But Shen Mue and Fable 1 were considered open world while they had loading screens (with atrocious loading times as well) when you entered another region of the world , and if i remember well there were not many ways to complete an objective, just one way… while having multiple solutions to the problems is a requirement for open games right?
Nonethless they gave you the freedom to wander about the world without actually going forward with the main objectives… but if it is enough to be considered an open game… well Mario 64 was too You could just walk around a level without collecting the stars
Maybe the difference is in Fable and Shen Mue and Zelda you can do optional missions and delay the mandatory ones, play poker at bars and other mini-games, while in Mario you had nothing else to do than collecting the stars therefore it is not open?
Generally speaking, an open world game is one in which the player has no limits (and is based on player’s imagination in case it’s a sandbox), like minecraft is an open world game. Open world game can have objectives and quests to complete but player is not bound to act upon them, it’s upto the player to choose whether to complete those objectives or not, and if yes, then there are multiple ways to seek those objectives.
Loading screens have no connection with the open world genre, it’s upto the designer to choose whether he would like to have loading screen or not. As far as ways to complete objective of an open world game is concerned, afaik there are many ways to complete that main objective, as well as there are many optional quests, but, this is just the traditional way of designing, the game could be designed any way. I would prefer the traditional method though.
I’m going to say this is a classic case of wikipedia being written by idiots. Streaming levels (while commonly present in open world games) is not intrinsic to open world games or exclusive to open world games, ergo isn’t really a part of open world games.
At this point open world is a terrible term because it cobbles together about a dozen different concepts that are poorly understood at best. The two biggest ones are probably nonlinear level design and nonlinear progression/game design, and god forbid you try to separate sandbox from it. The only given about the term is that it says something about the structure and connectivity of levels, possibly with the hope that you can explore/traverse these levels however you want sooner rather than later.
Dragon Age: Inquisition was the threshold of what could be called an open world game. It had very large maps where travel was limitless within that map, but they were still just maps. Skyrim is an example of a true open world game in that the entire world is “open” and available at any time.
However being an open world by definition alone isn’t enough. Just because terrain is available doesn’t mean the player is going to go there. A game that has a seamless world with mandatory or optional objectives spanning the entirety is going to be given the open world title, no questions asked.
But ya, the term is used fairly loosely and should not be used as a genre. It’s simply a description. Like, a blue umbrella. Open world RPG, linear RPG, rogue like RPG… they’re all still umbrellas.
My first ‘open world’ games were metroid prime and zelda ocarina of time. It’s just like you said with mario 64, there’s an older definition of open world that states you can wander around where ever you want and do whatever you want. Open world in the old definition is the modern “non-linear” game with hubs.
Deus Ex : human revolution and mario 64 have the same free roam around maps with a main hub design
And that’s the problem with the term. Structurally, you can draw parallels to the layouts, but the design goals are almost diametrically opposed to each other. The open levels of Deus Ex are there so that the player can tackle a problem with any number of possible solutions, while Mario 64 uses it to present the player a multitude of problems, yet these problems are almost always limited to a single solution. On that note, Mario 64’s model is the same for Zelda and Metroid (well, maybe not the very first Zelda).
And that’s the point, Deus Ex allows you to find your own solution to a problem (up to a certain limit), because there are many, while in Mario 64 you had not this freedom.
It is more exciting for players to find their own way to beat the game, although it is far more difficult to implement a design like that.
I prefer mario to deus ex (at least for human revolution). I probably prefer [nintendo title] to [other title] most of the time anyway. They’ve been rehashing mario forever and it’s still fun, they even made the rehash a selling point with that mario maker game!
Open world is pretty straight forward in its definition. A world implies a setting where the player can play the game. Open implies that the player can choose to visit any part of it at any time. That’s about all there is to it.
The confusion appears because there are so many shades of openworldness. It’s a float, rather then a bool.
You have games like Skyrim that are highly open, and yet the player is somewhat constrained by his level. You have games like Diablo 2, the world is somewhat open, the player can visit any of the regions of the act they are in, especially if they have already visited them. And yet the level/experience system makes the typical path through the game approximately linear. Then you have games like Halo. There is pretty much no reason to revisit an area. And there is no way to visit an area in advance. The game is for all intents and purposes linear.
So consider openworldness as a spectrum. The appropriate question is not “Is this game open world?” The question is “How open is this game?”
I think it’s because nintendo tries to make new things. Occasionally getting new IP, like splatoon, but usually inventing new types of games to play. Mario’s been around forever, but look how many kinds of games he’s in.
I’m also disappointed there is no super mario sunshine 2. I’d get a new nintendo console for that alone! I’ve already done that. I got a 3ds a few months ago just so I could play monster hunter. They’ve got some valuable IP for sure. Sorta wish they’d put monster hunter on a bigger device though…
But is it a level design term or a game design term? Is it an open world when the levels are highly interconnected? But what if the game railroads the player for the first 95% of the game? Is it an open world if the player can travel to any place, but all the levels are structured in a line?
The real problem with the term is that it’s main usage by people today is intended to mean not linear. If you find a game that has the appearance of being non linear (i.e. anything that isn’t a hyper linear corridor shooter or FF XIII, pick your poison), I am willing to bet a beer (okay, I picked the poison) that I can find someone who thinks it’s open world or at least talks about it having open world elements.
The term ends up being nothing but fluff. It implies a thousand things to a hundred people, yet none of them would ever be able to agree concretely about what is actually open world.
Most of the time it means whatever the marketers want it to
You’ve kind of demonstrated my point in saying that many people can point to open world elements in many games. There is a spectrum of openworldness out there.
Defining something by its opposite is also perfectly valid. Defining open world as something that is not linear works pretty well too.
Trying to pin down a more exact definition of open world is pretty useless. Its a very broad, high level concept. The term covers a wide variety of things, much like fantasy in fiction.
Ergo using the term is useless. It’s a term that needs to be discarded, so that instead, people can actually use the dozen concrete concepts that are weakly globbed together under the umbrella of open world.
As it stands, it’s not even a spectrum. Depending on which concepts a person subjectively think constitutes open world, just about any game could be put anywhere. Any attempt at objectifying it is almost always an exercise in drilling down to grab one of the concrete concepts, like player freedom or level connectivity or world simulation, and using that to plot things on a spectrum.
That’s not correct.
You’re confusing “open-world”, which is a type of level-design, with “sandbox”, which is a genre.
The whole “game is one in which the player has no limits and is based on player’s imagination” is the description of the sandbox genre. Sandbox games are typically open-world, but not necessarily. Take Garry’s Mod for example. The levels range from completely open to strictly linear.
Open-world games also aren’t always sandboxes. An example for a linear game with open-world level-design would be Mafia 2.
When you said that the loading screens are irrelevant, you were pretty much spot-on. Whether a game has loading screens or not comes down to the specific implementation. Open-world or not is a game-design question. Loading screens or level streaming is a technical one. The first 3d GTA games had loading screens because doing seamless level streaming with that amount of data simply wasn’t going to happen on the PS2.
@StealThePixels :
I’m going to try to explain this on a theoretical level.
Have a look at the following graph I found on Google:
Imagine each node representing a place in the game’s world.
If the player is in a specific location, there’s always only a finite number of places he can go. This is strictly linear level design in a nutshell for you. The key is that the developer controls the flow of the game, the progression through its world, very tightly.
For open-world games, you cannot draw such a graph. After leaving the vault in Fallout 3, the player doesn’t have to go to Megaton. It’s up to the player. Standing at a specific location, there’s a virtually infinite amount of places he can go. The difference is that the developer controls the flow only very loosely.
The short version is that in strictly linear games, the developers controls where the player goes next, while in open-world ones, the player himself does.
Strictly linear and open-world level-design somewhat behave like two opposites on a linear scale, in that they’re the two extremes. Some people seem to think that open-world is better than strictly linear, which I think is bullshit.
Both have their weaknesses and, due to their extreme nature, quite big ones at that.
I don’t think I need to explain the weaknesses of strictly linear games. The implications of giving the player practically no choices in a medium that is supposed to be interactive should be quite obvious.
Open-world games have two big problems.
Firstly, the levels have very little detail on a small scale. On a large scale Witcher 3 and GTA 5 look detailed. But as soon as you take a closer look, you’ll notice that the vast majority of buildings are only there to take up space so the world doesn’t look empty. This makes open-world level-design a bad choice for genres that require highly detailed levels on a small scale (e.g. stealth).
The second huge weakness is that their stories suffer greatly. I just finished Witcher 3 and even that game had a fairly bad story, when held up to more linear games with good writing. The thing is that you cannot possibly convey a sense of urgency. Sure, you might tell the player that he has to hurry because some big catastrophe is near, but let’s be real: That catastrophe is going to wait for as long as the player wants to run through the mountains picking flowers. In open-world games, you cannot pace the story.
So obviously one of the most retarded things you could do, is pumping massive amounts of time and money into a story-focused open-world stealth game.
Personally, I find the level-design philosophies that are neither fully open-world nor strictly linear the most interesting.
A completely linear succession of places that, in and of themselves, are fairly open and allow a decent amount of approaches is a personal favorite. Notable games would be the first Deus Ex, SystemShock 2, Thief 1 and 2 and Crysis.
My personal #1 has got to be the 3d metroidvania as seen in Dark Souls. 11/10 in terms of level-design; I instantly fell in love with it. Highly recommend everyone to check this game out, if you have a console or a controller for your PC. The areas are linear, but they’re highly interconnected with shortcuts and - most importantly of all - are in one seamless world. The world is fairly big, but feels gigantic due to the vertical element that your typical open-world game simply doesn’t have.
H’m, I think you’re right. I had minecraft in my mind and I wrote it upon that. Gotta fix it. “No limits” parts apply to all open world games to a satisfactory extent, though. Even a linear level design could have this concept if multiple levels are linked or chained together forming a complex and large map and where some of the levels are irrelevant to the main quest.
You could just walk around a level without collecting the stars
