The Open World Needs A Next Gen Overhaul

Back at the beginning of the century, the concept of a massive open world was a mesmerizing one. In 2001 Grand Theft Auto 3 was released and what Rockstar treated us to was the most fully realized and seamless sandbox experience gamers had ever had. It certainly wasn’t the first modern open world game – we had glimpses of this with games like Shenmue in 1999 and Ocarina of Time in 1998. But GTA’s approach to a living, breathing world where the player can spend their time in the game any way they want is what inspired the open world genre for the next two decades.

With technological advancements of our home gaming consoles came explosions in scale of the open world games we played. It’s crazy to think that 2001’s Liberty City gave us just over three square miles of space with which to play. This was gargantuan at the time and the prospect of exploring everything was one that blew our minds. Fast forward almost twenty years and Liberty City looks like a tiny little hamlet compared to some of the game worlds we have today. By comparison, 2018’s Fallout 76 map totals sixteen square miles. Breath of the Wild was just under 25 square miles. I’ll use those two as examples because they contain very little water and a lot of ground to cover. The funny thing is, they aren’t even close to being the largest open world maps we’ve had over the last console generation.

This then begs the question – is bigger necessarily better? For years it was. The larger the map our Playstations or Xboxs could render meant the more interesting environments, characters, and activities the developers could cram into every nook and cranny of the world. Settings became more varied and creative minds could branch out to new and exciting locales for their game worlds to play out of. Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise is probably one of the best examples of bringing immensely awe inspiring worlds to life – ones that have been long dead and largely forgotten. This past generation of the franchise alone has brought us shockingly vivid recreations of revolution era France, London at the peak of the Industrial Revolution, Ptolemaic Egypt, and Ancient Greece.

As major purveyors of the video game open world, Ubisoft is largely the reason why this style of game needs a make over. The French publisher has copy and pasted its open world formula onto just about every one of its games in the category since the original Assassin’s Creed was released thirteen years ago. Here’s a brief overview of the gameplay loop of just about all of Ubisoft’s open world games:

1. Reveal the map in small segments. This is generally done with the assistance of a towering structure or random check point.

2. Populate your map with waypoints. These are the games activities, some associated with a main story, side missions, or collectibles.

3. Visit as many points on the map to complete activities.

4. Rinse and repeat.

This isn’t a secret. If you’ve played any entries from the Watch Dogs, Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry or Ghost Recon franchises in the past decade, this is how it all plays out for dozens of hours. And it’s fine, there’s really nothing wrong with this. The trouble is that this has become the largely accepted way to construct an open world game play loop. The formula boils down to populating a map with way points, travelling to as many icons on the map as possible and knocking off the same activities for hours on end. It’s our fault for buying some many copies of these damn games, but that’s beside the point.

As game maps have become larger, the repetition of these tasks becomes arduous. I have to admit that I grit my teeth ever so slightly when I first learned that I needed to find towers in Breath of the Wild to progress in the game world. The Legend of Zelda, one of the most beloved and inventive franchises in the history of gaming, had inherited the Ubisoft open world game play loop.

To reiterate, these open world games are some of the best selling games and most critically successful of the past couple generations for a reason. They possess hours of gameplay, impeccable value, and excellent overall quality. But the underlying formula has gotten stale. With the launch of the new generation coming this holiday season, the next step needs to be taken. We know that the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X will present massive upgrades in processing power and graphical fidelity. But open worlds can’t simply get bigger. This will just result in dragging out the same activities for longer periods of time.

There have been moves in the right direction from the current generation. 2019’s Jedi Fallen Order took inspiration from the SoulsBorne franchise by giving us a large selection of varied and unique worlds that were broken up into smaller segments. Destiny skillfully did this as well by expertly blending social elements. By blurring the lines between single player and multiplayer, variety came not from a large quantity of repetitious tasks. Rather, it came from seamlessly transitioning from playing alone to grouping up with friends or even strangers. The Outer Worlds focused on telling a brilliant story with captivating characters with a campaign that could be cleared in twenty hours.

Whether it be a complete overhaul to the tried and true formula or simply an added layer of variety in the activities of open world games, something needs to change. It will be very interesting to see how this sub-genre evolves over the infancy of the next generation or if it will even exist in its current form for much longer. In any case, I’ll continue to buy all of Ubisoft’s open world games at launch, love them for the first twenty hours, rush to the ending because I’m bored, and then complain about them on the Internet.