Basically, how much of the world is interesting/fun.
For example, Fallout 3 doesn’t do a great job of this, as much of the world is baren with no story or gameplay. Half of the world feels like it could be cut out without much loss. The Yakuza games on the other hand, have smaller worlds but they feel massive and fun because there’s always something to do moments away.
The work-around is to make travel fun, so the “empty-space” is just more gameplay. The Just Cause games are the perfect example of this. All the movement mechanics are quick and satisfying, from the grapple and parachute, to the driving, to the OP wingsuit.
For example, Fallout 3 doesn’t do a great job of this, as much of the world is baren with no story or gameplay. Half of the world feels like it could be cut out without much loss. The Yakuza games on the other hand, have smaller worlds but they feel massive and fun because there’s always something to do moments away.
On the other hand, the world of Fallout 4 feels very cramped; you can’t go 5 meters without encouraging something. Bethesda’s games are interesting in this aspect – the worlds of different games are built similarly, but they differ in some small parameters (as in the density of Fallout 4), so they’re ripe for comparison.
Personally, I feel there were two peaks in Bethesda’s worlds – Morrowind and Skyrim. Both for different reasons.
Yeah, looking at it in a strictly dungeon distribution lens it’s actually pretty solid, and I find it feels a little crowded when you mod in more locations. I guess world distribution is the one thing they actually got right.
I’d be broader and talk about points of interest instead of dungeons, but yeah. This, the art design of the world, and the music. Those are the strongest points of Skyrim.
It has been a little while since I last played it, but I found that scale-wise, it felt small (I’m guessing this is what you mean) with major locations too close together, but content-wise, it felt sparse, empty and ultimately pretty boring.
A wasteland that one can throw a stone across doesn’t feel like much of a wasteland to me. I don’t want realism, just big enough that I can suspend my disbelief. I want to get immersed but a “town” with six people isn’t a godsdamned town.
Big enough that I lose interest or notice the padding.
A lot of it boils down to execution. The more urban areas of a Sleeping Dogs or the TW3 map with the Bloody Baron (not the viking map) feel geuinely massive enough though both are on the smaller end. Whereas something like GTA5’s San Andreas actively pissed me off because so much of the game was just driving to and from set pieces on the interstate.
That said: I actively don’t care about completion unless I really love the game. So if something was 40000km^2… I might never leave the two square kilomters the actual game takes place in and not care about the rest.
As for Just Cause 2 and 3? Neither felt overly large but both were broken down into regions and I mostly just played those whenever I felt like over the course of a month or two. So it really was closer to “levels” than anything else.
Contrast that with a Far Cry 2 which is downright tiny and… I’ll never have the patience to drive past even one outpost ever again.
It’s not about the size, but more about density of meaningful content. I like Elden Ring because every nook and cranny feels worth exploring. It’s the game that dares to hide optional areas behind optional areas, all with their own unique enemies and bosses.
On the other hand, taking Elden Ring as an example again, the mini dungeons were too repetitive. The first time visiting a catacomb is exciting, but it turns into quite a chore after the third time and onwards. You’ve already seen it all. Same thing with the dragon battles.
I think Elden Ring overall strikes a good balance with amount of surprises per square meter.
I think it’s really interesting to compare a game like elden ring to something else like BOTW
My first time playing through elden ring I had an amazing time, and thoroughly enjoyed the open world experience. I made sure to explore every crack in every wall, not necessarily for the rewards, but rather for the exploration itself because that exploration felt magnificent
However, I’ve now played through elden ring four times over the years, and I quickly realised I was only playing for the bosses, with the open world merely being a hindrance to my journey. This problem quickly compounds, as the first few hours of a save is usually you running around buck naked looking for your weapons, smithing stones, flasks, etc.
This is opposed to something like dark souls 3, where your journey to get the build you want usually means you can a 30 second detour from your main path.
Compare this with BOTW, which I’ve also played through a fair few times, and it’s easy to understand why these games are different. Unlike ER, I honestly thought of the bosses as more like hindrances to getting the powers, which would help me traverse the open world. To me, that traversal was the most enjoyable thing about the game
This might just be a tinfoil hat theory, but I think this is because of the difference in rewards between the two. Unlike ER, which most rewards being clearly defined and memorable, in BOTW the vast majority of rewards are either
a) spirit orbs from shrines
or
b) korok seeds
While the shrines themselves can be memorised, I’d say it’s practically impossible to remember the location of all these things, mainly because there’s no point - there are so many, you’ll run into your fair share anyway. There are exceptions of course, with weapons and shields and the like, but for the most part it holds true
I don’t think it can be too large, but like others have said, there has to be enough quality content in each location you can visit to compensate for the vastness of the open world.
It be amazing if you could go inside every single building/dungeon/etc. and have every one of them chockablock full of things to experience, like they did with Elder Scrolls 6, but look how long it took for that game to come out…
hypnospace outlaw !! it’s more subtle things, of course, since it’s just a sort of parallel reality to our own 1999, but i think that’s what makes it feel SO real. i’m a really big fan of the news page and advice pages you can find in the game because they show you the mundanities of the everyday lives of these people
Depends on a lot of factors like what the actual game is.
A sandbox game, bigger is better. Like Minecraft. If the goal is exploration and resource gathering you can plop me into an infinitely generated map and I will be happy.
Outside of that, narrative games can be too big if there’s nothing to do in between points of interests. I don’t mean like side-quests, but more like random encounters or crafting/gathering stuff. There has to be something there I can either get distracted with or to “on the way” to the next location.
I think a lot of games want their cake and eat it too. It’s not an open world game, but Final Fantasy XIV promoted the Heavensward expansion with the zones being like 5 times bigger than the base game…
…but there were only 6 of them and between already being able to teleport to each zone there wasn’t any difficulty navigating the zones and they added flying which made them seem smaller than the base zones.
1.0 XIV had impressively sized zones that were unfortunately very copy pasted and between the rushed release and the engine limitations enemies were very spread out.
An Open World is only too big if it requires loading screens at transition points that aren’t natural. An Open World can have an insufficient density of relevant content, where exploring it has too little marginal utility to the player, and therefore it is ultimately not useful to exist.
Ease of travel and speed of travel. Even a small map can feel cumbersome, repetitive, and boring. If the missions are designed poorly, and the game mechanics ignore an entertaining user experience, walking down the same hallway a thousand times can feel like a chore.
“Too big” is a relative feeling that involves many factors.
I don’t think there’s a too big for a simulation type game world, go all the way. But for more directed game styles that are narrative driven or more carnival ride than simulation don’t make it boring use techniques from past games; the keeping distant landmarks in view outside like in New Vegas, or hilly landscapes to obscure stuff to discover like in Zelda or Skyrim. Bad examples would be like traveling between towns in daggerfall or those monuments in the middle of nowhere in starfield.
I recall True Crime: Streets of L.A. being too big. The city felt so similar, I just lost interest. It could have been that the hardware wasn’t where it should have been to land a project that ambitious?
I don’t think that there’s a “too big”, if you can figure out a way to economically do it and fill it with worthwhile content.
But I don’t feel like Cyberpunk 2077’s map size is the limiting factor. Like, there’s a lot of the map that just doesn’t see all that much usage in the game, even though it’s full of modeled and textured stuff. You maybe have one mission in the general vicinity, and that’s it. If I were going to ask for resources to be put somewhere in the game to improve it, it wouldn’t be on more map. It’d be on stuff like:
More-complex, interesting combat mechanics.
More missions on existing map.
More varied/interesting missions. Cyberpunk 2077 kinda gave me more of a GTA feel than a Fallout feel.
A home that one can build up and customize. I mean, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t really have the analog of Fallout 4’s Home Plate.
The city changing more over time and in response to game events.
Measuring size alone is meaningless, as gameplay affects perceived size, and density of meaningful content in relation affects the experience.
Size should match content.
Skyrim is canonically pretty close to the size and shape of Estonia, but in game it’s very small. If the game’s content was spread out to the “real” size, it would feel completely barren.
The map in Deus Ex MD was quite small, just a couple tiny districts, but it punched way above its size because it was so dense in detail.
Agree. If you could go into every single store, house, nook and cranny of Cyberpunk 2077, and talk to all the NPCs, it would feel absolutely humongous. Gameplay significantly affects perceived size.
Hot take, but the open world nature of Elden Ring drove me crazy. Coming from a series grounded by its tightly knit and highly curated environments, I never understood why Elden Ring is so unanimously considered the “peak” of the series.
I enjoyed my time with it, but I couldn’t help but wonder what the game could have been without the open world inclusion. So for me it’s not necessarily “how big is too big”, but whether or not the gameplay necessitates an open world.
Agreed the level designs in dark souls coupled with the exploration made them s tier an adventure. Elden rings was ok but with all the traveling I felt more like a tourist.
I’m with you on it, because my completionist tendencies saw me trekking between one too many copy-and-pasted side dungeons in the 50 hours I gave Elden Ring before I couldn’t take it any more and never came back to finish the game.
It’s not like the moment-to-moment combat is any less fun than the games that came before it, but since the game lets me indulge in my worst tendency of finishing every optional thing before progressing things it just felt like a meaningless checklist slog.
It’s definitely a “me” problem, but it’s just one reason why I tend to prefer a more focused experience than a sprawling open world.
The copy-paste dungeons were a big issue for me. And the amount of reused enemies and bosses. There is definitely a way to “optimally” play the game for the best experience. But I’d say that goes against the nature of what an open world is supposed to represent.
There is no open world that is too big. They can only be too small.
However, the quality of an open world is not predicated on the size of the open world, but rather what is actually in it.
And this doesn’t mean that open worlds must be drowning in content, as the quality of the content itself also matters, and certain worlds that are large and empty can still be interesting due to its traversal being good, or the sandbox nature of a large empty world.
Some of the worst examples of open worlds are the kind that are just filled with isolated little fetch quests; busywork that’s all marked on the map with no element of organic exploration. Or the kinds of open worlds where nothing actually happens “organically” without the player starting it.
The best kinds of open worlds are the ones that emphasise exploration and/or have background systems governing the world in some way (i.e. factions that interact with each other without the explicit involvement of the player).
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