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Fight-the-Streets said:
Well, to where can you go after open world (a question in general not just for Zelda)? To make even bigger worlds? I think people are already tired of too big open worlds. The biggest innovation will be AI (but maybe less for Nintendo) even more physics, better graphics as always... . Maybe down the road someone really finds a completely new way of how to play a game. We just can't imagine it right now. Nintendo would probably be at the forefront of such innovations. But a complete different way to play a game automatically means it can't be done with traditional controllers/joy-cons, so VR? I doubt VR will ever be a mass market product (also AR). Honestly, I don't think it's farfetched that in future we play our games with our brain, meaning diodes are connected to our brain and we just "think" to move and act with the character. But before such a technology is possible I think AI will know from our private information we give them (Email, social media, notes, private files we give them access to, etc.) how our personal perfect game should look like and they will form this game out of an existing base game, several conditions can be applied of course. My fear is that in the foreseeable future we don't get out of the loop I personally call "Machete - Machete Kills - Machete Kills in Space" which stands for "Open World, so exciting, what we do next? Well, we make it bigger, more vertical (into the sky and underground); great, but what we do next? Well, we leave Earth and go into space!" I still can remember when we had those old (western) RPG's (Wizardry for example) and Adventures (all of them) where we only had static pictures and accompanying texts which told the story. The whole word was built in our heads and back then I always thought, how great it would be if we actually could move to that distant castle we see on the picture, if we actually could move around freely in this fantastic world... . Well, nobody could have known back then that all that will become a reality. But you know what? I don't think the experience back then was lesser than what we perceive now with open worlds in high end graphics. Maybe, innovation doesn't necessarily mean progress, maybe one solution can also be regress? I philosophical thought. |
AI DMs would be my guess for the future of open world games (not a genre by a long shot, but games tend to be labeled as one).
Given their roots in original Dungeons and Dragons, I'd say this is THE holy grail, at least for people who like open world RPGs. Because, for all their openness, even the most open of the open world video games are terribly constrained in what they can do and achieve and are nowhere near to even the official campaign modules for, let's say, 5e DnD (and they are all pretty much average to bad) in scope or freedom. And if you take proper hex or point crawl campaign, with simulation of living, breathing world running behind the scenes, with all the factions involved and interactions that come out of all elements in play, it is more than obvious how much properly trained AI will bring to video game design of future games.
Add to this some kind of voxel or otherwise volumetric representation of the consistent world, where everything has properties and interacts with everything, giving permanent results (hence why voxels octrees or some similar technique) and there is completely new way of thinking about and designing games (i.e., when your wooden doors are just that, wood, and not artificially protected by your code, and you have a player with an axe that can chop through them, you have to start thinking about what stops them from entering every house there is in your game world).
The Wayward Realms is one of the games that set its goal to achieve at least some of that (first part, not the second about voxel alike based world). It is from people who made Elder Scrolls Arena and Daggerfall - so there will be no lack of the ambition or understanding the matter at hand, given how insanely ambitious Daggerfall was. Hopefully they will have enough financing to achieve what they've set for themselves.
I expect smaller teams with great ambitions will be at the forefront of these attempts, as they always were - people who played lot of tabletop RPGs and wanted to translate that to computer games of the time.
