What Devs STILL Misunderstand About Open World Design | Design Delve

Elden Ring's open world is in my eyes actually a quite linear experience. Taking optional content aside, there is a desired order of areas to travers through (with Caelid being the exception), going off the path feels like sequence breaking. Especially the late game nullifies the idea of freedom where to go next with the fixed sequence of Leyndell, Mountain Tops, Crumbling Azula, Leyndell again (if I remember that all correctly). Traversing itself has some indicators of open-world-as-a-bad-choice: Torrent is basically just sprint mode, there is hardly meaningful interaction with obstacles/cliffs (either you can scale them immediately or you can't). Reading the landscape from afar didn't really let me map out my route mentally, because the geometry lacked clarity. Oh my, actually, I like Elden Ring a lot, but I think its open world shines rather as a narrative device and with its atmosphere, not so much as a gameplay experience. A really good open world, where every part of it was important to my motivation, expectation and planning, is Subnautica. Sure, the simplicity of the narrative helped, also something Breath of the Wild is benefiting from.

Best: Skyrim. Micro storytelling accomplished just by object placement and framing everywhere, large contiguous space with visual lures almost always in sight, extensibility (large spaces that aren’t locked to mid-quest line status are a modder’s dream), major side quests that aren’t required for or even directly linked to the main stories. Worst: anything linear disguising itself in an open world. Parallel tracks are still railroading. Looking at you, Biomutant.

I feel bad for the designers of Mind's Eye, since there was an open world there somewhere in the planning.

Breath of the Wild coming up is fitting, since it's what I'm more familiar with for the most acclaimed open-worlds. It really is an understated but key point that simply having things be placed with some logic and care is a huge amount of making an open world rewarding to explore. Especially since then you can throw some curveballs, and also establish the game's own particular visual language; if you spot something that looks weird or interesting, chances are there's something there to reward you. Nintendo's actually kinda been doing this since waaaay back, with Super Mario Bros having lots of little secrets and rewards hidden around off the beaten track, even if they don't have much to really reward you with besides coins and points. I'd say Super Mario World is where it actually becomes a part of the core gameplay to look around levels for things beyond the expected beaten track, but Odyssey comes to mind as having a similar deal to BotW; you not only are encouraged to blow off the main story and bugger off in a random direction in the sprawling worlds, but you'll probably find a bunch of stuff there. And even just piles of coins put in spots where the player clearly isn't meant to get to, just to reward them in case they do. And of course, the open world codifier Grand Theft Auto quite arguably set the standard for a lot of this; even when there's not much in the way of mechanical rewards, from the early 3D games there's a fair few easter eggs, silly (and dirty) jokes and little design touches hidden in random corners of the map. Supposely players are STILL finding and documenting new things in GTAIV and V, including what seems like an entire implied elaborate conspiracy plot. Kinda funny given it suggests you barely even need any actual gameplay reason for players to seek out these things, just make cool, weird, funny or spooky things in random places on the map and you've made a game in itself.