Open World- How Big can we make it?

[KoolHndLuke]

 I love open world games for the exploration, item gathering, npc encounters, quests etc. But I wonder how big can devs actually make them? I mean in terms of scaled world space. But first let's determine what makes a world-space feel expansive and interesting in the first place- is it sheer space or the content therein? Recently playing Dragon's Dogma DA for the "umpteenth" time I can say that I feel it is a smart, creative mixture of both in terms of enemies. items, etc. My personal preference of course, but how much more can be done to really expand the open-world experience? More world-space in and of itself is boring without distinctive characteristics and other things like different npcs, quests, and maybe some unique loot. It depends greatly on whether the creator is simply extending things for the sake of making the world feel bigger or to actually try to create a sense of stark differentiation between one area and another in an effort to make the created world feel more "alive".

 

Overall though, what are the technical limitations of making an open-world game? Is it more a limitation of specific game engines/hardware or is it more to do with how much dev time is required vs projected sales?

[DoctaSax]

'Open world' is essentially just space. The concept promises player freedom and endless replayability, but that really mostly falls under 'open gameplay' and 'open story', which is usually lacking, so people get fed up with it.

People complain about always ending up as a sneaky archer in Skyrim, or doing nothing but shooting in FO4. Closed gameplay.

Or they go on about the main quest that gets old real quick, while its objective is soooooo important that it feels odd the player character should want to embark on all the side quests . Closed story.

The perfect blend of full openness on all fronts is ofc difficult to pull off, technically and creatively. Still, 'open world'... we want it to be more than it means.

[KoolHndLuke]

6 minutes ago, DoctaSax said:

Still, 'open world'... we want it to be more than it means.

In terms of what? A more hand's off feel to a game- like you can enter the world at any point as any one or thing and make your own story? What kind of system would support such open decision in an open world game? I have thought that to have a large, engaging world you would need a lot of models, textures, and scripting- thus making it more of a technical challenge than anything else. In other words, realizing the scope of your vision.

[KoolHndLuke]

6 minutes ago, Alkpaz said:

How big.. umm try getting to the center of the galaxy in No Man's Sky, while scanning all systems/planets/fauna/flora between start to end. I'll check back with you in a few years.  (give you an idea, already about 200 hrs in and have only visited 9 systems due to quests/missions and the like) 

Newer game so I haven't been able to try it on my old setup. How much more expansive is it would you say? And in terms of what? Does it give the player multiple arcs to completing quests or their consequences or is there more distinctive features/more npcs and creatures to discover?

[DoctaSax]

3 minutes ago, KoolHndLuke said:

In terms of what? A more hand's off feel to a game- like you can enter the world at any point as any one or thing and make your own story? What kind of system would support such open decision in an open world game? I have thought that to have a large, engaging world you would need a lot of models, textures, and scripting- thus making it more of a technical challenge than anything else. In other words, realizing the scope of your vision. 

Not sure about assets, but open story/gameplay could be approximated by coding dedicated to that ideal, rather than settling for predetermined quests by predetermined quest givers with only vaguely alternate routes and almost no impact on your game experience later on. A lot of that has to do with how quest intel is stored: a limited number of pre-declared vars and/or quest stages. I think systems from strategy games like CK2 could be very useful in overhauling the RPG genre to make the 'world', ie the interactions and content, more flexible and vibrant, because they tend to generate content that builds on intel stored as a result of previous content, and that between thousands of characters. It's intricate, extensive, and dynamic.

[27X]

It's interesting that you mention DA because DA is actual open world, where progression methods are kept distinct from each other but exist as a direct measure of both 'progress' and advancement (those thing are very very separate) contrast with say Dragon Age or ME:andDramaDuh where the world literally doesn't move unless you do.

 

Very different spaces, and the UBI method is pretty much the latter as well, with just with more accessibility. What you're looking for isn't open world, it's living world, and living world tend to suck as storytelling vehicles unless the mechanics driving them are completely. fucking. perfect., and there hasn't been a game yet that even comes close. TES kind of has this in that NPCs follow their things independently of whether you do their fetch runs or not, but those are just a series of loops with pretty determined outcomes and maintenance.

 

A living world would change the loops to be deterministic and procedural, and not in the "and then vampires, you can't buy a sword from here anymore gg" but where the NPCs literally have a fully fuzzy routines based on motivators and conditionals that change by either event/and or environmental stimulus, basically where the sims will be in like 500 years the way EA does sequels.

 

The problem with fuzzy npcs is unless you're very careful in setting up responses and outcomes, they will quickly decide they're just gonna do whatever the fuck they decide to do and player stimulus will simply set the fuzziness on a new tangent, and whatever the player hopes to achieve is literally going to be out of their hands.

 

While that might sound excitingly realistic, it will also means progression and goal winning by the PC will be literal happenstance. If an NPC decides you suck? They're going to hound you until one of you dies, forever; or maybe they just go off on an adventure and that prophesied super woobie they were carrying; they decide instead of giving to you they're gonna use it on that T-Rex over the yonder hill and now your quest object is in a fire breathing telepathic dinosaur, and he decides he's gonna use that to burn down the entire town you were gonna visit the next day to get that sweet thieves' guild quest, and THEN he's gonna go use it to go kill the king of the castle you were gonna defend to get that sweet sweet sex scene with his daughter/son/dog/horse that was advertised on the youtubes. Welp. sucks to be you, wanna start over?

 

Contrary to popular belief people don't want actual living sandboxes, cause they're messy and often tell the player to fuck right off, while there's definitely fun in that, as we can see from MP sandbox style games, the appeal gets pretty dull pretty quick when any agency you have is literally at the system's mercy ala Rust/GMod/S&ndB0x, and those games tend not to have any thematic staying power at all. There's a reason basically every Rust player is 12-14, cause nobody with a real life has time for that.

 

Open Worlds are actually probably going to start dropping off as a unique thing on their own in much the same way as rpg progression is now thing in virtually any game you get, they'll still be there but they won't be a means and genre unto themselves, just another framing tool.

 

As for Living Worlds, that shit is a loooong looong way off from being realized in a manner that will just drop  you as a strange people in a strange land on a campbellian circuit.

 

also, mods for DDDA:

 

 

[FauxFurry]

A better question when it comes to open world video games is "How big should we make it?"

 

Bigger isn't always better. Just look at the messes that are Procedurally Generated Open World games (No Man's Sky is the best example even in its current form). Smaller, denser, meticulously designed, highly interactive world spaces are what developers should shoot for at the present (see Deus Ex: Mankind Divided). Once they get that down pat, then they can expand from there, if it fits the specific game's narrative.

[KoolHndLuke]

1 hour ago, 27X said:

The problem with fuzzy npcs is unless you're very careful in setting up responses and outcomes, they will quickly decide they're just gonna do whatever the fuck they decide to do and player stimulus will simply set the fuzziness on a new tangent, and whatever the player hopes to achieve is literally going to be out of their hands.

Wouldn't this be easily remedied by setting priorities (giving it a higher value or something for the AI or quest?

 

1 hour ago, 27X said:

While that might sound excitingly realistic, it will also means progression and goal winning by the PC will be literal happenstance. If an NPC decides you suck? They're going to hound you until one of you dies, forever; or maybe they just go off on an adventure and that prophesied super woobie they were carrying; they decide instead of giving to you they're gonna use it on that T-Rex over the yonder hill and now your quest object is in a fire breathing telepathic dinosaur, and he decides he's gonna use that to burn down the entire town you were gonna visit the next day to get that sweet thieves' guild quest, and THEN he's gonna go use it to go kill the king of the castle you were gonna defend to get that sweet sweet sex scene with his daughter/son/dog/horse that was advertised on the youtubes. Welp. sucks to be you, wanna start over?

Again, coding priorities for npcs would override this I think. Also, why tie objectives to an npc- especially if they "carry" a unique item that you might be able to steal or collect from their dead body? I say make the quest and objectives independent meaning that you can pursue them with different determining factors (such as stealing this or killing that npc) making the objectives of quests dependent only on your skill and cleverness (or luck) and prior activities along with say a familiar system ranging from friend to enemy with more tiers of trust. The key is options here with improved AI routine and awareness- to greatly expand on conditions and their short and long term effects. Though I'm not even sure how this type of coding could/would or is achieved.

[KoolHndLuke]

What I had in mind when I opened this subject is to find out if maybe there is an open world game that already has everything I'm basically imagining. Red Dead Redemption 2 comes to mind when I speak of an immersive open world experience that sort of pushes the boundaries even though I haven't played it yet because reasons, but as the industry evolves how much can we as gamers realistically expect in an open world game? Is one studio's game engine favorable for open world type games over another like say what CDPR uses that use many scripts or such and do all games use scripts or do they mostly use functions? Can I expect to play in a game with the size of a small country at some point in the near future? ?

[Ernest Lemmingway]

The size of an open world game tends to inversely reflect the amount of actual content and/or the quality of said content put into it. I'd rather have smaller world with a lot of quality content than a large world with repetitive (read: radiant) quests and mostly empty spaces.

[DonCorleone]

It can be as big as you want it, might even be generated by code so developers don't have to do every area themselves. ( examples are MC and Rust, at least on terrain part, but you could add in quests and such to be generated also. There would be some repeatability but with enough of options each area would significantly different)

[SmedleyDButler]

25 minutes ago, Ernest Lemmingway said:

The size of an open world game tends to inversely reflect the amount of actual content and/or the quality of said content put into it. I'd rather have smaller world with a lot of quality content than a large world with repetitive (read: radiant) quests and mostly empty spaces.

It's funny, because I almost feel the opposite about Skyrim - there's too much packed into too small a space. You can barely go over a hill or past a grove of trees without a new random NPC or quest trigger, especially with many mods adding things. So there's almost no sense of wilderness except in a few spots. 

 

Obviously making it genuinely true scale wouldn't work very well, but you can travel between towns so fast - even on foot - that it warps all sense of scale. Having a horse is basically pointless in purely vanilla Skyrim. It applies vertically too - you can climb a mountain by just walking up it (unless it's straight inaccessible) and it only takes a couple in-game hours to scale the highest peaks in the entire game world and this only requires some walking and jumping.

 

Beth tried to compensate for this by having days go by quite quickly, but IMO that really doesn't work and in fact makes it worse (I usually stretch the times scale out from the default 20 to 15 or even 12).

 

Even before getting into complex changes like NPC AI or dynamic interactions, we can see that a lot of game companies haven't even mastered basics like getting a good sense of scale in a fully curated non-random/procedural world.

[SmedleyDButler]

I do think that at some point we'll see a better combination of procedural generation plus specific hand-made areas to make game worlds which can be engaging yet still on a good size. But procedural generation on its own is no solution. All the most interesting content will still need to be hand-made.

 

But if you can get procedural generation to a point where the smaller landmarks (town, ruins, small dungeons, etc.) are varied and interesting enough for the brief visits you might make to them, that will go a long way towards making open worlds which can be different on each replay, while maintaining core elements.

 

Minecraft is getting there, but their villages and dungeons are still pretty bland without much interaction, and the villagers have literally no personality to speak of. Which is perfectly fine for Internet Legos! But that doesn't work for games with a stronger roleplay element, where you're expected to interact with others.

 

The ideal spacing is probably around 2-3 procedural towns and villages between hand-built large cities (or backwater worlds between major planets in a space game), though a wider range of 1-4 would probably still work if you wanted things more variable and your procedural settlement generation is very robust with lots of varied features to the characters and villages the engine creates. The frequency of dungeons or their equivalent is a lot more variable (basically any point of interest other than settlements in your open world) as those really depend on gameplay.

[27X]

17 hours ago, KoolHndLuke said:

Wouldn't this be easily remedied by setting priorities (giving it a higher value or something for the AI or quest?

 

Again, coding priorities for npcs would override this I think. Also, why tie objectives to an npc- especially if they "carry" a unique item that you might be able to steal or collect from their dead body? I say make the quest and objectives independent meaning that you can pursue them with different determining factors (such as stealing this or killing that npc) making the objectives of quests dependent only on your skill and cleverness (or luck) and prior activities along with say a familiar system ranging from friend to enemy with more tiers of trust. The key is options here with improved AI routine and awareness- to greatly expand on conditions and their short and long term effects. Though I'm not even sure how this type of coding could/would or is achieved.

If you're doing stuff like that, there's no reason not to use the much cheaper (in terms of runtime and AI horsepower) stuff that's available now in OW set ups. If you're looking for "just a peeps in world where stuff happens while I'm gone as well as what I'm doing" that's full featured enough for things to happen differently every time you play and you'll basically 'never' do 'everything' in a single playthrough, I don't see how that's gonna happen in terms of cost and frankly player boredom.

 

People say they want infinite open world until they actually play it, and as for living world; I can't imagine a world where just like real life it turns you absolutely don't matter, and nothing you do will actually matter being terribly appealing. Crafted venues with NPCs that literally depend on you will likely be the norm for the foreseeable future until the costs of doing something that large come way way down, in terms of both logistics and compute power, even with the advances in compute-based AI that's happening now.

[winny257]

it's a huge world but still too small for me.

 

Spoiler

 

I feel cheated if an RPG is already after one hundred hours to the end is!
of course, is a living world, countless quests, and most of all, a good Storry, important.
but that should not mean, that I in 30 minutes from one end of the world to the other end of the world can walk (real Time)! 

 

*Arena is around 6,000,000km2 , and Daggerfall is 161,600km2.

If you're curious, according to the wiki, Morrowind is 15.54km2, Oblivion is 41.44km2 , and Skyrim is 38.33km2*

 

as big as the first two games, should be game worlds, but by today's standards.
but then needed every player several terabit hard disk drives! 

[FauxFurry]

24 minutes ago, winny257 said:

it's a huge world but still too small for me.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

I feel cheated if an RPG is already after one hundred hours to the end is!
of course, is a living world, countless quests, and most of all, a good Storry, important.
but that should not mean, that I in 30 minutes from one end of the world to the other end of the world can walk (real Time)! 

 

*Arena is around 6,000,000km2 , and Daggerfall is 161,600km2.

If you're curious, according to the wiki, Morrowind is 15.54km2, Oblivion is 41.44km2 , and Skyrim is 38.33km2*

 

as big as the first two games, should be game worlds, but by today's standards.
but then needed every player several terabit hard disk drives! 

Correction. Every player would need several Petabyte hard drives.

[MagnaSonic3000]

I think an open world needs to be like Yakuza, where every little story you run into is unique, actually has a progression that makes sense, and feels satisfying to finish. Even if their side stories can get really strange.

[winny257]

1 hour ago, FauxFurry said:

Correction. Every player would need several Petabyte hard drives.

I guess so, 1 Petabyte = 1000 Terabyte  and that would be the purchase price *10.827,81 € * I could afford that. 
 

https://www.easy-tecs.de/nas-systeme/qnap/qnap-12-16-18-24-bay-sas-nas-server/qnap-tds-16489u/42175/qnap-tds-16489u-sb2?sPartner=billiger

 

I did not want to scare everyone right away, but nevertheless, larger game worlds are possible, I do not mean outer space with a few planets, stars and spaceships!

[MagnaSonic3000]

The biggest open world game would be an exact replica of space. Actual planet sizes and space travel. You'd just need to wait about 20 years for the PC parts to run it.

[winny257]

2 hours ago, MagnaSonic3000 said:

The biggest open world game would be an exact replica of space. Actual planet sizes and space travel. You'd just need to wait about 20 years for the PC parts to run it.

lol, but the travel speed should be real, ok, simple speed of light is allowed. 
I like science fiction, but for me it's still absolute utopia, because humanity is til today not in a position with speed of light to travel. 

 

small example: beloved or hated Andromeda Galaxy (MEA).
that's the closest Galaxy, 2.5 million light-years away from us. 

 

but in films and games that is not at all a distance, *schnips* and 2 million light-years have passed. ?

Sorry, I do know the English word for *schnips* not, but here is a gif for this. 

 

 

[SmedleyDButler]

snaps.

[SmedleyDButler]

Also, that reminds me of Journey to Alpha Centauri.

[MagnaSonic3000]

3 hours ago, winny257 said:

lol, but the travel speed should be real, ok, simple speed of light is allowed. 
I like science fiction, but for me it's still absolute utopia, because humanity is til today not in a position with speed of light to travel. 

 

small example: beloved or hated Andromeda Galaxy (MEA).
that's the closest Galaxy, 2.5 million light-years away from us. 

 

but in films and games that is not at all a distance, *schnips* and 2 million light-years have passed.

That's because in things like Star Wars they just kinda whoosh everywhere in like 3 seconds.

[GrimReaper]

Mount&Blade is unironically the best example when it comes to an open world that isn't just a facade to hide collectibles in or just a backdrop for some sort of narrated story. It features independent, persistent actors that change the world even when you're doing absolutely nothing. You're another factor that's thrown into the equation, not the anchor that holds everything together. And that's despite the fact that a lot of time is spent travelling on a map rather than a seamless, detailed world.

[Darkpig]

I played in a sandbox once. Then I learned that my choices don't matter in this fucked up world and then I turned into a boring adult. Just kidding. I still have fun kicking down other kid's sandcastles.

 

On a serious note. The thing about an open lifelike world is that life does it better. Sure you can add fantasy elements to it but that is about it.

 

To put it in perspective think about Starwars. It is a massive franchise set in literally a massive universe but the plot is a simple good vs evil storyline. Why? Because people love that shit. Stories have to either be more engaging for people to follow the complicated plot or add small details to a simple plot to make the story's world look more complicated. Think Adventure Time.