Warning: this will be very, very long. I am fascinated by and a huge fan of the concept of open-world games.
Excellent, excellent talk which probably influences a few of my views:
In my opinion, open-world games are the zenith of video games–at least video games that try to tell a cohesive story and put you “in” a world. Everything outside of the main story itself serves to reinforce the fiction of the world, and gives the story (main and side stories) that much more impact.
I think the first “open-world” type game I ever played was American McGee Presents Scrapland. Wall o’ text about a game I love
fantastic quirky and funny story about a naïve robot in a very cynical world. From just about the beginning of the game you were open to do whatever you wanted. There wasn’t a whole lot to do, but what was there was fun. You had around 6 or so different public venues you could go in (the police station, the newspaper office, the town hall, etc.) and four different “outside” districts connecting all of them. You traveled outside by spaceships. There were maybe a dozen or two different types, but they were all modular–engines, weapons, and hull were all separate components and could be mixed-matched as one chose.
It handled death one of the best ways I’ve seen in a game: you were a robot, so they uploaded your “mind” to a big computer (they called it “The Great Database,” and it was controlled by “Bishops” who had a penchant for…creating work) and thus you could respawn, as long as you had the money and the “lives.” If you didn’t, you woke up in jail, where you could escape.
Apart from your character, there were maybe a dozen different archetypes, as well as around half a dozen other unique characters. Each character had a special ability: Staplers had a double jump, Nurses could bash someone over the head with a hammer, “functionaries” could speed up time, and your character could “dash” through any other character(destroying them).
The main thing that got me though, was the fact that the game world was so alive. Outside there were dozens of ships zipping about. Bankers and cops darting about shooting each other. Smaller generic ships following “paths” or roads through the city. And inside, it was the same way. Dozens of characters in a building. And each one could act out their ability at will. Small cops would go up to someone and demand money. If the character refused, the cop would turn into a giant cop and start shooting at them. Other nearby cops would pick up the scent and you’d have these massive shootouts in the middle of a public space, with bystanders getting vaporized.
It was a small world compared to many games out today. But the…I can’t think of the word, but the “ability to act independently” of the agents was something that isn’t replicated in most open worlds today. A bandit in The Witcher will never spontaneously attack a nonviolent citizen NPC. Bethesda games have NPC schedules, but there’s no variability. In Scrapland, you truly didn’t know if the banker across the room was going to steal money from a bishop, who would then attack the banker with his laser weapon, who would then be attacked by the police, who would then be attacked by other bankers nearby…I can’t recommend this game enough, if that isn’t obvious.
My next experience with an open world was Oblivion. And as much as I loved Scrapland, and consider it a game ahead of its time, Oblivion opened my eyes to the potential of a video game world to be a “real” place. Just the feeling of walking along a road in the middle of nowhere, and gradually seeing a city appear, that you could approach and then go into. It was just an incredible experience, and it made the world feel far more real than almost any game where you jump between random locations all the time.
I remember one time I was walking along the road (I think it was near Skingrad) in the middle of the night. I encountered the Count of Skingrad. Now, I don’t remember exactly how I knew this (I think it was the Dark Brotherhood questline), but I knew he was a vampire. Immediately I got a very uneasy feeling, suspicious of his nightly prowl. I don’t recall what happened afterwards ( I don’t think he did anything special), but by encountering this character in a different context, and then in the open world, I was able to experience something “immersively” that would never happen in a paint-by-numbers linear game.
More recent open-world games (outside of Bethesda experiences) have been more…shallow experiences, I would say, because of the distance between the player character and the characters in the game. I think this is a consequence of the (largely) mindless push towards larger and larger spaces. I don’t mind larger spaces, but in such places for some reason the dependence on meaningful interactions seems to have decreased. In The Witcher I can speak to random NPCs, but all they do is give their one or two-line barks. And they don’t do anything on their own. In Ubisoft games I can’t even talk to them (somewhat understandable since they don’t make RPGs). They have a type of systematic interaction, but it’s very shallow. The random thug I kill to stop him from killing someone else, the random child/thief running away…the game generated these moments ago, and they’ll disappear the moment I get too far away.
And part of it is that these interactions are created specifically for the player to intervene in. Far Cry (and the later AC games) did a little bit better with this one, where you would get fights between factions beyond the players influence.
That isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy these games, but they aren’t as immersive in my opinion because of these things.
I suppose there are a few different criteria (in my mind) to create the optimal “open world game.” Now, let me preface by saying that this set of criteria (and the “optimal open world game”) is inherently subjective. Different people are looking for different things when they play these types of games. But in my mind this group of things define the most meaningful world for a player to experience (“experience” is critical–it should be like going to a different country, not like going to a theme park where everything is directly for the customers).
Story. This seems backwards: an open world frees the team and player to focus on things other than the plot. However, context is everything. Open worlds with no kind of designed impetus upon the player require the player to come up with their own meaning. And while that does work (look at Minecraft), at that point you’re not crafting a world. You’re merely creating a space for a player to inhabit. The optimal open world game in my mind is a crafted world which the player can experience. And to convey that world you need “story” of some kind. That doesn’t necessarily mean a main plot driving you through bombastic events, but a context through which to view the world and your character.
Agents and Systems. As I mentioned a lot of open-world games today are almost totally scripted, where the NPCs are actors more than agents. The Witcher is an example. But the best open-world games have agents and systems working in concert. They can act on their own volition, and the world responds to them. These together create a world that is alive and real. Assassin’s Creed has systems, but it doesn’t have agents. It is “alive,” but it is not “real.” By having systems, I know the world has its own logic and functions on its own. By having agents, I know the world’s logic and functioning is meaningful - it impacts “real” people or beings. These are typically separated out (like AC), but for an optimal world they should be together.
Furthermore, these things don’t just define how a player observes the world, but also how they interact with the world: I don’t really care if I run over a randomly spawned character in Watch Dogs or Ghost Recon Wildlands, but I’ll be far more circumspect in my actions towards persistent characters in a Bethesda game (though they still have the randomly created enemies, they do have the agents as well).
Memory or 4th dimensionality. Many games drop you into the middle of a world which for all intents and purposes was just created. Everything happens in the moment, and is gone the next moment (or within a few moments). There are two aspects to this–history and current events. A world with history is one where things have happened before this. Many games pay lip service to this, but games such as (again) TES have detailed fictions describing the rise and fall of empires. This is not a momentary sandbox which the player jumps in and out of. This is a world with a past, and that past informs the player’s experience.
The second component is current events, or the world’s response to the player. Most games really don’t have this down–probably the closest would be MMOs because of how they work. But anyway, this refers to how the world “remembers” what’s going on right as the player plays. If the player kills all of the sheep in an area–if they save and reload, are the sheep still dead? If the player leads the police or “law enforcement” forces on a wild chase which they eventually escape, what happens when they walk up to those law enforcement characters a few minutes later? Reputation systems like (yes, again) TES has do this to a point. Metal Gear Solid V had this in an interesting way (or at least in theory–I never saw it in practice), where enemy characters would counter the way the player played–if they sniped characters frequently, the enemies would begin to wear helmets (or so I heard–I never saw it in practice). I would like to see this in more impactful ways, however, where the agents respond to such things in a permanent (or semi-permanent) way.
Economy. This is something that has not been done really much at all, but I think it’s critical to create a living world. In the real world, nothing is infinite–neither goods nor capital. Games, on the other hand, regularly create and destroy things at will, creating a disconnect with reality. To really feel the impact of something, economy needs to be implemented. In Skyrim, the player could chop wood and sell it. This was an infinite source of money. But imagine if doing so actually removed trees from the world. If the characters you sold the wood to actually did something with it. It would change the way we view the hundreds of items we craft in game, the many “junk” items we pick up as loot from bandits. I think (emphasis on that part) this is where an “optimal open world game” needs to go.
There are probably more criteria, but these are the ones that really pop out to me.
I’m only one person, but I am trying to make an open-world game. I’m doing it through the “power” of procedural generation, and the concepts of agents and systems. If I can build a simple world, and then put in agents with (relatively) simple rules, their interactions with one another will create something more than the sum of its parts.
I need three or four main things to create the “base” of my open world game:
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Environment. A procedurally-generated world within which everything takes place.
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Interactions. Interactions between agents, and between agents and the environment. Things like cutting down a tree, tilling the ground, attacking another person, hunting an animal, building a house, etc.
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Agents. Both human and animal agents to do the interactions above. Not really talking 3D models, but AI. Each one needs a semi-randomized group of variables which define their interactions or actions.
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Objects used by agents. Trees, plants, buildings, tools, weapons, etc.
With these, the game world should be able to “play itself,” which is what I am most interested in. And while it’s definitely going to be a ton of work–I think it’s more than achievable. Ultimately it’s about crafting systems which can reproduce themselves, rather than constructing everything oneself with a team of 1000 people (hello Ubisoft).
All of the ideas behind this game were founded two years ago, upon reading the book Prey, reading about Oblivion’s Radiant AI promises (which didn’t come to fruition), and discovering cellular automata. The idea of complexity, of interaction, of the whole being more than the sum of its parts, grabbed my attention–and still has it (not just in games, but in my career as well).
Unfortunately, most of what I plan for the game only resides in my head at the moment. However, through TerrainComposer I’ve managed to create an algorithm which can give pretty varied terrains with different seeds. The next step is to figure out all of the possible interactions, and then build an AI system which incorporates those types of interactions.
