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HoloDust on 01 March 2025
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Frogger said:
HoloDust said:

It is because most devs don't make actual open world games, but linear narrative games set in open worlds (which is almost completely opposite to what proper open-word/open-ended game should be).

I think your initial reasoning is very constrained since it takes into account only modern crop of "open-world" action-adventure/RPG/pseudo-RPG games, which trace their lineage all the way back to tabtletop D&D, but most fundamentally don't understand the balance of it (mostly that "overworld" is not a safe place for you to fuck around endlessly, and that there needs to be a cost for it).

But there are also open-world/open-ended games that stand near the top of greatest open world games ever made that don't have anywhere near that structure and work great (Elite and Sid Meier's Pirates being just two examples).

I think a linear narrative game set in an open world is still an open world game. My critique is more about map design and content withing those designs. Even Zelda 1 understood this balance. You explore the overworld to find the underworld, and explore the underworld to re-enter the overworld. It's a perfect loop. The underworld felt like 50% of that game.

I think the overworld can totally be a safe place for you to mess about endlessly, if your game has a good underworld balance. I can totally imagine a game where the overworld is totally peaceful, but the underworld is dire. If there was ever a good open world Persona game for example, I'd imagine it'd have this structure. Peaceful overworld in a city, with explorable buildings and dungeons for the underworld. The balance just needs to be right.

We already have bigger worlds. We need denser ones.

Well, yes, it does feel that you were talking about Zelda alike structure from the get go - and not all open worlds are based on that structure. (As aside, original Zelda 1 didn't have overworld at all, it was just a hub form where you choose what "Labirynth" you enter (akin to Demon's Souls), but Miyamoto desided (under unluence of Ultima that he played) to add overworld as well.)

And yes, I agree, in Zelda alike games fine balance between "overworld" and "underworld" is crucial (and why BotW/TotK formula is not good in my opinion).

That said, Zelda, although somewhat open world-ish (its actually gated open world), is not open ended game, and thus, from my POV, is not epitome of open-world games (which again, stem from early D&D and its open ended gameplay).