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).
I did hear about Light No Fire from the No Man Sky devs. Looks impressive from what I’ve seen so far on it with it’s supposedly literal Earth sized world.
It’s too big when the developers are unable to fill it with enough interesting things to do and discover to keep my attention. But there’s no absolute size I’d automatically consider too big, as it also depends on things like traversal. If you ride through the map on a mech going 400km/h, it can be much larger and more spread out than if I have to traverse the entire map on foot.
That’s definitely a key point. Absolutely loved the first Forest game, the map was just the right size for what content it had, then the sequel has a map 4x the size that is just completely empty for 90% of it. They did make some improvements over early access but it was still mostly a waste
Its not about being too big but too little stuff to do IMO. The first Assassin’s Creed wasnt even that big but felt like a wasteland going from one side of the map to the other
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