For more than 20 years the action adventure genre has been dominated by open-world games. They started in quite a constrained way, with titles such as Shenmue and Driver offering miniature cities to wander about, but during the 21st century, they grew to encompass whole kingdoms. Now we have titles such as Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring and Death Stranding that contain vast and highly varied environments; Minecraft worlds are reportedly 60,000km wide. And let’s not forget space sims such as Elite Dangerous and No Man’s Sky, which effectively contain whole galaxies.
This whole design model, however, is starting to seem a teeny bit unsustainable. Not only is it astonishingly expensive to build giant worlds (it’s rumoured that the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 will cost in the region of $2bn), but the market is also saturated with competitors all promising many hundreds of hours of exploration. Is there really an unlimited supply of players willing to buy and play more than two of these a year – especially now that we’re being incentivised to stick around through live service features, such as regularly updated costumes, missions and locations?
As a result, major studios are beginning to rethink their approach to map design in large single-player adventures. Released in February, Avowed is the latest epic role-playing fantasy from Obsidian Entertainment, and instead of an open structure, the landscape is divided into a series of smaller segments, which open up consecutively as the story progresses. According to narrative designer Kate Dollarhyde, a key part of this decision was being able to provide a cogent narrative that allowed for more player choice. “Pacing is really tough in open-world games,” she told Xbox Wire. “You never know where the player is and what they’re doing at any given time. So having these zones that happen in sequence means we always know what content you’ve just come from on the critical path.”
In short, what the player loses in terms of being able to wander about wherever they like, the developers gain in taking control over how the story proceeds. I enjoyed the structure too because it gave me a very clear idea of how far I’d come – it made a very ambitious title feel manageable.
Another recent example is Atomfall, apocalyptic postwar thriller from Rebellion Developments in which the player must escape the quarantine zone placed around a disaster at the Windscale nuclear plant. Again, there are four main landscape areas for the player to discover, some of which are subtly locked behind narrative prompts. These spaces are fully explorable – you can wander the woods, explore a little village, clamber down into winding caves – but they’re comparatively small, so it feels like wherever you go, you’re going to find something interesting and relevant. Added to this is the lack of fast travel: you get everywhere on foot, so you really become embedded in these rich spaces – part of the pleasure becomes taking new routes between familiar locations, checking out ruined country mansions, or hidden gorges leading down to trickling streams.
It reminded me of how fun it was to play last year’s excellent role-playing adventure Dragon’s Dogma 2, which was more open in design but similarly restricted fast travel across the map, providing only a few teleport sites. In this way, every quest really felt like a quest – something time-consuming, unpredictable and dangerous. The sorts of things games are really about.
I wonder what effect the arrival of GTA 6 will have – whether other publishers will feel they should compete or if they’ll just throw their arms up in surrender and head the way of Obsidian and Rebellion. I hope it’s the latter. There’s still so much innovation to be made in contained explorable environments – look at how much interactive variety has been teased from the wonderful Hitman titles: the way that interlocking gameplay systems involving player-character abilities, enemy AI and environmental factors combine to produce rich procedural narratives. I’ve forgotten a lot of the landscape I saw in the Horizon titles but I’ll never forget knocking out a millionaire tech bro with a giant fish.
The variety that open-world titles boast about doesn’t just have to come from sheer expanse, it can be much more granular. I’d take an intricately authored village over a vast wilderness any day, because I like to get to know a place. I knew the little town of Silent Hill, I knew the docks of Shenmue. It’s like famous game designer Chappell Roan once put it: I don’t want the world, but I’ll take this city.
What to play
If Balatro has got you really into weird poker games, can I point you toward Cave of Cards? A little browser-based game by the brilliant designer Adam Saltsman, it’s essentially a “match-three” puzzler mixed with a poker game: you clear the cave by digging up playing cards and making a decent hand. You can play on your PC, Mac or phone and it runs on the online virtual console Pico-8, which has dozens of other excellent little games to try.
Available on: PC, Mac, smartphone
Estimated playtime: 2+ hours
What to read
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Very relevant to our essay above, Nicolas Doucet, the director of Sony’s beautiful platformer Astro Bot, said at a talk at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco: “From the start, we were in the mindset that it’s OK to make a compact game, and I think it’s really important – especially going into this year – it’s OK to make a small game.” Eurogamer has the rest of the details.
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Oh and look: here is writer Sam Howitt with an excellent article on Mass Effect: Andromeda and the idea of games that respect your time as a player. It’s a really nuanced piece with lots of examples, and I like the way Howitt neatly sums up the Ubisoft school of open-world game design as “travelling to points on a map to build up progress meters”.
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If you’re waiting for the TV adaptation of The Last of Us Part Two, Variety has a decent interview with the actor Pedro Pascal, who portrays Joel, about how he prepared for the five-year gap in the narrative timeline between the games. It’s an interesting insight into his grasp on the character and the world itself.
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What to click
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Why video games can’t escape their role in the radicalisation of young men
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UK watchdog bans ‘shocking’ ads in mobile games that objectified women
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Video game music has arrived on the festival circuit – and it’s only going to get bigger
Question Block
An important question from reader Natalie this week:
“It’s taken me many games played and unfinished before I’ve realised that, although I enjoy gameplay, puzzles, strategy, defeating bosses and the like, all of my favourite games have compelling narratives. Can you recommend some of the best storytelling in video game history? I’m a Nintendo Switch gamer but I’m up for hearing broad recommendations for future reference.”
This is a tough one to answer because I’m extremely critical of video game narratives that rely on overly complicated world-building and endless environmental lore drops – and those are often the ones on lists of the best video game stories. There are a bunch of classics I’d recommend, though: the indie title Firewatch, Valve’s classic sci-fi opus Portal 2, the beautiful Ico, the immense God of War. The Resident Evil Remakes are strong on schlocky horror narratives, too. For the Switch, try a bingeable quartet of Undertale, The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, To the Moon and Outer Wilds – all gripping in different ways.
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.