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In the mid-1990s, something extraordinary happened to video games. 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. 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.
Fast-forward 25 years and the open world genre is no longer radical or daring – it’s pretty much the standard. 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. The backstory is usually told through audio files, scrolls or holographic messages left haphazardly around the place by incredibly garrulous and indiscrete strangers.
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. 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. 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.
Last week, a controversy blew up on social media when one frustrated gamer tweeted, “STOP MAKING OPEN WORLD GAMES. CLOSE THE WORLD. NONLINEARITY IS NOT THE SECRET TO AN ENJOYABLE EXPERIENCE”. 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.
But I think the original poster has a point. If you want a tense, beautifully structured story experience, open worlds are not the place to go. 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.
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. But open world games can be too baggy and obtuse with these rules, or the narrative is set almost at odds with the world. 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 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. 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.
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. 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.
Open world games need to evolve beyond the conventions with which players are now desperately familiar. 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.”
I really like the idea of open world games becoming closely contained narrative metaverses. 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. And within these contained worlds there is the freedom to uncover compact, tense stories, new rooms, or unsuspected depths of enemies and allies. Then maybe you find yourself in another restricted space or you play again and discover a whole new route, a whole new realm of possibilities through different interactions and decisions. The most interesting modern horror cinema – Cabin in the Woods, Midsommar, Get Out, Don’t Breathe – is about the infinite possibilities of rigidly enclosed spaces. Density rather than scale, maybe that’s the thing.
What to play
If you’re at all interested in the way games work, in terms of structure, narrative and convention, I’d really recommend playing The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. It’s an expanded edition of the 2013 postmodern masterpiece, created by Davey Wreden and William Pugh, and if you’ve never played it, it’s best to go in with as little information as possible. I will say that it’s a sort of mischievous and often hilarious comment on narrative game design, which plays with space, character and story and constantly up-ends the player. There’s lost of fresh content in Ultra Deluxe that perfectly compliments and expands the original, and it steers just clear of the pretension exhibited by that other critically acclaimed ‘meta’ video game, Disco Elysium.
Available on: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox
Estimated play time: About 7 hours
What to read
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As an unashamed Sega fanatic, I loved this feature by Matthew Reynolds at Eurogamer about one of the most important and formative open world games Shenmue, which arrived on the Dreamcast console in 1999. More specifically, the article is about the game’s feature-packed harbour area, where players can race forklift trucks and search for sailors. The game creates an extremely compelling sense of place and culture, and the harbour area really exemplifies this.
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A new Star Wars game is coming, courtesy of Respawn Entertainment, and it’s a sequel to the well-reviewed action adventure Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. The Star Wars site has a nice little interview with the games director Stig Asmussen about the process of expanding the Star Wars universe.
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And just because I can, I’m going to recommend a novel that I’ve discovered a little late, but that I think all fans of From Software games should read immediately. It’s Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, which follows a mysterious character through a vast labyrinthine mansion filled with statues. There are lots of little narrative, architectural and visual elements that will really chime with fans of Dark Souls. I loved it.
What to click
Evil Dead: The Game review – gratifying guts and grue
Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong review – a thriller to get your teeth into
Question Block
This week’s question comes from the excellent indie game development studio Nosebleed Interactive, based in Newcastle upon Tyne. They asked:
“How much do players really care about graphics after they’ve started playing a game. Occasionally a game will be so pretty, I stop in awe, but for the most part, when the action starts I couldn’t care less about raytracing and all that stuff. To sell, yes, for playing though?”
I think this varies enormously from one player to another. The people who spend £2,000 on a high-end gaming PC are doing that because they want to see astonishing 4K visuals with all the attendant special effects: for them, games are a predominately visual experience and if there’s a drop in quality three hours in, they will very much notice.
But for other players, what becomes more important as a game progresses is environmental diversity. If you think about it, most action games are based around quite limited compulsion loops: you enter an area full of enemies, you kill those enemies, you collect loot, you move on. So the visual theming of different areas provides the thrill of novelty, but it is also a tacit acknowledgment of the player’s success. When you hit the Marble Zone in Sonic the Hedgehog or a new vault in Tomb Raider, the graphical change acts like a score bonus or victory jingle – it’s a reward for your mastery.
There are also emotional moments that rely heavily on visual quality: the giraffes in Last of Us, the monsters in Shadow of the Colossus, John Marston crossing the border into Mexico – these were moments designed, like the Sistine Chapel ceiling, to provoke awe. And in those moments yes, graphics matter.
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