Let’s start with the familiar scenario. You spent 40, 80, or perhaps 120 hours, running around an open world to thwart the indescribable evil plot of your enemies.
“If you don’t act fast, everyone is destined,” says your trusty companion. On the way to the showdown, a small exclamation point appears on the side of the road.
The next thing we know is that we are in the middle of a map that combines fields of random items.
meanwhile, Your arch enemy is brewing tea and playing poker with the fools.
No matter how much you pretended, it wasn’t really important, so you might forget that sense of urgency.
The odds are Of the 100 hours you have in your open world darling, only one-fifth of that is dedicated to progressing through the story In a meaningful way.
Almost universally, this is the false temptation by game directors and executives, making everything open world when it’s not necessary.
Opening the world as a problem
“So you’re saying all open worlds are bad?” No, it’s far from it. However, most of today’s story-driven, large open world games would be better as shorter, linear experiences.
One of the main discussions about open world games is replayabilityBut most of the time you can choose a world that doesn’t mean anything, with the infinite stretches of beautiful but sky scenery or the world stuffed with side quests.
The majority of players are not planning on spending a second playthrough Final Fantasy XV Help biologists to catch frogs While the world is burning.
When developers nail the world and atmosphere, the rewards of the main story are often overwhelming compared to the amount of effort it took to get there.
For all the common pitfalls of the format, RPGs and survival titles tend to work well as open world games. You are creating your own story or working on what the world has to offer you to keep you alive.
nevertheless, A vast open world pushes developers to do the act of balancing immersion and meaninglessness.
Certainly, wasting time in a game where you waste time can be argued that it is a beautiful ratio phor for the human condition, but there must be a better way.
Find a sweet spot
Action titles have a peculiarity, but are governed by the basic laws of all video games. Players need to worry about the game for it to work.
You need engaging settings, interesting stories and gameplay to complement it.
To stay immersed in the story, all accessible areas need to fit the overall feel. That’s difficult if you have a 60km² person.
There was no game that balances the freedom to roam and the pace of a good story. Metro Exodus. The game has six maps, three fully linear and three relatively open.
You can hurry up on your goals, but your peers will give you valuable Intel about where you are on your way to your goals.
It’s a high-reward exploration that doesn’t take you too far, but adds enough depth to the story. Metro Exodus You can choose to stick to the crew’s mission without much contact with the locals, or try to do what you feel is right.
Games like Metro Exodus They were successful because they followed the core lessons of Albert Camus’s 1942 novel. Stranger. Like Marceau, the main character of the book, All actions and inactions by players affect the lives of others, and his fate is fundamentally the culmination of his choices.
Some open world games try to replicate a comprehensive action-consensus system, but most of them become flat.
take Fallout 3 for example. At the end of all wandering, your companions want you to die of radiation addiction. Because this is your destiny, not their destiny.
You can buy a DLC that will improve it a little, but decent writing should require an additional $10 fee for the game to call you a co-sick person.
It’s not very
Now I quickly admit that it is difficult to create an attractive gameplay system with a sense of serious consequences. In many games it’s somewhere between the unrealistic and the nearest.
The good news is that There’s no need to have a large open world with dozen dialogue options and progression paths for the game.
Most players are completely happy with the game’s choice, as long as it makes sense within the context of the story. That’s a bonus: Witnessing someone else’s decisions adds a perspective and shows how different people approach the situation.
Take 2010 Medal of Honor for example. Your fate is sealed after your unit lead decides to organize an unauthorized rescue mission and you chase his lead from the helicopter. You will not be asked to “push f to jump” or to choose between three different but functionally identical options. You just do that.
On earth there is only one path to purpose, but depending on your stealth skills you can decide whether it’s a mean or violent journey.
The game is essentially The Destiny’s Man Fights the Taliban There is how linear the levels are, but the story and acting added enough weight to it, and after finishing the game I stared vaguely at the screen.
Despite all this, the emotional impact on me was much greater than that. Stalker 2an over 80-hour adventure with a massive map, but rarely builds a story on the side to justify the 20-minute hike from point A to point B.
When you ask gamers which games made them cry, the answers are increasingly drawn to simpler titles focusing on storytelling rather than 200GB open world. Specific open world masterpieces like Red Dead Redemption 2 It’s not a rule, it’s a notable exception.
For me, the last game I shed tears was My warwith a side crawler that is missing in 2GB, it is about to continue living in a bombed abandoned in. Similarly compact, signal It’s very linear, but it bumps into something like a brick bag.
It’s fair to hire a studio across the subsidiary to build a beautiful open world, and everything is special, but storytelling is special.
The valuable replayability comes from the desire to re-experience a series of emotions. Splitting the burst of story joy with fetch quests and redundant crafting mechanisms will make you splash the soul of modernity’s best storytelling format.
