Beyond GTA: how tech and communities could change the future of open-world games

• February 25, 2020

Historians of the future might look quizzically at the open-world phenomena, which swept video games during the opening decades of the 2000s.

At a time of environmental precarity and extreme inequality, a handful of the world’s biggest entertainment and technology companies collectively sunk billions of dollars into virtual worlds of increasing vastness and detail, arguably outstripping Rome’s ancient Colosseum in spectacle if not actual bloodlust (despite the digital body count sitting much higher). At the turn of the millennium, early 3D efforts such as Shenmue and Grand Theft Auto III set the blueprint of expansive spaces and nonlinear play, and by the mid-2010s, the games had evolved into near-photorealistic behemoths created by workforces spanning many continents. In 2018, Red Dead Redemption 2 — arguably the biggest, most convincing, and successful recent open-world title — pushed the ballooning approach to its logical extreme.

The 2010s were far from straightforward for the design approach. Ubisoft, the French publisher with a global network of studios, began applying its open-world formula to flagship franchises, including Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Ghost Recon, and Watch Dogs. This resulted in beautiful but increasingly similar-feeling titles. As the worlds got bigger and as graphical fidelity rose, production costs followed suit while stories of worker exploitation — the sort reported to have taken place during Anthem’s development — proliferated (although it was less of a feature of the open-world format than modern games more broadly), raising concerns about the actual sustainability of such endeavors.

So where can we expect open worlds to go in the next decade? What stories will they tell, and how might they respond to an increasingly tumultuous world?

On the immediate horizon, the neon-pink techno-thrillers Watch Dogs Legion and Cyberpunk 2077 appear to mark a continuation in look and feel, albeit speculating on futures that have seemingly already arrived. Ubisoft’s latest imagines a dystopian London under siege from intrusive surveillance (an ongoing reality), while CD Projekt Red’s roleplaying game depicts a similarly bleak city where corporations rule the lives of citizens (resonating with the game studio’s own intensive labor practices).

Brighter, leaner, and perhaps less pessimistic is upcoming indie game Sable, which pairs Moebius-inspired graphics with a chill Breath of the Wild-esque open world. Putting players in the shoes of its titular character, a teenage girl embarking on a pilgrimage, the game takes place in a desert populated by remote structures and people. Greg Kythreotis, lead designer and artist of the game, describes it as a “heads-up” experience because there’s no mini-map. He wants players to focus on the world, soaking up its details as their eyes and ears guide the direction of travel. With inspiration taken from nomadic groups such as the Berber, Bedouin, and indigenous Australians, the game might depict what it means to live more intimately with an environment (certainly compared to those of us who are living resource-guzzling lives).

Perhaps as a result of such inspirations, Sable will be less full of raw stuff to consume than its blockbuster open-world counterparts. Despite the harshness of its desert setting, Kythreotis explains survival won’t ever be at the forefront of the game. “Our world isn’t realistic in that way. It’s a stylized landscape,” he says. “The narrative is one about exploration, not just a literal, physical exploration but the character’s self-exploration.” Counterintuitively, the designer refers to the game’s desert as a sea, and quests or activities as islands of content. The drifts in between — “lonely, thoughtful spaces” — are designed to foster quiet contemplation. It’s not unlike 2002’s The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker’s swirling ocean, which felt like it mirrored Link’s emotions. What Sable might signal is a subtle but important shift as open-world games become more than sites to extract resources, gear, and collectibles, but environments to reflect personal journeys.

In the past, mainstream titles certainly transcended their cluttered environments (just look to Grand Theft Auto IV’s bleak migrant story set in Liberty City) but often not. At times, these games — made possible by our burgeoning technological capacity to transfer information at lightning-quick speeds — have felt as if they resemble social media’s “endless scroll.” Business models have seemingly become as Frankensteinian as the games themselves, with microtransactions and online components bolted on to keep players hooked. Like Facebook and Twitter, these games are finely tuned to command our attention.

Sable isn’t the first game to forgo virtual detritus in favor of a sleeker and more lonesome adventure. 2013’s Proteus and 2014’s Eidolon — two earnestly romantic pastoral games — used their lo-fi, albeit expressive, environments to foster interior musings, a far cry from the explosive popcorn-like entertainment of mainstream titles. Sable shares DNA with such games, but it’s also an explicitly post-Breath of the Wild title. “[The latest Zelda game] felt like a validation of our ideas,” says Kythreotis, who pitched Sable to publishers in 2016, prior to the release of Nintendo’s open-world effort. “I think we’re going to see more exploration of that kind of looseness.”

Sable’s low-stakes, coming-of-age journey might be what Kim Belair, former Ubisoft scriptwriter and co-founder of narrative development company Sweet Baby, has in mind when she outlines her hope for a future that is “lighter on a huge story and more about the personal journey of a character.” In a 2017 piece for Gamesindustry.biz, Belair advocated for a de-escalation of open-world stories that rely on the world-ending narratives that are commonplace in games such as Assassin’s Creed and Horizon Zero Dawn (not to mention almost every modern superhero movie). It stands to reason that when everything is high-stakes, then, of course, nothing is. Not only do we become desensitized to the carnage, but these types of stories, Belair argues, are often antithetical to the open-world format itself.

This is conceivably another inflection of what Far Cry 2 and Watch Dogs Legion director Clint Hocking calls ludonarrative dissonance, a term he coined in 2007 to describe the nagging disconnect between the lighthearted action story of the Uncharted series and the genocide-scale murder the game asks the player to perpetrate. In open-world games, it’s not necessarily killing that creates dissonance but the go-anywhere and do-anything structure of play. “When you have a main quest that is driven by urgency, passion, or death, they [the game designers] often make you do side-missions to get enough points, experience, and weapons in order to do that [complete the primary story],” says Belair. “To me, that’s not the most exciting way to produce a feeling of urgency.”

That’s partly a reflection, Belair says, of mammoth productions often involving hundreds of people. Even against everyone’s best efforts, teams can become siloed from one another with visions naturally drifting apart. In the last six years, Belair’s been working as a scriptwriter and narrative designer, and the demands of stories have risen sharply as studios look to deepen their glittering worlds, which can still feel eerily shallow. “People are realizing it’s not enough to just say ‘Okay, you have a fetch quest and we’re going to send you to this thing.’ Skyrim was 2011. At the time it was huge, but there’s almost no branching in it,” Belair says. “When you have a side mission, it’s just ‘get X necklace from X cave.’ But now we’ve gone, ‘Okay but what’s the story of the cave? Who are the characters in the cave?’ It’s just got bigger and bigger.”

Open worlds will continue to grow into the near future, particularly if Todd Howard’s proclamation that Elder Scrolls VI is being designed “for people to play for a decade” turns out to be true. Still, Howard’s wish to see games become their biggest, shiniest, and deepest selves — replicated across an older generation of men and women who dominate senior positions at the biggest game companies — isn’t shared by everyone.

You might not think of Minecraft or Roblox as open-world games, but they, too, emphasize the unstructured play in large environments of their more traditional counterparts, even as players hop in and out of online servers and maps. Populating those games and even social media platform TikTok are Gen-Zers who are satisfied with a very different quality of experience, according to Robin Hunicke, Funomena co-founder and professor of game design at the University of California Santa Cruz. “Roblox encourages people to explore lots of different worlds,” she says. “Only a few of those worlds are actually sticky and everything else is just interesting to comb through. Dreams is another good example where you think of the world not as a continuous space but as a series of slices.”

With the release of Hytale penciled in for 2021, a game that began as a Minecraft multiplayer server in 2015 and subsequently secured the financial backing of League of Legends developer Riot Games, the style might yet reach an even greater audience. Like its progenitor and the hugely popular Roblox, the game’s biggest selling point is the content creation tools it launches with. (Although Hytale features what its developer calls “handcrafted adventure scenarios.”) While many game studios now outsource much of their production overseas in an effort to save costs, Minecraft, Roblox, Dreams, and the upcoming Hytale — as much platforms as they are games — rely on user-generated content. It’s part of their appeal and long-term pitch to both the players, and, arguably laborers who populate their servers.

Hunicke also points to evolving AI-assisted toolsets that might upend the aesthetics we’ve grown accustomed to further down the line. Ganbreeder and Artbreeder are two apps that blend images together based on a series of algorithms. “The work that is produced by the system is appealing but you’re not sure why,” she says, suggesting the images illustrate new entanglements between humans and machines. “Worlds can start to evolve where you don’t necessarily understand the space you’re in, or the implications of the visuals, but you’re interested in exploring it.” Hunicke cites experimental games such as glitchy first-person explorer Memory of a Broken Dimension and sandbox world-builder Mu Cartographer as titles that explore similar territory. (Dreamy geometric puzzler Manifold Garden arguably fits the bill, too.)

Whether open-world games of the scale normalized by giant studios and publishers such as Sony, Microsoft, EA, and Ubisoft remain sustainable over the next 10 years is by no means certain. They’re already eye-wateringly expensive to create and won’t be getting cheaper anytime soon. The format might yet be usurped in popularity by video games that rely on user-generated content or even a new wave of experimentalism stretching the boundaries of our relationship with technology. Certainly, new game development tools will make it easier for small teams to create large environments, like the MapMagic World Generator asset Sable uses to procedurally generate its nature. Yet, any number of catastrophes could render them irrelevant as fanciful playthings that no longer justify their mammoth resources. Indeed, as the real world becomes smaller because of tightening immigration laws, inhospitable land, or even just shrinking economies, these expansive digital environments might simply begin to feel out of touch, like anachronistic hangovers from a more open era.

We’ve already seen open-world games begin to engage with such issues. 2019’s Death Stranding and Outer Wilds offered compelling meditations on environmental catastrophes during a year that ended with news of Australia’s cataclysmic bushfires. When Breath of the Wild 2 eventually sees release, perhaps its rolling hills and vertiginous mountains will be imbued with the same rarely felt magic as its predecessor, an outlook that feels intensely necessary right now. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Grand Theft Auto 6 will likely arrive in the next few years delivering, one expects, another vast open world grounded in realism. Rockstar’s latest game might yet deliver the kind of story Belair thinks the format is best suited to. “Because they’re so wide, I would love to see open world games tackle that length of time and the way that we survive in the world — the ways we continue to live,” she says. “If you’re going to give me three years of a character’s life, I want every single thing in that world to contribute to it.”

Whatever shape open worlds take and whatever subjects they ultimately tackle, Hunicke believes these games must confront the real world. “When you look at what young people feel on a daily basis — the feeling of loss of control, loss of predictability, increased anxiety about an uncertain future, the brittleness of different systems in the face of climate change, and especially economies — I think it’s important to be aware of the contemporary impacts of those changes,” she says. “To appeal emotionally and to feel worthwhile of their time, you need to be helping them handle, process, and endure those feelings.”

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Historians of the future might look quizzically at the open-world phenomena, which swept video games during the opening decades of the 2000s. At a time of environmental precarity and extreme inequality, a handful of the world’s biggest entertainment and technology companies collectively sunk billions of dollars into virtual worlds of…