Why The Best Open World Is A (slightly) Closed World

so picture this you're having a lovely time playing an open world game you're riding your horse around or going on an epic journey from one corner of the map to another fighting bad guys collecting items all that good stuff and then you see it looming on the horizon like a gigantic middle finger from god an obligatory open world tower yay the core fun of the open world design ethos has always been about a sense of freedom of being able to do whatever you want and go wherever you want at your own pace but it seems that as open world games have gotten bigger denser and absorbed more and more other genres they've somehow gotten less interesting to explore and incredibly stifling and bland as a result a lot of people think that these omnipresent open world towers that you can climb to reveal a part of the world map are basically responsible and it's hard not to sympathize whether you're playing assassin's creed spider-man shadow of mortal halo infinites whatever they all follow broadly the same pattern climb a tower or a thinly veiled analogue for one reveal a bunch of cosmetically different copy-based objectives tick them off over and over until you get bored and just sort of resign yourself to doing the main quest and basically abandoning the idea of trying to explore the fact that you basically get told where to go at every turn in these games means that you're not actually invested in the world you're quote-unquote exploring you're just being given a list of chores that you happen to have to walk between by a big radio tower or a magic elf crystal or a robot giraffe this specific adverse reaction i have to towers really cemented itself during the lead up to and my first playthrough of elton ring which before you ask no i won't be spoiling all the footage you're gonna see will be of my first five hours and it won't contain any story stuff or any of the main dungeons okay the lands of eldon ring feel great to explore right from the outset i was striding off on my own making my own way finding terrifying adventures wherever i went best of all the game does this without using the dreaded towers or markers to tell you where to go so is it just the absence of this stuff that makes eldon rings world so fun to explore i'm not convinced while the general criticism of open world towers is warranted i think the root cause of why so many open world games are bizarrely boring to explore is a little bit more fundamental in fact in some of the best open world games ever towers are used to great effect in breath of the wild not only does getting to and climbing a tower represent an interesting exploration and platforming challenge but they're these perfect vantage points to spot an interesting area to explore and then have a great time gliding all the way there horizon's tallmags are also a really flavorful way of working once usually a very stilted gamey objective into the environment and they play off the game's movement mechanics excellently see towers can be good contrast that with some games that don't have towel focus design but do still have bad open worlds like say no man's sky cyberpunk or far cry 5 which even makes fun of the idea of forcing the player to climb towers whilst making them climb a tower anyway these games are beautiful and for the most part have huge lovingly rendered open worlds but as a result they're also incredibly indistinct with every single area looking like a superficial featureless desktop background and having nothing in the way of interesting or memorable topography sure you can explore wherever you want but you're probably just going to find some more pristine colorado countryside or in the case of 2077 some completely incomprehensible cyber spaghetti designed by m.c mcesha and not a civic planner because these games have worlds that are nice to look at but weren't actually designed to be explored and understood as physical spaces players are forced to fall back on quest markers and dotted lines to have any hope of actually getting around without getting completely lost and in doing so are unable to get invested in the world because they're always interacting with it through the ui in this context it kind of makes sense why towers became such an open world staple in the first place the back of far cry 3 arguably the game that popularized them just over a decade ago its many miles of tropical jungles are essentially interchangeable and also impossible to navigate without the towers and objective markers basically telling you where to go and what to expect at all times look at all these different locations they're so hard to tell apart that i totally lied about where the footage comes from these are the real spots i filmed in open world towers aren't the cause of games having boring open worlds they're a quick fix solution that's gradually grown into a game design crutch you don't have to make an interesting fun to explore world if players can just rely on map markers and quest trackers to tell them where to go without ever really immersing themselves in the physicality of the game world on anything more than a surface level this means that although side objectives have no actual wider context of discovery or progress to make them feel meaningful and as a result they get boring way faster so what's the solution to this problem how do games make open worlds actually fun to explore well i think the first step that so many games miss is just enabling exploration in the first place if players don't know where to go then they'll default to chasing after a visible objective and miss out on all the fun of making their own path that's why it's so important for open worlds to give players a chance to look at the landscape for themselves and then decide where to go confident that they'll find something interesting the batman arkham games have the genius idea of basically just giving you the ability to fly around whenever you want right from the outset and from the gliding vantage point you can easily work out where you're going and what stuff is worth checking out nearby both arkham city and knight have incredibly densely designed worlds but because of the way gotham's architecture uses height differences color coding and distinct locations that are recognizable at a distance getting around is both fun and surprisingly intuitive just boot arkham city back up and you'll see just how much more you need to refer back to the map when you're in the midlife crisis car compared to just flying around it's a world of difference in case a title can't simply let players take off whenever they want though i find it always helps when games lower the barrier to exploration as much as possible by filling the world with cool distinct looking locations and then putting interesting stuff there as much of a cliche as it is the idea of slapping a mountain a big tree or i don't know a tower on the horizon and letting players decide to go there themselves feels so much better than if there were an objective marker ordering them to do it instead we can really see the importance of this approach in metro exodus which has towers and a fairly typical open world map design for its free roam segments however rather than automatically labeling everything on your map once you get to a tower you have to spot points of interest yourself with binoculars at which point the game will tell you if there's anything worth fighting there with a little crackling noise before marking it on your map though crucially it never tells you what you're going to find preserving a sense of mystery and eventually discovery while also making sure you don't get lost this tiny change makes expiration feel much more rewarding because it's driven by the player you're not being told to go somewhere the game reckons you'll enjoy you're deciding to go somewhere you think is interesting all the games doing is verifying you're not wasting your time all of elden rings main dungeons for example are visible from miles away even if you don't know what they are yet and all the coolest side stuff is situated within or near big towers unique looking ruins or giant trees because the devs want you to go to these places they're the best bits on that same note for all their faults bethesda games are great at this too you can't go 30 seconds without something cool and worth checking out popping up on the horizon for you to go and take a look at and because you weren't explicitly told it was there the discovery feels all the more rewarding additionally because the map is full of recognizable locations working out where you are is easy too basically all your navigation in skyrim can be done by working out your location relative to the throw of the world which is the big central mountain where the mario dragon lives however this brings me onto an important point cast your mind back to the first time you played skyrim which was god 11 years ago ugh i'm gonna bet you probably went to explore the bleak falls barrow dungeon first even if you could have gone almost anywhere else bleak falls and the cool temple halfway up are literally the first thing you see out of the tutorial and the big dragon basically begs you to go and have a look and wonder what's inside even before the main quest that sends you there on top of giving players the room they need to explore many great open world games also give players a little bit of a helping hand by nudging them in the direction of the best stuff and ensuring they explore the world in the best order breath of the wild to go back to that game does this big time despite pretending that you can go wherever you want look at this poll of which of the four divine beasts the game's main dungeons players did first given that you can explore the entire map from the outset you'd expect a roughly even distribution but instead basically everyone did val rooter the big elephant first why well it's because that divine beast is very near kakariko village the first step on the main quest so you might be thinking players follow the ghost king's instructions head to kakariko and then the closer to vine beast seems simple enough well yes but also for players who don't immediately follow the main quest which is going to be most people the entire south of the map is this stealth bottleneck that pushes you eastwards towards kakariko north of the great plateau is full of scary guardians west is a bunch of mountainous and desert terrain you have neither the stamina nor the crossdressing attire to deal with south is a bunch of tricky to navigate lakes under the sea so the only real route is east which because of its massive mountains forces new players either through this path in the wetlands or this path through the twin mountains both routes eventually leading to kakariko village and then zoro's the main the zorus the main tower is even right there to tempt you to check it out and get hooked onto the easy handholding questline via prince said on because the elephant divide beast is by far the easiest and also contains some important tutorials for stealth and elemental arrows so the devs would much rather you did it first you're still making your own decisions and you still don't know what to expect the game is just structured in such a way that the path of least resistance is also the most interesting so the new players don't spend half the game wondering how to make their bags bigger and while these korok seats are for just because they went the wrong direction at the very start of the game fallout new vegas is the master class in this kind of world design at the very start of the game you're given both an explicit objective to track down the groovy dude who shot you and also the implicit objective to go to the place the game is named after vegas this is made incredibly easy because the lucky 38 casino the central building in vegas is visible from across the map and vegas itself is one of the only lit areas in the entire map at night it's this giant beacon drawing you in wherever you go but the thing is this puts the developers in a weird spot they want players to go to vegas eventually that's where the story gets going but if they simply let players beeline straight there then people would miss out on a massive chunk of the open world content and might not have the world building and gameplay context to really appreciate it how could they draw people to vegas whilst also encouraging them to put it off and go see the sights first the answer my friend is death on six legs good springs the star town is actually really quite close to vegas as the crow flies and many enterprising players will head north when they leave to get there as soon as possible however in doing so they'll end up running into these terrifying arseholes called casadors casadors have deadly poison hit like sledgehammers and running packs this canyon is even designed to make them impossible to avoid it's awful going northeast instead takes you within proximity of black mountain which is full of aggressive super mutants as well as this quarry which is overrun with [ __ ] death claws seriously this tiny sliver of the map between vegas and good springs is one of the hardest areas in the game and it's right next to the starter town what this means is that even if players don't want to follow the main quest right away they've got to take the long way around which means essentially going on a guided tour of all the best and most important early game quests the game has to offer prim and the mojave outpost give players a look at what the ncr is all about and why they're struggling nipton is a town that gets destroyed specifically to introduce you to caesar or kaiser if you're an eduards legion novak basically hands you a good companion and gives you one of the most fun quests in the game walking along the highway here takes you right past helios one which is a great quest and a trading post where veronica your lead into the brotherhood of steel lives then you go right past hoover dam which is what the game's primary conflict is all about by the time you reach vegas not only are you physically prepared to deal with the mid game you've also been caught up to speed on the political and ethical conflicts the game is built around if you just run through kazar gully to get here you'd have no idea what's going on with the various power struggles that define the game but that's just it you can do that if you want if you're smart and lucky enough or just on your second playthrough you can ignore the introductory route and still get to see some cooler more advanced content because you've proven you're ready for it hidden valley and black mountain are just off the road from deathclaw quarry and beyond satan's butthole where the kansadors live is red rock where the great khans live two very interesting vaults and jacob's down the super mutant enclave oh and by the way if you go to vegas instantly the game literally lets you skip the big quest where you hunt down benny because there he is far too often open world games let you go wherever you want from the outset and either scale the challenge to you or simply don't have any challenge at all by making the world less welcoming and more uneven it can weirdly imbue the various locations with an important degree of emotional context part of the reason why repeated open world objectives get boring is because your relationship to them never changes sure these anime camps in halo infinite are fun of the start when you're struggling to get your bearings they just feel like push up is a few hours in because they're all calibrated such that you could conceivably visit them at any time to eventually get around to the game in the thumbnail fixing this problem is what i think eldon ring excels at and why it feels like such a breath of fresh air even if it's actually quite conservative as far as open world design goes now elder ring is a huge game and i can point to any number of places where they've done this but i think the best and minimally spoilery example because i know what you people are like is one that i found in maybe the first 20 minutes of gameplay in a place called the dragon burnt ruins after tactically retreating away from this highly publicized dragon boss who drops out of the sky to surprise you i went to hide in some perfectly safe nearby ruins as i explored this area i bashed my way through some fairly easy zombies dogs and rats eventually being rewarded with a hidden treasure chest what a fun player driven adventure i wasn't encouraged to go to at all in any other open world video game this treasure chest would contain some crafting materials a collectible or some sort of incremental increase to your existing power in elder ring however it contains a big [ __ ] you and the distant sound of hid attack and miyazaki laughing at you your reward at the end of your little adventure of surviving the dragon beating these enemies and finding this hidden cubbyhole is that you get teleported to a very scary brand new area and prevent it from leaving until you escape fighting your way out of this trap zone basically isn't an option as a starter character these evil prawns can and will one shot you and these miners quite cleverly are resistant to physical damage which is likely all you have access to early on so they feel much tougher than they actually are this all means that you've got to run like a little coward baby all the way to this grace with your tail between your legs back to the nice safe over world oh [ __ ] yup the game's not done yet instead of escaping into the peaceful melancholy vistas of limgrave eldon ring kicks you out into the middle of a goddamn begskinski painting just look at this place it's horrible it's full of giant versions of enemies you thought would push overs earlier on the environment is designed to provoke every single subconscious human threat response and if you so much as think about stepping into the poo water you just die you basically just die caleb is the monster under blighttown's bed and if you've got any sense whatsoever you're going to want to bounce as soon as possible and never come back and this is where the true genius of this seemingly cruel trap comes into play by dumping you into a zone you're just not meant to be in eldon ring not only establishes the world as vast mysterious and dangerous and introduces a scary lore concept in the best way possible it also generates an anecdote this trap isn't some one and done throwaway side quest that stops marrying afterwards in stumbling onto this encounter the player forges a permanent connection to the world and creates a mini story that might not be unique but certainly feels like it when you eventually come back to caled you aren't just entering the union mandated spooky swamp zone you're returning to a place that beat you before or if you choose to stick it out and hard mode slash cheat your way through this really hard area you get to feel like a rot tempered monster when you return to the nice green zones and obliterate everything because it's so much easier by comparison in this sense the environment takes on a bit of a personality there's a bit of give and take action and reaction to your relationship that creates a real-time narrative out of an ultimately static location that's only enhanced by the fact that you might not even have chosen to come here at all i think this attitude is kind of the reason why good open worlds stand out from bad ones even if they're tonally and mechanically quite similar a strong open world fundamentally comes down to a sense of confidence that a player can be let off the leash allowed to find their own path and still have a good time even in games that subtly or not so subtly guide the player they're still more than happy for you to totally ignore the invisible hand of the designers and go your own way because regardless of where you choose to go there'll always be something cool for you to find in weaker less successful open worlds there's always this sense of neediness to them like if you go five seconds without being told when the next scheduled activity is or where to go next you'll lose interest but simultaneously them being unwilling to limit you in any way in case that scares you off it's very easy to boil open world games down to the most obvious individual elements hell that's the reason why people mistakenly focus on towers as being the problem to begin with and also why gaming executives seem to see the genre as nothing more than a way to smash disparate systems and ideas together i think though that an open world needs to be more than the sum of its parts not just a set of dots on a map but a constantly evolving landscape that you develop your relationship with as you play uncovering secrets planning out routes and tracing a contiguous line between each of your adventures if an open world is so bland and textureless that it gives you nothing to grasp onto then it will be impossible for players to see it as anything other than a pretty backdrop when it's possible for an open world to be so much more i guess what i'm saying is that open world devs have been focusing on the open part of their chosen genre so much that they've started to neglect the world [ __ ] towers what we need is more giant caves when did our nation go astray when did we abandon the big cave full of giant insects huh you can never go wrong with a giant ant that's all i'm saying get on it you be frauds well fancy meeting you here in this the secret after the video segment which you can only see if you've done my personal quest and are about to get ambushed by the secret boss who's gonna jump through your window any second now until then i've got a cool youtuber for you to check out and that is ruby seals aka codex entry who you'll probably recognize best for her fantastic series of walkthrough videos on pathologic which are absolutely great she's also got some other really fantastic videos on a whole host of subjects ranging from the history of final fantasy to a spirited defense of some of the worst episodes of neon jealous evangelion which nearly convinced me they're worth watching normally i've got a little bit of resistance to really long videos but ruby's stuff is fantastic and well worth watching if you've got like several hours spare check them out also what kind of after the video segment would this be if i didn't thank my lovely brilliant patrons who graciously volunteer access to their wallet for me to buy the things i need to not starve my patrons are the absolute best and if you'd like to join them all you've got to do is go to the link in the description and give me some cash in return you'll get early access to stuff behind the scenes content and even bonus video game analysis that the plebs don't get to see just one dollar on patreon for one month is worth more to me than thousands upon thousands of ad views it's by far the best way to support the channel and if you support me for more than five dollars a month you'll also get your name in the credits like those people you saw on the side of the screen with ten dollar patrons getting a very special voice shout out like these wonderful people who are andrew lebrano alg asaran bjorn carla brennan spalding brian natariani constance in amend corey gerard cosmetics 360 daniel manches david setzer dirk jan karen beld dontwo diggy dog diglettier eggton edward franklin woods eugene bulkin gaskill greta henderson jacob dylan riddle janos faquette joey bruno jordan gear george aria navarro lee berman lucas slack mace window 54 max philippov nwdd nate graf patrick romberg pet pumpkin phil with the bilby phoenix thurakas rajagar reddit x regal regex rey's dad sheldon hearn simon jacobson steve reilly strategy in ultima the forbidden shrimp tyler duncan whimsical wisp zach grendel and chow thank you for watching i will try and put the next video out faster they just all end up taking so long wow bye

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 1,317,106

Keywords: Games, Video Games, Gaming, PC Gaming, Adam, Adam Millard, Architect, AoG, Architect of Games, Review, Analysis, Game Design, guide, Level design, New Games, Soulslike, Bosses, Elden Ring, Spider Man, Hardcore, Horizon Zero Dawn, Skyrim, Elder Scrolls, Deus Ex, Far Cry 6, Fallout New Vegas, Metro Exodus, Open World, Towers, Best Open Worlds, Worst Open Worlds, world design, Cyberpunk, Zelda, Breath of the wild, Elden Ring bosses, Caelid, elden ring guide, Elden ring secrets, Dark Souls

Id: -as8kVASgXw

Length: 21min 0sec (1260 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 21 2022