Open World games are by no means new, on the contrary I'd venture to say they've teetered
on overdone and contrived in the past couple of years, that is until 2 very important games
were released.
Horizon Zero Dawn & The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild to many little things MUCH better
than open world games leading up to their creation.
I'm Aj from Fanatix Four and I want to dive into those things so game devs know moving
forward Things Every Open World Game Needs to Start Getting Right.
Video games are increasingly becoming the most interesting place to tell stories.
Games like The Last of Us, The Walking Dead, & Journey have expertly illustrated best practices
for storytelling in games.
Though those games have a significantly easier time with crafting a cohesive narrative due
to the nature of those games, it doesn't preclude open world games from taking notes
from those games.
A trap open world games tend to fall into in regards to story is a disjointed approach
to the story they present and the story that the player will actually experience in their
gameplay.
Something that Breath of the Wild does right in this area is it makes discovery part of
the main objective.
The player is tasked with discovering the world around them to recover Link's lost
memories and prepare himself to ultimately take down Calamity Ganon.
Everything you do in the world furthers your progression in that direction.
A standout open world game released prior to Breath of the Wild illustrates the WRONG
way to do this.
Fallout 4's story tasks you with the initial objective of rescuing your kidnapped son,
HOWEVER this otherwise pressing matter gets pushed to the back burner in favor of finding
settlers or fighting off radroaches.
By no means am I saying that Fallout for is a bad game, however, I do believe a story
that supports the gameplay experience is a smart way to go for the current AAA landscape.
Now you may think story and world building are one and the same, I disagree, partially,
at least.
More linear games like Dark Souls or my personal favorite of games of its ilk, Bloodborne showed
us that games don't need precipitous exposition dumps to clue us in on what has happened in
the world prior to our introduction to it.
Open world games typically pride themselves on the size of their worlds.
Problem is, not many of those games do much WITH those worlds to teach us about them.
If there's a dragon I need to chase I should see claw marks throughout the world that deepen
as I get closer to its lair, terrified, distraught, frantic villagers, half eaten wildlife, and
signs of the knights that ventured and failed to destroy it before me - not just a cutscene
or 2 belaboring the fact that it exists.
After all, what's the point of a massive world if it's only used as a benchmark for
other games?
In a world full of jacks, I'd say combat tends to be the weakest link amongst the other
qualities of open worlds.
Back in 2009 the combat system in Batman Arkham Asylum blew many of us gamers away, little
did we knew, it blew devs away even more.
Or at least the proliferation of similar if not carbon copied versions of it.
This combat system is fine in that it gets the job done, but I find it uninteresting
and bare bones.
There's not much variety in reaching the opportune outcome.
You punch, you kick, you parry, you win.
Now lets look at Horizon Zero Dawn's combat system.
Most battle in this game feel like full fledged boss battles if noms battles had systems running
in the background that caused said bosses to have more than 1 distinct way to cause
damage.
In fact, I'd go as far as saying the most open part of Horizon overall is its combat.
Now at the risk of causing an uproar in the comments, Breath of the Wild is also a good
place to go for inspiration for combat systems.
If you wanted to, you can take on enemies using a boulder you found in the opening hours
of the game, or you could daisy chain a string of metal weapons to electrocute it, or you
could use a octopus corpse to drop bombs from the sky, or you could send a horde of chickens
to murder him to death.
Or you could… you know what, you get the point.
There are endless possibilities in Zelda's combat.
Now am I saying every open world game' combat should be THAT open?
No.
I don't even necessarily think every open world game NEEDS combat.
But, the ones that have it should definitely look into opening up more in that area.
This one can get a bit tricky, I mean, how could you POSSIBLY expect every game to handle
objectives correctly?
Developers would need to find the correct objectives to support the story while making
sure they're fun to play through, find the sweet spot right smack dab in the middle of
emptiness and being bloated and unnecessary, in addition to possibly the most important
thing - they need to be satisfying and varied enough throughout an experience that'll
likely occupy hundreds of hours.
The trap that many open world games fall into is delegating their objectives to being conduits
that seek to nudge you into exploring the world.
Quests like "find and kill so and so" or "overtake the enemy stronghold!"
Breath of the Wild takes this approach & flips it on its head.
Objectives end up popping up as a result of you exploring the world rather than being
the reason behind your exploration.
& quests range from solving physics based puzzles to snowboarding to reach a goal before
time runs out.
All of which are open ended enough to solve them by getting creative with the physics
engine to cut corners.
Some open world games give you a level of choice in how you complete objectives but
they usually just break down into: "Do you want to do this stealthily and go undetected?
Or go in guns blazing?"
All of that to say, open world games need to give the player a wider variety in what
to do, and how to do it.
This is BY FAR the most important thing to get right, after all, if the player doesn't
WANT to explore your world, it might as well not be there.
A player should spend more time saying "OOO WHAT'S THAT?"
Than they spend saying "Ok, what do I need to do next?" & this goes hand and hand with
what I said about quests and objectives, they should be a by-product of exploration.
Not a way to force it.
Moreover it needs to feel FUN to explore.
Let's run back to the Zelda well, shall we?
In Breath of the Wild exploring is routinely a part of the puzzle;e, and not in the typical
way of the player needing to find the predefined path to the objective.
It's more about finding a way to get to where you want to go in the way YOU want to
do it.
They don't even gatekeep exploration outside of the tutorial section in the beginning like
most open world games do to inch the player into feeling powerful but confined at the
same time.
From the very beginning of the game, Breath of the Wild affords the player the tools needed
to clear the main objective.
Everything that you can pick up along the way by way of optional dungeons and quests
only serve to make that easier.
Exploration is allowed to feel fun because everything can serve as preparation for the
future, rather than feeling like a distraction from the end goal.
At the end of the day developers should be making a game that's made with cohesion
in mind.
Everything needs to support a core purpose.
If a game is open world everything in the game needs to support that idea,, not just
being open world to have it on the box.
But those are my thoughts!
What do you think developers need to get right with their open world games?
Do you think the frequency that they've been releasing recently is too much?
Let us know in the comments!
I did some videos about Zelda that you may like if you liked this!
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