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The Evolution of Open World Games

Cody Cochlin
10 min readFeb 1, 2019

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Open worlds were once a revolutionary new concept in game design. Open world games have often pushed the boundaries of current technological restrictions and have been considered marvels of innovation that were way ahead of their time. Once a novelty, open world games flood today’s market. Each year, the most popular and talked about titles consist of a plethora of open world games. I will be exploring the rich history of open world games and see how the genre got from its humble beginnings to the massive mainstream success that it is today. I will also be looking at open world games that weren’t so well received and see what this means for the future of the genre.

Firstly, it is important to clarify what constitutes as an “open world game.” Though a broad term, it’s generally used to refer to a game which ditches the conventional level-based structure for a more open-ended experience in which the player is free to explore a typically large game space without any one particular goal or linear path which they are forced into. An open world game typically has a limited amount of restrictive borders which tell the player where they can and cannot go, and any activities or missions contained within are entirely optional. The word “open” can technically refer to either to the actual geography of the game, or more so in a metaphoric sense, the style of play. In most cases it refers to both, but there are unique exceptions such as the Dark Souls series, which takes place in a geographically linear map but incorporates a very open-ended experience.

To understand the evolution of open world games we must start from the beginning. The very first open world game was Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness, released in 1981. It certainly isn’t much by today’s standards, alternating between top-down views of pixelated stick figures and wireframe point-and-click first person perspective. However, despite how primitive it may seem now, it was considered a novel of its time and got the ball rolling for future open world games. Just a few years later in 1984 the second open world game came out which was a space exploration and trading game called Elite. It’s 3D wireframe graphics were considered revolutionary, and it was the first game to use procedural generation to create its environments, which would later become one of the most invaluable tools for game developers wanting to push the boundaries of open environments. Two years later The Legend of Zelda came out, a game which gave players a short introduction, and then dropped them into the world and didn’t tell them what to do or where to go. While it didn’t add any particular technological advancement into the mix, it set a new standard for the quality and presentation of open game environments. The next huge milestone for open world games was the first two Elder Scrolls games which came out in 1994 and 1996 respectively. These massive partially procedural generated, partially handcrafted RPGs were among the first successful open world games to contain actual 3D graphics as opposed to the bare-bones wireframe 3D that came before it. The second game, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, in particular was a marvel of its time and still is today. It’s world map was 161,600 km2, roughly half the size of Great Britain. Additionally, it contained thousands of towns, cities, and dungeons to explore, and had hundreds of thousands of NPCs that could be talked to and interacted with. Nothing of this scope and this quality had been done before, and it once again set a new precedent for games to come.

Other titles which served as significant milestones were Grand Theft Auto in 1997, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time in 1998, and the little known Shenmue in 1999. Shenmue, while having the least mainstream success out of the three titles, was the most innovative in the sense that it was the first open world game to have day and night cycles, weather patterns, and fully voiced NPCs all in a truly, geometrically 3D environment. All of these components had been done before, but this was the first game to package it all together, defining the standard for future open world games. It was then Grand Theft Auto III that carried this new standard into the mainstream in 2001. From there, the open world genre continued to gain success and rise in popularity over the next few years with games like Fable (2004), Stalker (2007), Far Cry 2 (2008), Fallout 3 (2008), and Just Cause 2 (2010).

Many attribute the popularity and success of the open world genre that we see today to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Since Skyrim’s release in 2011 there’s been a huge influx of open world games being released, and the genre found itself having more players than ever. For many, Skyrim marks a major turning point for open world games, and for gaming in general. Before Skyrim, open world gaming was still a somewhat untapped market, but after its release the genre became a gold rush for AAA developers.

Most games up until this point had mostly followed the basic formula of having complete freedom of exploration but with designated story missions and side quests located throughout the map. Now there is some variation within that style of design, of course. Some developers choose to take that same open-endedness from the world design and apply it to the narrative as well. The Elder Scrolls series and the Fallout series are titans of this subgenre, since they allot the player so much freedom to make dynamic decisions which change the direction of the narratives, making the open world experience come full circle, since it makes the player feel as if they are a real person that exists within this environment that has an impact on the world around them. This design is used in place of one where the character you play as and the narrative choices they make are already predetermined. Games such as Batman: Arkham Knight and Mirror’s Edge Catalyst are great examples of this type of design. Additionally, there are those that fall somewhere in the middle, having a predetermined protagonist and a mostly predetermined narrative, save for a just a few choices that can be made which lead to alternate endings or narrative paths. Red Dead Redemption II is one recent example that comes to mind.

There is one open world game though that must be talked about. It is a game that surprised consumers and developers alike by having none of these narrative elements. It is a game that took the world by storm in the early 2010s and went on to become a dominant focal point of online gaming content for years to come- that game is Minecraft. Minecraft managed to be more than just an open world game, Minecraft managed to be the quintessential “sandbox” game. It is a game that comes with no story, no objectives, just the players and the world around them. What those players choose to do with that world and its resources is entirely up to them. Minecraft is a game that was the only one of its kind and still remains to be one of the only games of its kind. Minecraft possess the unique aspect that no other game had at the time that every single thing you see in the world can be deconstructed and reconstructed into something else. This concept inspired so many other future games to come- games like Day Z, Ark Survival, and No Man’s Sky, while completely different and unique in their own way, owe a lot to Minecraft for laying the foundation for that kind of sandbox gameplay. But Minecraft’s entirely unique way of allowing players to build whatever they wanted made it a catalyst for a new wave of online content that centered around creativity and pushing the boundaries of what was possible to make within the game. The possibilities were endless, and online content creators shared with the world unimaginably spectacular constructions and contraptions and even entire games that were built within the game. Interestingly, entire careers were made out of making content related to this game, and it was all made possible by the sheer amount of freedom this game allowed for.

The open world formula has helped create some of the industry’s most beloved games, however the concept hasn’t always been used so successfully. Many open world games have simply fallen flat. Where most open world games stop being enjoyable for players is when they start to feel like the open world is just shallow, empty gimmick. This is a concern that many gaming fans have brought up in recent years. Many fans are concerned when they hear their favorite developer announcing that they’re going to dip their hand into the open world market, and for good reason. With headlines like “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s map size ‘dwarfs’ Skyrim’s” and “Xenoblade Chronicles X’s map is bigger than Skyrim, Fallout 4, and The Witcher 3’s maps combined” and “No Man’s Sky will take 5 billion years to fully explore,” some gamers are starting to get the impression that developers are more concerned with making the biggest spectacle possible than they are with actually bringing consumers a unique and meaningful experience. This issue seems to have gained a reasonable amount of traction online, and an abundance of video essays can be found that say things like, “A lot of these games end up being designed around how big the world is, not about what’s in it,” (TheSMonroeShow) and “What good is ‘300 hours’ of gameplay when it’s all so dull and monotonous,” (Svash) and “You end up with games that are just kind of big, but with no reason for being that way, like some gross overcompensation for all these other shortcomings,” (rabbidluigi).

No Man’s Sky serves as a perfect example of the problem that these fans are talking about. No Man’s Sky was a game that had so much promise and so much hype leading up to its launch in 2016. Its entire marketing campaign was centered around the idea that it would offer a virtually infinite world space. The developers of No Man’s Sky flaunted its roughly 18 quintillion procedurally generated planets that could be explored with the promise that the game would theoretically offer endless content, as each planet was supposedly unique and offered new things to be discovered. The problem lies in the fact that the whole gameplay experience rapidly began to feel repetitive and dull, and No Man’s Sky quickly went from being known as the world’s biggest game to the world’s emptiest game. No Man’s Sky is a game that falls victim to the issue of having such a spectacular and expansive space to explore but no incentive to explore it.

Another thing that gaming fans complain about with the open world trend is that all of the games follow a very similar format. Games like Batman: Arkham Knight, Just Cause 3, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, Horizon Zero Dawn, Assassin’s Creed Origins, and many more all share the same eerily similar formula of main storyline and then a plethora of side activities and collectables which often boil down to being the same menial task in repetition in order to draw out the number of gameplay hours. Individually there’s nothing wrong with this formula, especially in games like these which have such enjoyable gameplay mechanics that players don’t mind the repetition. However, the problem lies in the fact that if every developer copies this formula, which many already have, then eventually it will become very tiresome. Players will quickly grow sick of the open world genre as they all start to feel like the same game. Devoting dozens of hours to meaningless filler quests may be fun once, but if gamers find themselves having to invest that much time across multiple games following that same format, they will become tired of it in no time.

Another problem lies in game franchises that are built upon a closed level design that suddenly decide to ditch that in order to cash in on the open world craze. Fans of these series are often very skeptical when they hear developers announce that the next entree is “going open world.” Metal Gear Solid V is an excellent example of one of these instances. While many enjoyed the latest Metal Gear Solid entry, a lot of hardcore fans of the series were displeased with the shift in design. One video essay in particular by TheSMonroeShow points out the fact that the previous installments had very well designed compact levels, and to a degree that same well crafted compact design can still be seen in many of the areas you play in throughout the game. However, the only difference is that in this installment you have to travel between those compact “levels” so to speak, which is simply boring, tedious, and unnecessary.

It is amazing to see how open world games have evolved over time, and the future of open world games is going to be an interesting thing to witness. We will definitely need innovation and change in order to keep the genre feeling fresh. Franchises which have already found their success and their audience with a certain formula should stick to that design to retain that audience. However, any new franchise which wishes to step into the open world market will have to really come up with something new and imaginative in order to find success in the genre.

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Citations:

(There’s more but I honestly lost track of a lot of them, and these are the ones which I directly took information from)

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Cody Cochlin

Written by Cody Cochlin

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