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Building a Successful "Open" Game World

Posted by Soulskill on from the invited-to-return dept.

M3rk sends an excerpt from an opinion piece on Gametopius discussing what it takes for an open game world to be successful. Interesting stories and characters are important, but they must be balanced by varied and entertaining gameplay. The lack of either will be a limiting factor in how many people return to play once the primary plot is completed. Quoting: "A game like GTA IV takes itself and its fiction very seriously. It spends a lot of time, effort, and gameplay resources convincing you that the world you are traveling through is the same world that the story and cutscenes take place in. It may not be a game that allows you to own or control property to the degree seen in Burnout Paradise or Saints Row II, but it wants its world to be cohesive, not divided. ... While GTA IV's game systems almost serve its plot, Saints Row II and Burnout Paradise live for their game mechanics. Sure, these worlds are fun to look at and explore, but any exploration and discovery that the player enjoys merely drives them to these games' raison d'être: fun systems to play with."

28 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Idea: by Mhtsos · · Score: 2, Interesting

    An open game world should have an open content: An achievement in the game should allow you to add to the world's history. Then other players should validate it to become part of the world's lore. (First post BTW)

    1. Re:Idea: by JoeMerchant · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Like Second Life?

  2. Idee fixe of first person by Grismar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Many games, open world games in particular, put you in the place of the protagonist. Or, at the very least, you play the persona of an observer in the game world.

    This type of storytelling seems to me to be an unnecessary restriction on story telling in this type of game format. When watching a movie, or reading a book, the same limitations can occur, but there are many variations.

    Having a story in a movie be about many characters never bothers me, at least not in the sense that I'm wondering who is holding the camera that allows me to see the story. As a disembodied observer, the story unfolds itself just as convincingly as it would from the point of view of some of the characters. The game can focus on manipulating the game world, changing the rules or even just tracking several characters in an interesting way, effectively playing 'director' of an interactive movie.

    1. Re:Idee fixe of first person by grumbel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy does that, the story is told from the viewpoint of three characters and you switch between them every now and then on predefined points. It works pretty well. Dreamfall also does that, even featuring a dialog between the two of the characters where you switch characters in the mid of discussion, which was pretty cool moment. The interesting part is that this is really nothing new, Maniac Mansion had that back in 1987, along with cutscenes that show you what other non-player characters in the house where doing.

      I think a big problem with video games these days is that they try to follow Half Life model of 'cinematic storytelling', which means a single view point that is always attached to the main character, it never ever gives you a clear idea of the bigger picture and limits the story to things the main character experiences, which makes things both implausible and very limiting.

    2. Re:Idee fixe of first person by g4b · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Story telling deals with a story, which is situated in the "not-present", e.g. past.
      The story told is already happened.

      Playing a game takes place in the present.

      Everything you experience creates stories in your life. Like this article you just read on slashdot. You can tell it. But like the tactical post analysis of any RTS session, which is sometimes more enjoyable as the game itself, its just the result of the game.

      You hardly are able to tell a specific story in a game, except through taking away control from the player.
      What you can hope for, is that a game resonates into a story, which lets the player experience another story from his own perspective.

      It is a common misunderstanding of game design to think about games like stories. They are not. As is any activity, its taking place in the present. You dont think about how cool you jump and shoot another one in the head. However, you remember it, shortly after, and enjoy the moment of writing "pwnd" in the console or talking about it afterwards. "Remember...?"
      And that's why not everything you can do in storytelling will work with games.

      Most RTS games let you control a lot of units. So yes, you can identify yourself with a lot of different persons. Even most old RPGs let you build parties. But it's not the same, as experiencing the story of many characters in a movie leading to a plotline. And remember, if there are a lot of characters, their plotlines always cross.
      Even if you try different characters, I think especially in an open game, that would not work so much.

      Also, there should be a difference between game and toy. A game where you can mix your plotlines to get a movie is more or like a toy, not a game. There has to be some gameplay. Even in SIMs there is. If you play SIMs with a moneyhack you will get bored soon. Even if you can let your characters act out in all possible situations you want to imagine.

    3. Re:Idee fixe of first person by Moryath · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Space Quest, Maniac Mansion, King's Quest, etc were quite "open" games in the sense that players were encouraged to try anything they could think of to solve puzzles. Quite often there were multiple answers to a single puzzle (consider the permutations just through the "demo" portion of Zak McCracken and the Alien Mindbenders, for example).

      The biggest problem with so-called "open" or "sandbox" gameplay is that gamers are given a giant, flat piece of concrete and a single toy with which to play around. It can be fun for a while, but quickly gets boring when you realize that the underlying gameplay has no mutability, no change. One of the most famous quotes about gameplay and rules is "before you can think outside the box, there needs to be a box" - which is why systems with underlying rules (such as pencil-and-paper roleplaying games)spur much greater player creativity than "blank slate" mechanics.

      "Storyline on rails", like Half Life, can be fun. Equally fun can be "explore the storyline" or "choose your own adventure" style gameplay. The problem for "open" games, by contrast, is that by the time you finish their weak-ass, boring "storyline" mode, all you're left with is the concrete slab and a single toy. Sure you can do "whatever you want" (defined as "whatever crap minimissions were flagged as infinitely repeatable") but that gets boring as hell. Sure, maybe there's an achievement for screwing and then killing 1000 hookers in GTA 5: Attack of the Censors. Sure, maybe you get a "trophy" for retrieving 2000 kids' balloons in Spider-Man 4: Beating a Dead Horse. You know what? That kind of "gameplay" bores the crap out of me."

      Give me a good, solid exploration/adventure style title over the GTA model any day of the week, please.

    4. Re:Idee fixe of first person by Nebu · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Space Quest, Maniac Mansion, King's Quest, etc were quite "open" games in the sense that players were encouraged to try anything they could think of to solve puzzles.

      Just my personal opinion here, but any game in which, when you try the "wrong" thing, kills you off and presents "Gee, I sure hope you have an earlier save" message box, doesn't really encourage you to try anything you can think of.

      "Companions of Xanth" was a bit better in this regard in that they made custom responses to even the most absurd actions (e.g. "Talk to table" yields "Sorry, the table has taken a vow of silence.") and while a lot of things did kill you in Xanth, instead of the normal dialog with only "Quit", "New Game", "Load", there was also an "undo last action" button, so dying by experimentation became a lot less painful and a lot more fun.

      The "Monkey Islands" series was even better (in this particular metric of "encourage players to try everything"), because there was no way to die from trying things. I believe the series had 4 games, and there was only 1 game you could die in, and even then it was only via inaction (don't do anything for 10 real-life minutes), rather than from experimentation.

    5. Re:Idee fixe of first person by NoobixCube · · Score: 2, Informative

      In Monkey Island 1, you could 'die' by staying underwater for 10 minutes. Guybrush did say he could hold his breath for ten minutes, and it just shows he was exactly right. Also, when you actually get to Monkey Island, there is a joke about death in Sierra's adventure games on the cliff. It crumbles under Guybrush, and the Sierra save/load/quit dialogue comes up. He soon bounces back up thanks to a rubber tree. I forget if you could die in the second game or not, but in the third, it was a vital part of a puzzle. Alright, so that's actually a fake death, but the characters nearby talk at length about how they didn't think you could die in a Lucasarts adventure game.

      --
      Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
  3. Re:eat my shorts slashdot !! by gravos · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't know. I find Fable II is more entertaining than GTA IV. Itâ(TM)s enjoyable visually and story-wise whereas GTA is just kindof bleh. The problem comes when these kind of dynamic world games spread themselves too thin and try to have a huge world but they don't actually have enough developers to pull it off. A game like Oblivion loses an element of personality and depth in its quest because it tries way too hard to be huge.

    --
    This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
  4. Problem solved by s1lverl0rd · · Score: 5, Funny

    Saints Row II and Burnout Paradise aren't open game worlds! They don't even run on Linux!

    (ducks and runs away)

  5. Wait, what? by MWoody · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A game like GTA IV takes itself and its fiction very seriously. It spends a lot of time, effort, and gameplay resources convincing you that the world you are traveling through is the same world that the story and cutscenes take place in. It may not be a game that allows you to own or control property to the degree seen in Burnout Paradise or Saints Row II, but it wants its world to be cohesive, not divided.

    Burnout Paradise? Is that a typo? Of his five or so examples of open world games, I'd say that's the ONLY one with less control over the game world - particularly in the sense of controlling "property" - than GTAIV.

  6. Open worlds are still limited by plots though... by VinylRecords · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I loved the plots of Grand Theft Auto IV and Final Fantasy X, and that you could do a myriad of side activities within the game world before completing the story mode (and in the case of GTAIV continue playing the game free roam) but ultimately as a narrative experience you are bound to the plot.

    In Grand Theft Auto IV if you want to unlock the other islands etc. you must progress through the story, so the world is only open (from the start) so much. In Final Fantasy X you are limited very much where you can travel until you have progressed up to a significant point in the story where you are finally given the option of roaming the world at your own leisure.

    Fallout III actually had a more correct approach to giving the player a true open world choice in that the entire landscape was available to be explored the moment you exile yourself from the vault. And every sidequest and other task is available to be completed as the player's own judgment and they can go in any direction and order. You can even choose your character's name, gender, race, and some facial features.

    But what all three of these games have in common is that no matter how open the worlds are at any point, in order to complete the game, at least as the developers designed, is to conform to the character's pre-written closed world and isolated story.

    In GTAIV, you cannot become a cop or a taxi driver, or a motorcycle racer, you must find the military men who betrayed you back home to find closure for your character. But the game, once you have beaten it, gives you the brilliant option of playing the conquered world completely freely including finishing the side tasks. Though to unlock this complete sandbox you've had to assume the scripted and not open-ended role of the main character. The story is GTAIV is excellent, but the focus and enticement of having a large sandbox to explore and fiddle with, is usually the driving force for people to complete the game.

    In Final Fantasy X, once you beat the game, that's it, it goes to the final cut scenes and wraps up the story. The only way to replay it is to either start a new game, or to load an older save file. Of course this is the way the developers planned the game, you are meant to finish the game, there is a story and it is the main focus of the game despite you being in a sandbox world at one point the developers are pushing you to finish the story, the game. FFX had such a tragic ending and fans screamed so loudly and furiously for more story, and therefore more gameplay, that Square (who makes the FF games) created FFX-2, or the first true sequel to any FF game in history. So even though at some point the game was open-ended, once you are done doing every side-task, all that is left is the story. But completing the game 100% is no small task.

    Fallout III, you get the entire world open from the beginning, you can lead a good karma life, a neutral karma life, or a bad karma life. But no matter how good, indifferent, or neutral you are, your world is always the same, the quest is always the same, The Waters Of Life. In Fallout III they give the character the choice of being whoever they want. In GTAIV you are Niko the insane immigrant seeking vengeance and retribution at all costs. In FFX you are Tidus and company ridding the world of the giant monster Sin. In Fallout III you can be whoever you want in terms of looks, and even karma, but no matter who you think you may be...you are forced into the Waters Of Life Quest.

    Even if the Waters Of Life Quest can be ended in different ways, the developers force you to help your father in a task that has little emotional connection to you the main character. You have to join project purity. You could blow up Megaton, enslave children, kill the ghouls, enslave the replicant, and become the devil of the wasteland...but when daddy says he needs help with the water filter and fuse box running the generator guess who has to become a handy man taking time off from savagely raping and brutalizing the world. I could understand if

  7. Re:eat my shorts slashdot !! by Xest · · Score: 2, Informative

    I have to agree really, I don't think GTA4 lived up to the hype in all honesty. It was a good game, but only as good as the majority of other games out there but personally I felt, not as good as Saints Row 2.

    Saints Row 2's more open world style, it's coop mode and so on made for such a better game. The minigames were just more funny too- seriously, the escort one, driving round at high speed avoiding TV crews and the IRS whilst your mate is in the back performing the "Brown Twister" or whatever on an old granny, hours of amusement! It just had so many semi-hidden elements too from streaking to the suicide guy to the zombie killing section.

    But Saints Row 2 wasn't unique in beating GTA4 as an open world game I felt, Mercenairies 2 was rather fantastic, from getting your first chopper through to continuing to play the game after you'd completed it and getting to actually calling nuclear strikes that would whipe out half a city.

    I think coop matters as much as anything for these types of games though, Crackdown clearly wasn't as good as GTA4 single player but slap coop mode on and you could have much more fun. Even then coop isn't the be all and end all though because as you say, Fable 2 was more fun, even though it's coop mode was pretty crap. IIRC GTA4 actually has a coop mode but it's just a crappy sub-game.

    Whilst we have our Resident Evils, our Rainbow Sixs, our Gears of Wars and that that do have coop modes, there's nothing I look forward to more on release calendars than open world games with good coop modes. One in particular I'm holding out my hopes for is Just Cause 2, I quite enjoyed the first one and if the next one will have coop then it should make for fun times.

  8. Re:Meh by tnok85 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Interesting stories and characters are important, but they must be balanced by varied and entertaining gameplay. The lack of either will be a limiting factor in how many people return to play once the primary plot is completed.

    Neither of the factor is a must for a game to be a success. World of Warcraft for example. It has no story, weak characters and gameplay which been obsolete for about 10 years. Halo is another example.

    All it takes is to target the right market at the right time and have a huge marketing budget. Everything else is optional

    Warcraft actually has a very in depth backstory, moreso than any of the games listed above (with the exception of Final Fantasy, perhaps). There are novels surrounding the universe, a very very detailed history, and so on. The stories, however, play out in quests and raids. Most players don't read quests, just enough to figure out how to get XP, and most raids aren't even touched by the average player.

    So I see your point there - there is no story, but that's because it's not a story driven game and therefore the players are not forced to sit through the lore. It's a community driven game - not a good one to compare to the others.

    Halo, agreed. (Don't say 'it's just a FPS' - try the Half Life series)

  9. procedurally generated history by S3D · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Really open game world should be procedurally generated IMHO, like roguelike games and their derivatives (diablo etc). The problem is that such world often look sterile and artificial, and need content created by designer to become more alive. I think the solution could be - after creating random seed world it should evolve for several hundreds generations. That way disbalances would die out, factions will have history of relationship, artifacts and places of power would have some logic in their placement. Kind of genetic algorithm for game content.

    1. Re:procedurally generated history by Carlos+Matesanz · · Score: 2, Insightful

      that sounds cool, but how do you measure the fitness of a world, Its "aliveness"?. It's something to tink about, though.

    2. Re:procedurally generated history by tygerstripes · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I agree that this is the ultimate goal of procedurally generated content - a whole world built upon a set of "simple" well-defined rules, some starting parameters and a little room for God to play dice.

      Not only would this make the world unpredictable, un-walkthru-able, endlessly inventive and open, it would lend itself to more and more elaborate worlds as developers learned to optimise procedural generation and spawn more and more depth and detail without games becoming unwieldy to install. Forget Spore: see kkrieger for a real-world example of just how efficient and powerful this concept can be. (I'm also excited about Introversion's latest project, Subversion).

      However, there are problems with this. The first and most obvious is that designing procedural algorithms to generate good quality content is an enormously complex and challenging task when compared to conventional content development. It's like the difference between building a creature by adding and changing organs (again, see Spore), and building a creature by coding some DNA from scratch and chucking it in a cell nucleus. It's much more elegant, but so very much more difficult.

      Add some randomness into the mix to make the world not only procedural but also unique, and you have a hell of a tricky project on your hands. Setting the range of starting parameters, such that the resultant world will always be interesting and varied enough to be playable, would be very difficult, even with a very simple system - see the Game Of Life if you don't understand why.

      Secondly, there is the subtler problem of how to make good game content. Talented developers spend years learning their art and the pitfalls of the trade, and even then can screw it up too easily. Making good scenarios and content is an impressive skill, and the result can only be judged in human terms - how can a computer judge what makes a good mission, quest, set-piece or whatever? Even with a simple thing like Sudoku, hand-made puzzles are almost always more satisfying, more taxing in particular ways, more elegant... Procedurally generating a really good puzzle or quest on a consistent basis is, I suspect, impossible.

      I really hope that what you suggest comes to pass - it's the holy grail of PG games - but for the foreseeable future it's exactly that. Quixotically difficult, and quite probably an impossible fantasy.

      --
      Meta will eat itself
  10. Re:Open worlds are still limited by plots though.. by El_Muerte_TDS · · Score: 4, Informative

    You are correct. I was actually disappointed that in Fallout 3 the game stopped after completing the main quest, but also that most side quests are closely related to the main quest. In the previous Bethesda games you could actually ignore the whole main quest and still play a round with a world where the main quest didn't bother. Ignoring the main quest in fallout 3 could lead to an instant jump in the main quest progress, which is actually very annoying.

    Bethesda's Daggerfall featured a very open world. Of course the quests eventually became nothing but grind. But you could do pretty much whatever you wanted. You could go into the trading business, busing and selling houses. Or join one of the various guilds/cults.

  11. Burnout Paradise "fun to explore"?! by Lord+Bitman · · Score: 2

    I'm really sick of having to "explore" my way to every event and challenge. Burnout Paradise is a game where its "cohesiveness" really gets in the way of fun gameplay. It could benefit a lot from a little less cohesion and a little more "easy UI".
      - "Retry previous race" would be nice
      - "Reverse previous race" would be a more-"cohesive" way to do the same thing - get back to where you were, but have some fun doing it.
      - "Jump to location" would be a less-cohesive but more what you actually want
      - "Custom Race" would be the more-cohesive variant of that. Just define a point to race to, and do it.
      - "Invincible mode" (or at least a way to enable Burnout: Revenge style "anything but head-on is fine" crashes) would instantly make all the "get from point a to point b before you can do a race" stuff a lot more enjoyable.
      - ability to disable the slow-motion crash cam (at least for driveaways) would make the whole thing more fun

    Burnout: Paradise is NOT a good example of the game's "cohesion" taking a back seat to the goal of fun.

    --
    -- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
    1. Re:Burnout Paradise "fun to explore"?! by DeathCarrot · · Score: 3, Informative

      - "Retry previous race" would be nice

      It's not intuitively placed, but it does exist. It's in the in-game menu (right on the d-pad by default on X360 controllers IIRC).

  12. Re:Meh by Turiko · · Score: 3, Insightful

    halo is a rather poor example... you are the sole character seeking to save your race. It has a pretty good story; kind of farfetched, but not too much.

  13. Re:Open worlds are still limited by plots though.. by YourExperiment · · Score: 2, Funny

    You could go into the trading business, busing and selling houses.

    Busing houses only became practical with a high-strength character though.

  14. Re:Open worlds are still limited by plots though.. by Sciros · · Score: 2, Informative

    The Elder Scrolls games (also Bethesda's) are more open then Fallout 3 in that sense -- you can ignore the main quest easier, and even when you complete it, the game continues on.

    By the way, Fallout 3's third mini-expansion will change the ending and allow you to continue playing once you complete the main quest. Why they didn't think to do that right away confuses me, since they could have just looked to their Elder Scrolls games from the get-go.

    --
    I like basketball!!1!
  15. Where is the godfather of open games: Ultima! by Kaukomieli · · Score: 2, Informative

    Especially Ultima VI, but also Ultima VII had a vast world that can be explored freely. You can even harvest crops and bake bread if you like or drift across the sea in a raft...

    I still fondly remember the exploration of Britannia and it took me at least a month to realize there was a storyline I could follow (I only had about 1 year of english at school at that time and game-information was heavily text-driven...)

  16. Re:Meh by Nebu · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Interesting stories and characters are important, but they must be balanced by varied and entertaining gameplay. The lack of either will be a limiting factor in how many people return to play once the primary plot is completed.

    Neither of the factor is a must for a game to be a success. World of Warcraft for example. It has no story, weak characters and gameplay which been obsolete for about 10 years. Halo is another example.

    The "Warcraft" and "Halo" worlds are actually pretty well fleshed out with lots of detail, so I don't think these are the best examples for "successful games with no story".

    Better examples, IMHO, include: Tetris, Dance Dance Revolution, Rock Band, most flight sims and racing games.

  17. Open game worlds are overrated by CopaceticOpus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Open game worlds are overrated. There has been an ongoing trend towards every game moving from closed areas and scripted events toward wide-open spaces. "Open environment" is a feature added to any game in order to make it more modern and easy to sell. But adding that feature doesn't necessarily lead to a better game.

    Open worlds were fascinating at first because they were new and full of possibilities. The game levels became vast playgrounds to explore. There was an undeniable appeal to running around in GTA III for the first time and just firing rockets in various directions to see what would happen.

    However, the novelty of this is wearing off. There's only so much of interest to do in these open spaces. My real life town is a big open space, but that doesn't mean I wander around the various streets with my mouth agape. I'm finding that I spend too much time in these open world games getting to the interesting bits, rather than moving directly from one interesting challenge to the next.

    I want scripted events. I want a game to be well written and entertaining, and for all the time I spend with it to feel satisfying. I'm hoping the pendulum will swing back towards careful design, even at the expense of openness.

  18. Re:Open worlds are still limited by plots though.. by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2, Informative

    I would also like to remind of Arcanum. True, there you couldn't play past the ending, but you could also ignore the main quest, and roam at will. It is also the only game I know which had map of the entire world (a large continent) available for exploration from the very beginning, and you could actually go to any point of it and find what was there (i.e. if there's a city or a camp that you do not know about, you could still stumble into it by walking.

    How is it different from TES and Fallout? In one simple way: the map of the world was true to scale. You could truly walk the entire continent from end to end, but that would require weeks of in-game time and hours of your time, watching your character journey through the land, and an occasional random encounter with some hostiles.

    Of course, the whole thing was procedurally generated, outside from special locations such as cities, dungeons etc, so there wasn't much point in travelling around like that... but the very fact that you could do it somehow improved immersion.

    On a side note, it's also the only CRPG I know of where you could kill every single living creature you meet, and still finish the plot - none of that silly unkillable NPCs a la Oblivion (and so many others), or "the thread of fate is severed - maybe you'd like to load the last save?" of Morrowind.

  19. Re:A website for game development? by harry666t · · Score: 2, Informative

    > You don't need a website to distribute GtkRadiant packages:

    I know. Actually, GtkRadiant is "almost already there" in Debian:

    http://mentors.debian.net/cgi-bin/sponsor-pkglist?action=details;package=gtkradiant

    The problem is that nobody seems to care about "sponsoring" it. Last year I somehow managed to build it from SVN (there is a crapload of different revisions of the source, each of them broken in a very unique, specific and interesting way) on one machine, but since I've switched to a newer hardware and did a fresh install of Debian Lenny, I was unable to accomplish this feat again. And one would wonder why is GtkRadiant getting less and less popular.