Many modern open-world games prioritize sheer size, often leading to diminishing returns where the vastness actively hurts the player experience. Developers sometimes fill these massive worlds with repetitive content or empty space, sacrificing quality and meaningful content density for impressive map size metrics on a marketing sheet.
The Pitfall of Prioritizing Size Over Quality
A recurring issue in contemporary game design involves the intense focus on creating bigger and bigger titles. Some developers seem caught in a cycle of marketing bigger is better, promoting the scale of their worlds as a primary selling point, sometimes over the actual activities within them. However, simply increasing the square miles of a game map does not automatically translate to a better or richer experience.
That’s why people are inclined towards online games with reasonable graphics. For instance, eSports and games at an online casino are becoming more popular than big open-world games that require hundreds of GBs on your harddisk.
Empty Expanses and Repetitive Tasks
Games like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey feature a huge, beautiful recreation of Ancient Greece, but significant portions can feel empty, requiring lengthy travel on horseback between points of interest. Similarly, titles such as Just Cause 3 offer a massive, sprawling world, yet much of it consists of procedurally generated countryside or enemy bases lacking unique characters or interesting discoveries.
So, this often leads to players feeling that much of the content is meaningless filler. When a world is vast but lacks interesting stuff for players to do, the size does not matter. The result can be boring side activities, like capturing the 15th enemy camp and turning the adventure into a task performed on autopilot. Such an approach can make games feel deader than more contained experiences.
Neglecting Traversal and Pacing
When worlds become excessively large, the act of traversal itself can become tedious if not treated as a core game mechanic. If getting from A to B is not fun to traverse, the size becomes a detriment. Good pacing is crucial; like pauses in music, empty space can serve a purpose, but too much emptiness or uniform density can make the actual content blur together. Finding the right balance between scale and engaging activities is essential.
The Importance of Content Density and Meaning
The most effective open-world games often prioritize content density and quality over sheer size. It’s not just about how large a world is but how detailed, believable, and filled with meaningful content it feels.
Smaller Worlds, Richer Experiences
Focusing on a relatively compact space allows developers to be more precise with world-building, creating a more hand-crafted feel. Games like the Yakuza series offer condensed but highly detailed environments packed with variety.
Similarly, Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos and surrounding areas, while large, are lauded for their rich, granular detail, atmosphere, and the feeling of a living world, achieved through meticulous world-building rather than just expansive geography. In these cases, the world feels indispensable to the narrative and overall experience. On a lighter note, people are getting back to the best arcade games instead of playing open-world games.
Making the World Serve the Game
Ultimately, the size of a game’s world should be a facilitator for the core gameplay experience, not its defining quality. Developers should build worlds that fit the specific settings and narratives of their games. The world should serve the needs of the game, not the other way around. If the only reason for a massive world is marketing, it might not make sense for that particular game.
Rockstar’s approach with Red Dead Redemption 2, for example, focuses promotional materials less on map size and more on what you can do within the world, the natural progression of actions, and how the activities make the open world format necessary and engaging.
Player Fatigue and the Quest for Value
The dominant trend of massive open-world games like Skyrim and The Witcher 3 has led some players to experience “open-world fatigue”. Seeing a map cluttered with hundreds of icons for potentially repetitive missions can feel overwhelming and demoralizing.
The “Time Sink” Problem
While players understandably want value for money, especially given the cost of games, the push for “over 100 hours of gameplay” can lead to time sinks filled with bland or stale content. Completing everything can feel more like a chore or commitment than a fun adventure. The sheer scope and the repetition involved can lead to player burnout. The feeling of freedom is key, but it can be undermined if the activities become monotonous.
Finding the Right Balance
There is no easy solution, and the answer is not necessarily to stop making large open-world games. However, a critical look at why a game needs to be so big is essential. Does the size genuinely improve the moment-to-moment experience?
Games like Fallout 76 initially suffered because, despite a large world, they lacked the interesting content, unique NPCs, and compelling questlines that made previous entries in the franchise engaging. It highlighted that a large, empty world devoid of content can be the downfall of ambitious projects. The focus needs to remain on content quality and density, ensuring the world feels alive, unique, and interesting rather than just vast.
