The Trap of the Open World

It sounds great on paper: a gaming promise of full freedom and exploration. The sizes and potential of these open worlds grow in tandem with the hardware used to run them. These worlds can even self-create and expand through procedural generation.

This all, however, creates a problem that far too many games forget: these ever expanding worlds need something in them.

The Mass Effect series made this mistake twice. The first entry of the series allowed you to land on planets to explore. A great concept, until you realized the majority of the time spent on each planet was a long, boring drive across nothing to get to needlessly spread out objectives.

The later two games of the trilogy smartly canned this feature, focusing instead on what the series did well instead of trying to fix the weakest part of the first entry. But then, Mass Effect: Andromeda decided to make exploration the focal point while doing very little to fix the issues that plagued it the first time.

The various planets in the game were graphical works of art, but where, again needlessly spread out. In an attempt to make the empty space less empty, enemy drop ships will randomly appear to encourage an engagement (that you can easily drive past) and side quests are scattered all over to encourage you to visit each corner of the map. The problem is that each quest and enemy skirmish ends up as empty as the world they occupy.

There are games that absolutely nail this concept. I mentioned this during my Tears of the Kingdom stream this past Thursday. The map of Hyrule is massive and added both Sky and Depths territories that more than doubled it from Breath of the Wild. Yet, the map rarely feels like an empty waste of time.

At any point, you can spot an oddity on a map that could result in finding a hiding Korok, giving you items that can expand your limited inventory. This reward is particularly hefty as the weapons you find can and will break often. But have a large enough weapon’s stash and the most punishing mechanic of the game loses its sting.

Enemies are scattered randomly across the map, but are often defending a treasure chests. Plus, with the Fuse ability the drops from the monsters themselves are now more desirable as they make your weapons stronger and more durable.

See a wild animal on the road? Go hunt it and get ingredients for cooking your next meal that can deliver some seriously strong buffs. Stop by that random shrine in the distance to get items to increase your health and stamina. Side quests will typically have decent rewards, but will also surprisingly build upon each other more often than not.

It’s a rewarding gaming loop. All the systems build on each other, allowing the player to consistently feel rewarded and accomplished while traveling its grand map. Far too often, the gaming loop most open world games throw at you is a hamster wheel, rewarding you only when you finally decide to get off.

And now, I stare at Starfield in my PC Game Pass pre-install. The alluring promise is there and I’m heading in since it will cost me no additional money. However, with the promise of being a massive galaxy to explore with hundreds of planets, I absolutely worry I’m about to jump on one of the largest hamster wheels possible.

I certainly hope that won’t be the case.

Schedule

Podcast

It’s finally back! This month’s guest is Summer Rain, aka weebwitched. Come check out her unique combination of content creation featuring cosplay & singing while also getting to hear some of her Persona 5 performance live from MiracleCon.

This Month’s Crowd Control Stream

Friday, September 22, at 9PM CDT, will be this month’s Crowd Control stream and I will do my level best to finish Super Metroid and y’all will do your level best to stop me.

Last stream raised $331.80—can we top it?!