Open world games. They evoke an immense feeling of freedom and have such potential for grand epic stories where the player will see so many interesting places and people along the way. So naturally, they’re quite popular. Many developers have dipped their hand into the genre but they don’t all do it the same way. Let’s have a look at how a few different developers create an open world, and how their designs affect the experience of the player.

We’ll start with Ubisoft, certainly the most active developers of open world sandboxes. Ever since they hit it big with Assassin’s Creed back in 2007 they’ve been cranking out open world action games almost every year. Part of the reason they can do it so quickly, apart from having a huge team and multiple studios working at once, is that they stick to a formula with minor changes in each release. Fittingly, this started with Assassin’s Creed. Unlike modern open worlds, it had 3 different cities to explore that were separate but all fairly large and open. But Ass Creed was the first game to popularise the mechanic revealing points of interest by reaching a high viewpoint. Once up there the player would get a panning shot of the city and the map would be filled with icons representing various collectibles and points of interest.

This leads nicely to the next point about Ubisoft’s open worlds. They’re filled to the brim with collectibles or mini missions. Pretty much every game from Ass Creed onwards would have a checklist with 3 or 4 different kinds of collectibles scattered all over the world for the player to find. While these are largely unrelated to the main story, they serve the purpose of giving the player something else to do. Don’t feel like an assassination? Why not hunt down some Templar flags for a while instead? This is a pretty good way of extending gameplay and a decent method of keeping the player’s interest. There’s always a variety of things to do in Ubisoft’s open worlds. And usually the player gains something from doing them, like money or XP, so even if they’re not super fun they are still rewarding.

Another important aspect of Ubisoft games is that, thanks to being able to climb in Ass Creed or Watchdogs, there’s more of a focus on verticality. Simply due to the fact a player can travel upward, the world becomes twice as big because every surface of a building from top to bottom becomes part of the play space, more space for hidden collectibles or even another option for traversing the world.

Of course, Ass Creed isn’t Ubisoft’s only big franchise. Far Cry 3 was another big hitter for them and it represented an evolution in their open world design philosophy. It had elements of Assassin’s Creed like climbing up towers to reveal the map and a million collectibles everywhere but it always brought forward the outpost mechanic. Far Cry 3’s world is littered with enemy outposts that you can clear to liberate an area and in doing so unlock new weapons. Like the collectibles, these aren’t entirely necessary and often offer the player a diversion from the main story. They make great use of the open world nature of the game as outposts can be approached from any angle and in whatever way you like.

And as they’re not part of a mission, the only failstate is the player’s death. As such, you can go in and out as you please, taking down one guard at a time, running to safety and coming back. Or going somewhere else entirely to acquire some better equipment and coming back to finish the job. They let the player revel in the freedom provided from having an open world. In a way this is similar to the assassination missions in Assassin’s Creed. They weren’t optional sidequests but they did usually allow you to approach the target however you wanted, though often times there would be fail states such as being spotted or the target getting away, resulted in the mission starting over gain.

In truth, the Ubisoft open world design hasn’t evolved all that much since the early 2000s. Some changes were made for Odyssey and Origins but they still largely focused on having collectibles everywhere, using towers to reveal a map and in Odyssey, liberating areas by taking out outposts. However they severely lessened the amount of collectibles, as there were simply too many in previous games for players to care about them. Finding your first hidden feather is fun but after the hundredth time it loses something.

So looking at most of their games, we can see that Ubisoft likes to design huge worlds with a lot of small things to do in them, but nothing relates to the over arching plot. Everyhing apart from the main story is either a way for the player to get better gear or experience, or simply take a break from the main questline. Given that things like outposts in Far Cry or hidden caves in Odyssey are small and short, it seems like their worlds are designed so the player can enjoy them in bite size chunks, coming and going as they please, not having to sink 10 hours a day into them but leaving that possibility open for those who want it.

Rockstar Games actually follow a similar principal. Looking at the GTA series we can see that there is a main story with missions that take place all over the map and a large variety of side content to do, unrelated to the main missions. In stark contrast to most of Ubisoft’s games Rockstar’s open worlds are not so saturated with collectibles. Of course they’re still there, Hidden Packages in GTA will unlock weapons and gear for the player to use and for some reason Niko in GTA IV keeps a checklist of 100 pigeons to be shot in Liberty City.

But most of the side content comes in the form of missions. There are randomly generated ones like hopping into an ambulance or taxi in Vice City will start a mini game where you need to bring passengers to random locations within a certain time limit. This kind of mission is a perfect fit for an open world game. Giving the player a set destination but no specific direction encourages them to make use of the open world. It presents the player with unlimited options because there is no one way to get where they need to be. Other side missions are more scripted and have specific goals for the player to achieve. Mechanically they’re similar to the main missions but usually on a smaller scale. They offer a nice quick diversion with a reward at the end and generally the stories told in them are well written, so they’re enjoyable and rewarding.

But then, what makes them different from the main story? Well, that’s actually quite interesting. The main story missions in GTA or Red Dead Redemption are the ones that progress the main character’s own story but also they tend to have the big set pieces like robbing a train, or doing a bank heist. These are things that aren’t possible outside of the missions. So really there isn’t much differentiating the main missions with the side missions apart from their scope and the focus of their story.

But there are other activities to do as well, especially in more recent Rockstar games. You’ve got tennis, golf, street races, stock market trading, gambling for example. These aren’t missions and they aren’t collectibles. They’re simply things happening in the world you can join in. I think these are a really good example of making use of an open world, in a narrative sense. Mechanically of course they don’t use the open world at all, they take place in small spaces.

But the fact that they’re just there and you can go and do them whenever adds to the feeling that you’re in a real world. Templar flags and hidden feathers don’t feel realistic. It makes no sense that they’re just on somebody’s windowsill or rooftop. It does make sense that the guys in the saloon are playing a game of dice and will happily take a chance at taking all your hard earned cash off you.

So what can we say about how Rockstar designs their worlds? Well, they go for a sense of realism, certainly moreso in their recent games. They want you to interact with the world as if it were a world and not just a game. Side missions act as diversions to the main story but also tell their own stories and other activities allow the player to immerse themselves in a somewhat realistic world. However we also see that main missions do not make particularly good use of the open world format a lot of the time. They’re mostly linear missions with predetermined paths.

The player is not allowed to fail, or they will be reset back to the start of the mission. It almost splits the game into two different games. You’ve got the open world and you’ve got the mission based game. The open world is freedom, choice to play however you like but the main story mission game is linear and must be played the right way or it doesn’t count! But this doesn’t always have to be the case.

You can see this in games like Morrowind, the third of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series. That game had a huge open world with a main quest and a million side quests to do. However, unlike Rockstar’s games, there was almost nothing in the main questline that wasn’t accessible outside those quests. Where a villain in GTA can’t be killed, or may not even exist physically in the world, until you start their mission, many of the main characters of Morrowind’s quests would already be there, doing their thing in their part of the world. This is a great way to make use of the open world and, compared to the side activities in GTA or Red Dead, adds to the feeling of being part of a real living world. It makes sense that Divayth Fyr is in his wizard tower because that’s where he lives and you can go there and kill him if you want, it’ll just make things complicated when you want to do the main story. So from this we can see that the design of Bethesda’s RPGs, up until Morrowind anyway, focused on creating a realistic fantasy world, where the player isn’t always the center of the universe. Characters, locations and important quest items exist and are interactive regardless of what quest or mission your doing. You won’t find hidden collectibles in Morrowind or Daggerfall. Everything exists as part of some other character’s inventory or loot in a dungeon.
Now you could argue that this changed in later entries. Skyrim does have the jewels of Barenziah’s crown to collect and the words of dragon shouts. Fallout 3 and 4 of course has the bobbleheads. But just like the random loot items you find all over the place, they have a good reason for existing in the world.

Of course, the games Bethesda makes are very different from Ubisoft and Rockstar games. The most significant difference is that your character is a blank slate, with only a vague hint at a backstory. Apart from giving the player freedom to play whatever character they like, it adds another layer to the freedom of the open world. Since they’re not a main character, they’re not beholden to the main story, and this is a great way to get around one of my pet peeves I have about open world games. Dealing with the fact that the player can leave the main questline aside, despite it making absolutely no sense for the character to do so. Now I’m not saying this is the only way to get around it. The best way is to just design quests so that it makes sense to not do them straight away. And even with a blank slate custom character, this problem can arise.

See The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion for an example. At the beginning the emperor tells the player they’re the prophesied hero he’s seen in his dreams and is destined to save the world! Now it makes sense for the player to brush this off as the ramblings of a dying old man and go join the fighters guild or whatever. In that way, they’re free of the main quest and it doesn’t concern them. It is not logical, however, that they spend hours progressing the main questline to the point where the imperial city is about to be invaded and oblivion gates have opened everywhere, only to go and join the fighters guild. It takes away any urgency the main quest had and makes the world feel less realistic.

Fallout 4 is even worse for this because it gives the main character a backstory and a family he’s supposed to care about rescuing. This does not fit well into an open world sandbox RPG because the main character wants to save their child, while the player probably just wants to do random quests and loot raiders.

Bethesda are an interesting case in this examination of open world game devs. Ubisoft and GTA both offer more freedom overall in their games with every release, whereas Bethesda remove important player freedoms. Certainly an argument can be made that having an NPCs death reset a mission in Ass Creed or GTA takes away some player freedom because it’s forcing them to play a certain way, but your actions still matter.

Unlike with the immortal NPCs that Bethesda implemented in every game since Oblivion. Sure you aren’t forced to keep them alive any more but your actions no longer matter in the grand scheme of things when the important people are invincible. This exists to make sure players don’t screw themselves over, as was possible in Morrowind. It let you know when you’d killed an essential NPC so you could load a save but older games would allow you to kill someone you didn’t know was essential until it came time to do their quest.

So we can see that Bethesda of the modern day likes to create open worlds where everything exists as part of the world and keeps away from overly gamey elements like hidden collectibles that only exist for a player to interact with. We also see that they do not commit fully to this realistic world any more as they make sure that while the player is free to go wherever they want, they are not allowed to do whatever they want in case they screw themselves over.

But what if you could let a player go where they wanted and do whatever they wanted, without holding their hand when they’re about to do something stupid? This is the design philosophy apparent in Arkane’s games. In all of their games, any character can be killed by the player, just like in Bethesda’s Morrowind. However, for the most part the story will continue in some way, or in the case of Dishonored 1, it will end prematurely but naturally.

In Noclip’s recent documentary one of the level designers on Dishonored tells a story about how a player managed to navigate around a cutscene trigger and kill Daud at the very beginning, before he could kill the queen, and the game just ended. This wasn’t necessarily intended by the developers but it does show what kind of open worlds they design. Their games are all made with systemic design in mind (something I’ve talked about before, much more succinctly than this). That means they’re all about letting the player interact naturally with anything in the world, as well as making sure everything adheres to the same set of rules.

This kind of design necessitates a realistically designed world, so that in itself leads to the game world feeling realistic and immersive. This is similar to Red Dead Redemption, GTA and the elder scrolls in a sense, Arkane tends not to lean on unrealistic elements like items that give you arbitrary stat boosts.

But I’m digressing a bit. Arkane’s worlds themselves allow the player a great deal of freedom by having every problem designed with multiple solutions in mind. In their games you can almost always sneak past a bad guy instead of fighting them. There are no concrete fail states for missions except for the player’s death. This design isn’t just relegated to quests or missions. In Prey, for example there are locked rooms. And they’re usually locked by passcodes. One room in particular is memorable for me. It isn’t part of any main quest but there are multiple ways to tackle the problem of getting into it. Find the code somewhere, guess the code, hack the lock, turn into a small object and get in through the window, use big objects to make a climbable ladder or use a nerf dart to hit the computer screen and unlock the door that way. So there’s an immense amount of freedom for the player to tackle any problem and play however they like but it’s important to note one thing that separates Arkane’s games from the other devs I’ve talked about. While their game worlds are non linear and the player can move around freely, they’re also nowhere near as big as Bethesda, Ubisoft’s or Rockstar’s open worlds. Dishonored 1 and 2 both have every mission take place in a separate areas, like mini open worlds. And Prey takes place entirely within a space station. Their games are also heavily story focused with significantly fewer side quests than you might expect in an open world. In Prey most of the people on the station are already dead and in Dishonored the majority are generic guards with no personality or backstory. They’re not people with their own houses and daily routines. The smaller scope of their games does have its limitations in that you never feel like you’re in a huge world where you can go wherever you like. While all mountains may be climbable in Skyrim, the buildings in the distance in Dishonored 2 are just textures outside the level boundary. But on the other hand, that small scope also means that you never end up wandering away from the main story for hours. That said, it’s not impossible to have a huge sandbox world and also make the player feel like they’re not ignoring the main part of the game.

Enter Breath of the Wild! This was the first huge open world game Nintendo made in a long time, maybe since the early Zelda titles. And it was clever in its delivery of the main story. For those who don’t know, the story is that Link has awoken after 200 years and must stop Calamity Ganon before he gets too strong. There are 4 big mechanical beasts that have been corrupted and Link can cleanse them and use their power against Ganon. However, they’re optional. Ganon can actually be fought at any point in the game, even as soon as you start. Not only does this offer player freedom, it eliminates the problem of having the main story be separate from the most appealing parts of the gameplay, that being open world exploration. You’re much too weak to defeat Ganon at the start (unless you really practice a lot) so the game is spent making Link stronger. Thus, everything you do in the game contributes to the main story. It’s not just fun to storm a random bandit camp, the gear and money you get from doing it makes Link stronger, furthering your overarching goal of becoming strong enough to defeat Ganon. The shrines you find and complete increase Link’s stats and the Korok seeds increase your inventory space so you can carry a bigger arsenal. Everything in this game leads to Link getting stronger, and to the player getting stronger as they’ll become more experienced with the game mechanics through their adventure. So when you decide it’s time to fight Ganon it doesn’t feel like it did in Skyrim when you thought “Well, I might as well do the main quest and finish this off”, it feels more like “I’m finally strong enough to do this. I’m gonna go show Ganon what I’m made of.”

But that aspect of the design doesn’t just affect how the player sees the main story. It affects everything in the game. Just like in Ass creed games there are outposts to be cleared everywhere and over 900 collectible Korok seeds and 120 shrines. But because each one offers a substantial reward it doesn’t feel like they’re just part of a checklist to mindlessly tick off. They even implemented the mechanic of climbing to high towers to reveal the map, but again these are given more significance than in most other games. Rather than just showing the locations of any points of interest, side quests or collectibles, they fill in the actual map. You see the entire map is blank at the start of your playthrough and individual regions are filled in when you climb a tower. It feels necessary and like you’re achieving so much more than just finding collectible locations. And they fact they don’t show you where everything is encourages further exploration. This is bolstered by the fact you can place pins on the map, or on the actual game world through Link’s binoculars to highlight places you might want to travel to.

And the other big thing they took from Ubisoft’s games is climbing, except instead of buildings you can climb every single surface in the game (apart from shrine interiors). There is the added caveat that climbing uses stamina so you can’t climb the tallest of buildings and mountains straight away. And it’s that mechanic that shows how all of the elements of BOTW’s open world are intrinsically linked. Towers let you see interesting things in the world, stamina loss or strong enemies prevent you from reaching some of them, so you need to complete shrines to increase your stats. Those shrines can only be found through exploration, or by going up a tall tower to get a bird’s eye view and find them from there. BOTW connects all of its mechanics in a way that most other open worlds don’t. It gives the player as much freedom as is possible, encourages them to scour every part of the world and ties it into the main story so you never feel disconnected from it. It’s almost perfect. But it’s not. There are very few towns and NPCs, and the ones you can find lack depth. Most of them are just nameless people who walk around aimlessly and can’t be interacted with, unlike the Elder Scrolls or GTA so in some ways the world feels less realised than in those games.

So what have we learned today? Well there are quite a few different ways to make an open world, each with its own limitations. But none of them is bad. I may have shown some bias towards Breath of the Wild but that’s just because it’s the style I prefer. Each style of open world game has its own merits and gaming would be much worse off if there weren’t such a diverse range.

I hope you enjoyed this examination/ramble about open world games. Do let me know what you thought, and tell me what’s your favorite open world game? Do you play to explore a huge world or you do you mostly just go straight for the main quest? And as always, if you liked the video give it a like and maybe even subscribe if you want to see more of this kind of thing. Or if you want to see some let’s plays, I do those too.