Among the many genres of games, nothing engages the player more with the world than the open world genre. A deviation from linear progression, open world games introduces the player to a massive setting for them to interact and explore in, letting them indulge in the playable area at their own pace. With franchises like Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed and Bungie’s Destiny, visual aesthetics take center stage and veil empathic throughout both games, while worlds like Nintendo’s Mario Odyssey (2017) and Majong’s Minecraft (2009) take a different approach to the open world concept.
Some games under this genre have undergone numerous forms of decadence due to today’s focus lying mostly on tying the game’s allure to its presentation rather than substance. Franchises such as Assassin’s Creed and Destiny are permeated with this aspect; often adorned with visual aesthetics to enhance its outer beauty, but having its exploration attached to mundane and repetitive tasks, leaving behind a relatively shallow experience. More often than not, there’s hardly anything to explore at all. In Assassin’s Creed, the players are subjected to the infamous trailing missions; missions that strike harshly the overall pacing of the game by artificially slowing the gameplay to a mundane pace. The constant recurrence of these missions throughout the franchise’s history evokes a lack of care for developing and refining them to be more engaging, and thus, adding some depth to the world they created. The game also has a knack for successively recycling the same side missions, just under different names, around the playable world. The world of Destiny suffers from the same issue; however, instead of trailing missions, the game follows the formula of “shoot enemies at point A, and then shoot enemies at point B”. This applies mainly to Destiny’s Patrol missions, in which players go out into the open planets and explore. This inculcates within the player a sense of embellished artifice; that the world has been seemingly made bigger due to the multiplicity of these shallow and unnecessarily prolonged side missions. But with all genres of games, each falls under a wide gamut. Games like Mario Odyssey (2017) and Minecraft (2009) are open world games that belie the aforementioned statement with their own means.
Minecraft is an open world game released in 2009, and it’s credited for wholly abandoning a narrative structure and dropping a player in an open world that completely submits to the player’s imagination. The mind is potent in its creativity, and Minecraft establishes itself as a competent faucet for that creativity to flourish. The game abandons the sophistication and realism that gripped the previous two titles for a more “retro”, or pixilated aesthetic to uplift the game and have it appeal to a broader audience. The concern for pacing is nonexistent for the world lacks any scripted or linear progression. It more so encourages the player to exercise the cogs of their imagination and exhibit a capacity for storytelling. It’s because of this freedom and simplicity that the game has managed to survive the test of time and develop into a fan favorite.
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Mario Odyssey was released on the Nintendo Switch in 2017 and indulges the player to traverse the many worlds in their own way. Every world that the players are introduced to is pervaded with their own variety of atmosphere, music, theme, enemies, and platforming that reinvigorates and challenges the player to find their own means of traversal through the game’s movement mechanics. Mario Odyssey never suffers from an abrupt pause in pacing like Assassin’s Creed because the game never dwells on a single aspect of its world; it just lets the player do what they want. It rewards the player’s streaks of curiosity with the mirth felt during a discovery. Power Moons are the game’s collectables, and are generally always rewarded for completing the many challenges and mini-games that are strewn around the 14 worlds the game provides to the player.
A suitable metaphor to describe open world games is a pond. The beauty seen in Assassin’s Creed and Destiny is remarkable and truly impute the theme each game is trying to attain. It’s difficult to dispute the efforts made to achieve this immersion; however, there’s a severe content drought. For a world as big as the ones these games bestow on the player, there’s hardly anything to do in them. They’re seemingly there solely to give the player a setting to move around in. Side quests exist, but sadly, they’re copy-paste missions that gradually become repetitive and mundane the more a player dedicates their time into the game. Open world games that follow this formula are large, but shallow ponds. Games like Minecraft and Mario Odyssey are more akin to being smaller, but deeper ponds. Minecraft boasts the potential of having limitless content. Here, the player’s imagination is the only limitation. Odyssey does bind the player to a narrative, but makes the experience enjoyable through its variety and innovative mechanics.
An open world game provides the player with a deviation from the conventional, linear progression by establishing a massive setting brimming with interactivity and secrets waiting to be discovered. Narrative takes a backseat as the indulgence in the playable area becomes the main focus. While some may take the approach of immersing the player in an incredibly detailed and beautifully crafted game world, the true nature that imputes the concept of an open world game can be found in games that focus their attention more on two aspects: the mechanics or the degree of freedom. Structuring the world around these two concepts will lead to memorable experiences that players will surely remember.
