Open World Games - How open is too open?

Open world games, also often called "sandbox" games, are huge right now. In these games, the player can freely explore the city, continent, or world in which the game takes place, completing missions at his/her leisure. The Grand Theft Auto games were some of the first to use this style. With increasingly powerful hardware available, the trend has only grown more popular, with hits like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim selling over 11 million copies (source).

But can an open world game be too open?

That thought has been going through my head as I've been working through Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, which has been sitting in my gaming backlog for a while. The world of Amalur is vast and colorful, very reminiscent of World of Warcraft. In fact, it feels like it was originally meant to be a massively multiplayer online game. Amalur is a fun game, but received mixed reviews, partly due to the incredible number of side quests. It's rare to have a game criticized for too many side quests, but in Amalur they vastly outnumber the main quest line, leading to an unfocused narrative.

Clearly, other people have been pondering the merits and drawbacks of open world games as well. The most recent Game Informer has an article about the European conference GamesCom. In a section titled "Open Worlds are Here to Stay," Game Informer discusses the plans of major game studios such as Ubisoft, Warner Bros, and Bungie to continue creating massive worlds:

As hardware becomes more powerful, open worlds become less strenuous and easier to build. The flood of these types of titles could result in some developers swimming against the tide with throwback games that tout "linear structure" as a selling feature.

More content is usually a good thing, but distraction from the main quest line is a major problem that results from an overabundance of places to explore and side quests to complete. When the hero is beseeched at all sides to solve everyone's problems, the urgency of saving the world or galaxy seems less important. Why hurry to the battlefront when you can spend a few in-game weeks finding lost necklaces or wiping out infestations of giant spiders? Some games poke fun at this (Joker in Mass Effect: "Guess what! The Alliance needs your help again!") but it remains a pervasive issue. Distraction from the main quest isn't strictly limited to open world games, but they seem especially prone to it. It's also difficult to avoid. Mass Effect 2 tried to keep players focused by periodically whisking Shepard off to a mandatory mission, but this could lead the player to be woefully unprepared without prior planning. When time limits are imposed (you need to complete Mission X before Mission Y, or it's lost forever), the game often becomes stressful for completionists, who spend hours obsessing over guides to make sure they proceed through quests in an optimal order. This can make the game much less fun.

There's also what I call "side quest snowball." Your character meets a NPC named Bob, who says "Take this letter to my friend Alice in NearbyTown." But when you get to NearbyTown, there are three more NPCs there, each with their own quest. Carl wants you to clear the goblins out of a nearby mine, Dan needs a shipment of radishes delivered to his aunt in FarawayTown, and Emily needs help finding her missing sister. You decide to do Emily's quest first, but on the way to the forest where her sister was last seen, you find a grievously wounded woman who needs some forest plants to heal her injuries... and a man who was robbed by bandits and wants you to recover his possessions. You also find the journal of a man who was searching for buried treasure and apparently was eaten by bears... and then when you finally find Emily's sister, she's being held captive by bandits who will let her go, but only if you do three favors for them. Before you know it, you have 20 quests and you're not even out of Newbie Forest! That's about what Kingdoms of Amalur is like. It can be easy to be completely overwhelmed by these side quests and lose track of your main objectives.

This is largely intentional in massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, where each area is designed for characters of a certain level, tends to have a mostly self-contained storyline, and ends with "breadcrumbs" to send you to the next level-appropriate area. But in a single player game like Amalur, it can quickly become overwhelming, especially when enemy level scales to player level so there's no clear indicator that "okay, you're done with this area, you can move on now."

This isn't just a problem with role-playing games, either. Just Cause 2 is an open-world game that is huge -- there are literally hundreds of bases, villages and other locations to reclaim from the bad guys. Some of the numbers are just crazy: 1020 fuel depots to destroy, 400 generators to destroy, 900 vehicle parts to collect, 950 weapon parts to collect, and many more. It eventually gets repetitive if you're going for full completion (or even 75% completion, required for the platinum trophy/1000 gamerscore).

So, yes: there is such a thing as too much content. The best games have an interesting world, but not an overwhelming one. I think there are two main factors at play here:

1. Size: The world needs to be large and varied, but not overwhelmingly huge. Five villages are not necessarily better than one if they're all indistinguishable from one another. 10 caves that all use the exact same floor plan are dull.

2. Randomness: Chance encounters make the world more interesting. Red Dead Redemption had what I thought was a good feature: randomly appearing, usually urgent quests that would trigger as you roamed the countryside. Whether you needed to save a hostage from bandits or chase down a stolen stagecoach, these events made exploring more dynamic.

While it wasn't perfect (the PS3 version especially was plagued with bugs), the game I've played this generation that best hit the "sweet spot" was Skyrim. I think part of the reason that Skyrim was so successful is that it had a great balance of size and content. The map, while huge, never felt like a chore to traverse (especially with fast-travel available, a must for these sorts of games). It had an open world ripe for exploration, but I never felt overwhelmed by quests. Random dragon encounters kept things interesting, and the main quest was appropriately epic in scale. The Elder Scrolls game with the largest map and most content was actually 1996's Daggerfall, and Skyrim has fewer locations overall than 2006's Oblivion. Bethesda seems to have avoided the tendency to make each successive game larger and focused on improving the content itself. (Skyrim's dungeons, though there were fewer of them, were all designed by hand, in contrast to Oblivion's procedural generation.) Let's hope next generation's developers follow their example.