s more going on. The loading screens between locations do provide some of that implied distance, thereby opening up a bit of possibility, and the end result is certainly a bit more satisfied than the slivers available in Final Fantasy X. By Final Fantasy XV, they had done away with loading screens while traveling through most locations. There’s undeniably a value in being able to see the transition between locations (this stands in contrast to Final Fantasy XII, which connects a jungle to a snowy mountain and just leaved the player to imagine what must have happened in between). At the same time, this means that whatever the player can explore represents about as much as can actually exist in this world. It’s a tradeoff, and one that doesn’t have a definitive answer for what’s best. For what it’s worth, Final Fantasy XVI brought back loading screens between zones and for the most part abandoned cities as free-roaming locations entirely.

What matters most is that making a big game and making a game that takes place in a big world are two different objectives that are achieved in very different ways. There are limits to what a developer can create, and deciding that the player should be allowed to explore everything means the world you create will run straight into those limitations. Deciding more narrowly what can be explored will still have those limitations in effect, but with more flexibility.