Genuinely no, and many people keep on designing open world ones when what they really want is to make linear ones

Breath Of The Wild did it well, but because they built the game around the concept from the ground up instead of doing an Assassins Creed.

There's so many challenge runs I can think of trying in Elden Ring, but then I remember the 40 minute Run-Around-and-Collect-everything marathon.

Gonna try a deathless DS3 run instead

Breath of the wild. No dungeons.

GG on your base health/stamina finish I guess

Yeah San Andreas was the open world game I was thinking of too, with the expanding of your crime syndicate. It's pretty much the only game I've played that implements an open world properly and I've been chasing that since then. Fallout 4 maybe, but building settlements or forts didn't have real impact. Diablo IV is way too driven to rush through and get to the endgame.

I think you really need to design it to be more of a simulation game that reacts to player actions and with a story inserted, not as a "feature" to check off. And a distinct goal or win condition for playing the open world.

Eh breath of the wild was huge but empty

That's so fucking lazy by the gamedesigner, and takes away all the fun too IMO.

BotW was empty only if you didn't know how to look at it.

If you look at it without having ever seen Elden Ring, it's pretty impressive.

If you look at it after having seen Elden Ring, BotW is dogshit.

Oh look, another Korok Seed. How meaningful and rewarding and not complete bullshit or anything.

I disagree. Especially because you have to put in context: BotW came out five years before Elden Ring, as an exlcusive bridge title between consoles, and still rocked a degree of interaction with the world (its physics/elemental system and the use of stamina as an advancement barrier) that ER still dreams of. IIRC Miyazaki himself said that the team was heavily inspired by LoZ's work with the formula.

For me, half the fun in Fallout is discovering some old building and piecing together what fucked up thing happened there.

I found that the rewards were almost always meaningful. Even if it wasn't a weapon or a spell I could use, it was always something unique that I totally could build around.

Elden Ring's open world was so good that it retroactively made BotW look like shit to me.

Yes, but the open world has to exist in the game as a meaningful set of gameplay systems/potentialities.

There have to actually be things that could challenge you, cost you, reward you, capture your attention, present you with a secret if investigated, set off an actually meaningful chain of events, etc.

If 'open world' is implemented as simply 'big space with occasional trash mobs wholly disconnected from the rest of the game'... you have a very shitty implementation of an open world.

Open world doesn't, or I guess shouldn't simply mean 'big empty space'.

If your game has a fast travel option that you regularly or often use to skip the open world, your open world sucks.

Yeah agreed. Even if it wasn't anything useful, it would be interesting and something to inspire future builds.

Agreed on BotW, although I didn't like it to start with. It being open world felt actually like a step down, as I liked the exploration in the earlier games where you'd be locked out somewhere and had to find an item to get further. It made me wonder what there was to find and I was excited whenever I got the item so I could go find out. With the world in BotW just being open and mostly empty on top of that, it just felt boring. And I didn't like the shrines, I felt they were too easy, too short and too gimmicky. The only fun I had with them was trying to do thing in an unintended way.

Agreed.

Bethsoft often pisses me off or lets me down but they are absolutely good at environmental storytelling, no doubt

There's definitely something to that. I liked that detective kind of work too. Games don't need dialogue to tell good stories. There's even good ways to just wander a large empty world and see sights.

Test Drive Unlimited.

Witcher 3 is so much better than 2 or even 1 (which was also confusing).

Also, imagine Gothic, Skyrim or Dragon Age in linear.

While Crysis would be worse with a fully open world. It plays as a narrative.

I wouldn't put Metroidvanias (with large maps, back tracking, ability gating and flexibility in which area to go to next) alongside other open world adventure games (like GTA, Witcher, Breath of the Wild, etc). I love Metroidvanias and linear games, but I wouldn't touch open world adventure RPGs with a 10 foot pole.

Is it weird I like empty?

Feels a lot more natural and makes discoveries more meaningful.

I think OP needs to stop playing ubisoft sandboxes

The benefit is the experience. The difference in experiences comes down to the level design. Are you in a maze or in a field?

The best game designs masks this in both scenarios.

The well designed linear game doesn't always feel like a maze, and has sections that feel like fields between mazes.

The well designed open world game contains mazes that you discover in a field that feels roped off into clearly defined sections that differ from each other and contain large landmarks to orient and draw you in.

Both feel bad if they don't include (at least the illusion of) the other. A linear game is boring without any choice. An open world game is boring without linear moments.

If every place/area only serves one purpose then the game should be linear. Some of my favourite games are the old Gothic and Gothic 2 RPGs. They are open world, but tiny compared to modern RPGs. They dont have "areas" with a set difficulty that you can complete and then move on, instead the map is like a skeleton of fairly save roads and settlements and the further you go away from the roads the harder it gets. So you see the whole map in the first chapter but have explored very little of it. You always return to the same areas and they feel like home. And every chapter of the story adds new enemies, quests and events to all areas of the game. All of it is hand picked. No "radient quests" to trick you into going to an completed dungeon again, no random encounters on the roads to make travel through the world feel less empty...

IMO, they have the best open worlds I have ever seen. The studios follow up open world games (Gothic 3, elex 1&2) fell flat because they tried to be huge as well and felt empty as a result.

Working with constraints does actually produce gems. Fallout, farcry, GTA, skyrim just throw billions of dollars at a project to make it huge. But everything there is is just a set piece to be looked at once and be discarded ...

The old Zelda games were also open world.

Gothic does sound awesome especially with the Gothic 1 Remake.

That's what I'm saying. The only open world games that truly utilise their worlds are ones that first close it off

There can be benefits of open world. When traversal is a primary mechanic and is half the fun of the game like in a lot of Spider-man and Crackdown games. When the vaste distances with little to no civilization, just natural terrains, forrests, and the occasional temple ruin and giant beast fill you with a sense of wonder and unease to set the tone of the game narrative like in Shadows of Collosus. When the world itself is a living puzzle to be unraveled like in LoZ: Majora's Mask.

The problem is when games have big maps just by expanding terrain, filling it with tedium and unthoughtful design, make traversal a slog, and make everything feel unintentionally void of life and interesting things to do/see. And narrative driven games almost always benefit from at least some linearity.

This was me with Breath of the Wild. Every mountain is a stamina puzzle in the early game. And nothing (except rain) can stop you if you're determined enough. And while the Korok isn't a satisfying reward on its own, it's nice to see them as achievements. Like the creators saying "Yes, we put this mountain here for you to climb, and you did it!"

Being able to fuck around can be fun. A linear Elder Scrolls (morrowind, oblivion, skyrim) would be boring

Not really. The 2D ones at least. You literally can't access areas until you've progressed by finding an item, usually by killing a boss in a dungeon. Its a fairly linear design actually.

The physics thing is a good point. But my experience with BotW is that I would see something in the distance, I'd go to it, and then there'd be a shrine with no meaningful reward or a Korok seed, and that's it. The reward is that a number ticks up.

Elden Ring, I'd see something in the distance, I'd go to it, and then there'd be a whole, actual dungeon to complete. And the reward would be unique every time. Even if I didn't end up using it, it'd be a weapon or a spell that would give me ideas for a different build.

Breath of the Wild is empty. The weapons are destructible, which makes them meaningless.

Imagine scaling enemies by actual player skill needed to defeat them, instead of just 'my number more big than your number'.

You might like the Dark Future mod, its roughly the equivalent of New Vegas' hardcore/jsawyer mode.

Try Kenshi.

There's no main quest at all, beyond try not to die.

Honestly a very good example here of 'open world' done in a genre that usually doesn't see it so much.

I mean like, compare a ... hub and spokes style immersive sim game, to any given open world game.

With an ImSim, you often get planted into an area, with a single or multiple main quests, and a whole bunch of essentially discoverable sidequests... and, when done well, those optional sidequests significantly affect how the main quests play out, and may give you different options for how to approach or conclude those main quests.

Then, onto the next hub/spoke section.

ImSims are not typically associated with literal huge open spaces... but the spaces they do have tend to be well interwoven.

There are often entirely optional, missable 'sidequests and submazes', basically, even in a typically smaller amount of literal space.

But also, they're not strictly linear in the way of like ... an FPS campaign/single player mode usually is. Sure you can have the literal levels be maze like, but typically/traditionally, theres usually only one entrance and exit, and the specifics of what you did in any given maze don't really impact the next maze beyond your weapon and ammo count and health maybe carrying over.

ImSims open up the conceptual field of a given linear sequence of levels, by allowing totally different play styles to yield signifcantly different experiences, and often the additional mechanics they do this with are more than just combat... social and exploratory play can be rewarded or punished by altering the narrative itself.

Generally, good open world games have a lot more emergent content - situations that emerge from the interaction of agents and simple mechanics (in the style of how simple rules create complex outcomes in the "Game of Life") - whilst good linear games have highly curated set-pieces scenarios which were created by level designers directly.

For an example of the former, imagine you're running around the Game World looking for a special kind of plant to create a potion that you need. You come across a battle between bears and a bandit group. When they die their drops are free for the taking and both groups are too high level for you to take on your own. None of this was setup to happen when you crossed some trigger line, it literally just happened because those the entities in those groups are part of enemy "factions" and the patrol route of one group (a route which might itself be procedural rather than fixed) passed near enough the position of the encampment of the other.

This kind of thing randomly happen is just not something you get in linear games which are generally just set-pieces and even the ability to pull on group of high level enemies to another group has to be designed in (mainly by making the restricted game area big enough for it in that section and placing the groups in the right places).

This is also why in a linear game if you die and restart you get the same fights in the same places you had before up to the place were you died unless that section of the game was designed with enough alternate paths of mechanics (say, hide mechanics) that you can go around and avoid certain fights.

Emergent content is also why Multiplayer can be a lot of fun, though in this case the "agent" whose interactions can give rise to all sorts of situations are other players.

I think elden ring probably couldn't be told in a smaller scale level design.

You hear about massive spanning battlefields, wars with gods, etc. Could not be correctly portrayed with a more compact level design. And the vistas are gorgeous.

Open worlds benefit the game when exploration is the point.

Hmmm... I see what you to mean... but it's in my top 5 games of all time, and none of the other Zelda games are. So I think it just shimmied into a different genre, which I get could be a problem for an existing fanbase that liked the old genre.

I loved BotW as it was... but to be honest if they offered more dungeons without changing the exploring part, I would have taken that on top, for sure.

I did hate Tears of the Kingdom, though, so I guess it's a delicate balance that just happened to land in my hitbox on BotW.

that was only fun for me the first time I played the game. I really enjoyed seeing some mountain in the distance and making my way there and climbing it.

Second time around it felt pretty empty and lifeless for me.

ToTK is more of the same but with janky powers and a juge overreliance on them

There is some non-linearity in the 2D games. In the first game, you can do some of the dungeons out of order. For example, some people like to save dungeon 6 for last because it's difficult. Some dungeons do require items from previous dungeons, but not every one.

A Link to The Past also has some nonlinearity in the same way. The dungeons in the dark world are numbered, but you can still do some of them out of order for the same reason as the first game.

I think this is a difference between us as players. I'm not a competitionist at all, and I don't even remember what economy the Korok seeds were for. I probably finished the game with a ton of them collected and unspent.

But in my mind they weren't meant to be collected as a goal on their own. I'd be exploring up a mountain or whatever, just because I wanted to know what was on the other side, and when I got up to the peak I'd look out over the landscape and enjoy it for what it is. And then while I was up there I'd see a weird rock and go "ah, the developers wanted me to be up here looking at this view" and I'd move the rock, get some little fireworks, and then I'd have a buddy to enjoy the scenery with.

And then hours later, maybe months in real time, I'd be climbing around and see a Korok and go "Oh! I must have been up here before! Hey little guy" and then keep going.

So I liked them because it was something put there by the devs to show that they intended this place to be visited; that they put some attention here, and I had come to a place that wasn't just endless grass or empty procedural trees or something. It was full of stuff, even if it was silly little guys.

Oh, and you can drop rocks on their heads and they go "oof". That's a good one.

GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas. Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 (yes), New Vegas. Elden Ring. Subnautica.

Try making San Andreas linear and you would instantly destroy one of the best games ever made.

Alpine Skyline and Nyakuza Metro were my favorite levels in A Hat in Time. The movement mechanics of the game are well-suited for exploring larger levels like them, and they made the journey to each objective fun

I disagree. I hate when games do this, particularly open world ones. The point of going to find loot and stuff is that it benefits you. If there is no benefit then the game shouldn't give you the option. Those games should be linear, because they're trying to make a linear experience out of something non-linear.

If I'm struggling, I want to be able to leave and come back stronger. Even if I wasn't, I want to come back and feel that I've gained power with the time I spent. If I don't, I know I'm wasting my time.

I was going to say on your last comment that I like the concept of the settlement system, but I don't like the implementation. The camp system is so much better. First, it isn't asking for you to babysit it. Second, it's about utility, not chores. Third, and most important, it lets you build where you want. I want a single-player version of it in future games that let you place it literally anywhere, including existing structures. The MMO structure of 76 obviously means this can't be allowed, but there's no reason single player needs to prevent it. I just want to claim my own little spot and build a home how I want to.

You could say a whole new dimension?