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.

5 Features Every Game Developer Should Include

Here are five relatively minor items that can, in my opinion, drastically improve the gameplay experience.

1. Progress tracker for achievements, trophies, and unlocks

Nearly every game released these days has at least one achievement or trophy along these lines: "Use Super Punch 100 times," "Kill 250 Evil Bandits," "Jump off 100 buildings." Even if you don't care about trophies or achievements, games sometimes give bonuses for reaching these goals, like an upgraded spell or bonus to weapon damage. While these challenges can be either fun or boring depending on the game, one thing that always improves the process is a way to track your progress. While this would seem like a no-brainer, a surprising number of games don't allow the player to track these statistics. (Fortunately, the developers often improve -- in Mass Effect there was no way to track weapon or power kills, but Mass Effect 2 and 3 both included progress counters.)

Psychologically, it's easier to work through a tedious process by knowing how far along you are. Also, in some cases it can be difficult to judge whether a given technique was executed correctly, and being able to check whether it was counted can prevent a lot of frustration. Finally, visibly displaying progress helps allay concerns about whether a trophy or achievement is glitched. "I'm sure I've killed 100 enemies with Lightning Bolt by now... why hasn't it unlocked yet? Am I just wasting my time here?" Since the game has to keep track somewhere, why not make it visible to the player?

2. In-game map for collectibles

Whether they're orbs, coins, flags, gems, wanted posters, or crabs, many games have objects scattered throughout the levels for players to collect. Sometimes these items provide background information to the story (such as the audio diaries in Bioshock and the dead drops in inFamous), others upgrade health, magic, or other statistics (Heart Pieces in The Legend of Zelda series, lizards and fruits in Shadow of the Colossus, apples in 3D Dot Game Heroes), and some serve no purpose whatsoever except to count towards the elusive 100% completion, 1000 Gamerscore, or Platinum Trophy.

Collectibles are a hotly debated subject in the gaming community, with some people enjoying the incentive to fully explore the game world, and others considering finding them all a frustrating ordeal. One game that received a lot of criticism was inFamous, which required players to collect 350 Blast Shards scattered throughout the city. Nearby Blast Shards could be seen on the minimap by pressing a "radar" button, but they showed up as a dark blue dot on an otherwise dark map which could be easily missed. The sheer number of the shards, lack of any way to display them all on the main map, and the obscure locations of some of them made finding all of them a nightmare. Fortunately, developer Sucker Punch responded to the criticisms, and inFamous 2 featured a much more forgiving system. Similarly, Assassin's Creed II contained 100 feathers to find, many of which were difficult to find without a guide. Assassin's Creed Brotherhood improved upon its predecessor by allowing the player to purchase maps which revealed the locations of its collectibles (feathers and flags).

3. Customizable control scheme

Game controllers have come a long way since the days of the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Nearly every console generation has more buttons than ever before. A feature that I wish more games had was the ability to reassign which buttons do what. Sometimes, the given inputs are physically difficult, or a game will inexplicably map actions to unintuitive buttons (such as pressing B to jump when most other games use A). This can cause a lot of frustration and accidental deaths if the game does not allow the player to change the jump button back to the more familiar A. Some games, such as Borderlands, attempt to avoid this problem by offering three or four different schemes, but none are as customizable as simply allowing players to change the button mapping as they please. Are developers worried that custom control schemes will overwhelm newer players? If so, feel free to tuck the option in an "advanced" menu, but please allow us to change the default!

4. Manual saves

Some games only use autosaves and do not allow the player to save manually. Mafia II, for instance, only saves at checkpoints during missions. Money earned, miles driven, or other progress while "free roaming" is simply lost unless you begin a mission and progress to a checkpoint. I understand limiting saves to certain save points or checkpoints to make the game more challenging (for example, requiring the player to complete an entire stealth section flawlessly makes it much more difficult than if you can simply save after each enemy you bypass). But I wish these games would at least include a "suspend" option (which is essentially a long-term pause) in case something comes up and the player must quit suddenly. Having to redo an hour of gameplay due to a sudden emergency is very frustrating.

Even worse, sometimes autosaves can become corrupted due to freezes or bugs. I like to save frequently for peace of mind, and with games like this it's impossible. I lost my entire first Assassin's Creed Brotherhood game near the very end when my PS3 froze during a cutscene and corrupted my autosave. I had to start the entire game over again. (And now I back up my saves frequently with the Playstation Plus cloud storage.)

5. Subtitles

Sometimes it can get kind of noisy around my living space, and sometimes the characters just don't talk clearly. I don't like missing dialogue while gaming, especially in a story-heavy game like Assassin's Creed, so I find it disheartening when games don't give the option for subtitles. And what about gamers who are deaf or hard of hearing? Apparently some people think that subtitles interrupt the "cinematic" experience, but as someone who's accustomed to watching foreign films and subtitled anime, I don't have that problem. Please, at least give us the option. (Fortunately, the later games in the Assassin's Creed series do have subtitles.)

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I am admittedly not a developer, but I think most of these could be implemented without too much trouble. In my experience, a game with these features easily rises from mediocre to excellent.