A daring adventure or nothing at all?
The term ‘open-world’ really seemed to start proliferating en masse around the time Breath of the Wild released. It was heralded as the most new and innovative open-world formula to ever grace our screens – and to be fair, it was. A completely malleable physics engine, a self proclaimed ‘chemistry’ engine for flames and lightning and so on, and a massive non-linear world absolutely littered with things to collect, enemies to fight, puzzles to solve, and of course – shit to pick up off the ground. BOTW’s story is even tailored around its expansive open-world. Its sparse, non-invasive, easy-to-recall, and paced into about 5-6 modestly sized sections, with lots of additional (optional) context and backstory in the form of flashbacks, if the player so chooses to follow those threads. Its safe to say it took the gaming community by storm, combining the beloved (already exploration-based) Nintendo series with more mainstream-oriented gameplay conventions, but expanded and improved upon by a startling degree that combined to make a formula that really wowed and surprised us all. To be sure, non-linear and more ‘open’ exploration formulas have existed in games since antiquity, with the Legend of Zelda being one of the most frequently cited as being an early example of such. Straightforward RPGs too have run the gamut from being linear to fairly open-ended. RPGs like Final Fantasy VII alternate between linear story-guided town exploration and dungeons paired with open-ended sections explorable via chocobo or buggy or airship, with tons of optional encounters, storybeats, weapons, materia, and more to find at your leisure. The core difference more than anything seems to be pacing and player choice. Breath of the Wild helped usher in an age of gaming where – instead of the game dictating the pacing of the events, the player instead now has complete control over what they do, what they see, when they do it, and if they do it. This ideology exploded, and if you can forgive the wording, infected every game and every perception about games for the next ten years. Every new game, every sequel, began touting ‘massive-open-world’ areas, player-centered pacing, non-invasive storylines, crafting systems, and guaranteeing dozens upon dozens upon dozens of hours of picking shit up off the ground. It’s another way in which games have become ubiquitous – developers, publishers, shareholders all – absolutely smitten with Breath of the Wild, began shoehorning in as many of its ideals and mechanics where they could. Chasing, like so many Marvel movies before and alongside them, that same immediate windfall of ‘hype’ and raw cash by bottling lightning in a bottle and appealing to everyone in the lowest common denominator.
For someone that views games as a vehicle primarily for storytelling – open-world games have not been a genre or gameplay loop I’ve felt particularly engaged by. Stories are often, as I’ve mentioned, overly simple – painfully sparse, with storybeats as much as two or three hours apart (if you’re lucky), and the entire experience tailored more closely around spending as much time building things, walking around, climbing, or again picking shit up off the ground. Even as far as BOTW goes, the story comes off as saccharine and melodramatic because of how simplistic, straightforward, and sparse it is. When the entire gameplay experience is built around player freedom, storytelling by its very nature slips through the artists hands. Where control, and scene, and intention diminish, so too does the ability of a storyteller to move the hearts and minds of the viewer, and so do they and up relying on base hyperbole and melodrama. I won’t say that an open-world formula is completely anathema to storytelling – because some less literal interpretations of the formula work very well. FromSoft’s Bloodborne and Sekiro are great examples – maybe even the Arkham series. But many true open-world games’ stories and writing suffer under a narrow player-controlled vision. And many games, many genres – become bloated, labored, and sometimes unrecognizable (and downright boring) when subjected to the open-world formula.
The variation is wide, but just to name a few games that have had a ‘large open world’ section or sections shoehorned into it mid development or when they began development in the wake of BOTW and were released recently: Pokemon Scarlet & Violet, Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, Shin Megami Tensei V, Kingdom Hearts III, Final Fantasy XVI, Bayonetta 3, Pokemon Legends Z-A, Donkey Kong Bananza, Mario Kart World, Metroid Prime 4. All of which span a wide variety of genre, but all of which who’s development centered around turning traditionally ‘linear’ experiences into something ‘open-world’. What’s worse, is that none of those mentioned managed to garter any critical claim, and were for the most part mediocre experiences with baffling ‘conventional’ additions meant to make them ‘more palatable’ for a wider audience. Pokemon’s transformation alone is something to behold. What used to be a frank RPG about hand-picking a team of beloved monsters, navigating labyrinthine dungeons and tough trainer battles, and thwarting an evil organization, is now about raising dozens of Pokemon in an instant, eschewing dungeon design entirely, with little to no mandatory trainer battles, and has your character making sandwiches and doing nothing of any real value narratively, in a big open world (littered with sandwich ingredients). It’s a generational set of changes – and part of that ubiquity I talk about. Games aren’t challenging anyone anymore, mentally or physically – everything has become completely optional. Completely up to the player to decide how to engage with it or value it. And it has severely degraded the overall quality and value of any individual experience.
People speak of ‘linear’ games as if they have a mouth full of vomit for some reason. But attempting to turn every game and every genre into an ‘open-world’ based experience is one of the most short-sighted and sure ways of losing both your dedicated fanbase and further alienating any potential fans. Linear experiences lend themselves to stronger narrative experiences, and many times over respect the player’s time and intelligence by pacing their experiences in a way that keeps them engaged and coming back for more. Trusting the artists involved, trusting them to tell you a story, to guide you through the experience and engaging you mechanically with challenges and tailored exploration, just like an author or director would, doesn’t make a game bad – it promises a more bespoke and memorable experience that can last a lifetime. In that every book shouldn’t be a ‘choose your own adventure’ novel, neither should every game. And of course there’s subjectivity involved here – if you absolutely adore ‘choose your own adventures’, then keep choosing them! But if we’re talking somewhat objectively about art and storytelling, for developers and shareholders to keep insisting that these elements influence and change every other genre and series en masse, we will keep losing the intention of artists, their originality, their nuance and more. Marvel movies are fine, but not every movie needs to be a marvel movie. Not every game needs to be open-world. There’s so many more things to explore besides spectacle and immediate self-gratification – love, life, death, philosophy, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in dreams – things artists want us to see and experience, things that we might avoid or never get the chance to experience ourselves otherwise. New experiences and ideas that can lead to growth and expansion of our minds.
It’s strange in a way, to see games repeat en masse the same mistakes hollywood has been making for the past 40 years. Beating marketing trends over players heads to death, focus grouping every aspect of an original idea until there’s no originality left, and by trying to please everyone, pleasing absolutely no one. And to be fair, it’s not just the open-world formula that has more than worn out its welcome (by at least five years) – live-service games, first-person shooters, roguelikes, ‘cozy-games’, all repeated and revisited to the point of absolutely parody. It should be obvious to anyone with the meanest intelligence, that chasing fads and popular mechanics diminishes the value of original art, new ideas, and ensures a cyclical string of half-successes, failures, and consumer attrition. So much time and energy and mangling of ideas and inspiration in pursuit of a ‘sure-thing’ has been the death of many live-services and games in the past ten years, where series and genres, instead of flourishing with new storytellers, new writers, and taste-makers, instead became an abattoir soullessly repackaging the same tired ideas over and over again, while shareholders incredulously ask ‘Why don’t they like it?’. They forget that (likely willingly) just like in hollywood, it’s the artists that inspire loyalty and excitement. Not brands. People get excited about directors and actors – not publishers or producers. Yoko Taro, Yasumi Matsuno, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Todd Howard, and now Hideo Kojima (though to be frank his adulation of hollywood is more than a little bit of a red flag). It’s an industry, as I’ve mentioned before, that wants so desperately to be taken seriously and treated like an art form – but cannot seem to raise up artists and creators, for fear of CEOs and Shareholders losing their power and bloated paychecks. Games are more ubiquitous, expensive, ugly, and boring than ever – and if developers and artists are made to keep chasing these ‘tried-and-true’ formulas for the next ten years, the layoffs, stagnation, and attrition will only grow deeper and more necrotic.