INSiGHT: The Myth of the Open World?

Let's make this very clear right now before progressing any further: I am not against open world games. Having a game with a true open world is a wonderful accomplishment. I've just realised that a lot of games end up doing it wrong and want to delve into what makes such a concept actually work as opposed to railing against the notion.

A while back I was playing Dragon Age: Inquisition. My thoughts on the game are mixed at best, and there are multiple reasons why. In this case, however, I was busy working through the game's many side-quests and had just completed one of the zones entirely and was starting a new one when I stopped for a moment. Something had finally snapped, given way. I saved my game, shut it down, and promptly went 'This sucks' before loading up an entirely different game. Some massive plot-twist hadn't come along, some character I had enjoyed hadn't suddenly croaked, nothing at all had happened. I was done, however. Like a person trying to cram down a six course meal, I just couldn't take it anymore and had to stop, and worst of all, it wasn't a very good meal. For a while, I didn't think about it, enjoying one of the many games on my backlist and review titles, until I had to stop and go 'Why did it suck?' I thought about it for a while, played some more games, and then found my answer.

Open world games are a fairly wonderful concept. Instead of a linear dungeon with the goals clearly marked and in which the story can be beaten more or less by always moving forwards, there is plenty of room to move about and explore. Who knows what could be hidden away in some corner and what mysteries the world holds? So many games boast about it that it often ends up seeming like a requirement to be good and more and more games try to have it, yet why do so many games also seem to fail at it, as well? For every Elder Scrolls game there seems to be some schlock title whose name isn't even worth remembering. For every Minecraft, a No Man's Sky. To make it even more confusing, I was also playing some games that were not meant to be open world, yet were coming off as far more explorable, open-ended, and enjoyable than their open world counterparts. Why? Well, I sat down to figure it out, picking several games I felt best exemplified the various dichotomies.

Mass Effect

The answer came out as this: because I had a reason to. When I was on these missions, I always knew why I was there, where I was going, and why it mattered. As a result, I could often suppress the boring aspects with the thrill of completion. It didn't matter that the planet basically held only minerals and a crashed probe offering gear several levels below what I needed, if I didn't like it I could just get the minerals and leave. When something different did happen, however, I also knew more or less that I was there for it. Hence why, despite being pretty lacklustre and bad, I never felt so frustrated. If I wanted to ignore it, I could just drive to the missions and minerals and leave. It wasn't good, but it didn't feel like a vampire sucking away my will.

Hyperdimension Neptunia

Minecraft

Spore

Elder Scrolls

Dragon Age: Inquisition

Unlike Mass Effect, I couldn't just focus on missions and waypoints as I had to outright hoof it about. Unlike Hyperdimension Neptunia, I couldn't just ignore it outside of fairly straightforward guild-quests and my 'reward' was little more than the feeling that I had wasted time. Unlike Minecraft, I wasn't doing something impressive or even personal. I couldn't claim that it was even a cosmetic difference, like in Spore, or to upgrade my house for another display dummy, like in Elder Scrolls. I was doing it purely because the game would remind me that I hadn't. That's when it fully clicked.

The myth of the open world game isn't that open world games don't exist, because plenty of titles do. In Goat Simulator there are a ton of things that can be done, and so much can be uncovered on future play-throughs that, despite the relatively small worlds, it manages the open world feel. Meanwhile, in Dragon's Dogma, you can technically go anywhere, but why would you want to go to most of those places beyond a quest marker telling you that you have to? In the original Final Fantasy, there is only one way to progress the story, but you're free to roam about and any choice you make to go back to somewhere is purely your own and, inside the dungeons, who knows what secrets you'll find? In Final Fantasy XIII, why bother trying to explore when pretty much everything you need can be found in a straight line? In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, there may be a core storyline to follow, but Nintendo offers the chance to explore purely for the fun of exploring, giving rewards for the more adventurous out there…and so on.