Open world games could be alot bigger.

It has often puzzled me as to why developers such as rockstar, bethesda, ubisoft and square enix don't make huge world maps, instead they make maps that you can travel from end to end in as little as ten minutes. Maybe they feel as though if the world is too big that people will get lost and not want to play, but isn't that exactly what we want? A world so big that we can get lost, not one so small that we know our way around it like it's our home town. Personally I would love to see game world's get alot bigger, maybe even country size. Maybe that's just a pipe dream though...

These maps have to be filled with things to do. You can only do so much walking / driving without getting bored. Rockstar has got a pretty good ratio of size vs content with Grand Theft Auto V. Studios like Ubisoft will have sizable maps with copy and paste content that repeats, endlessly.

The world needs to be filled with content to make it interesting. Look at a game like No Man's Sky.... It has all these proceduraly generated planets to explore, but the game is so boring and uninteresting. The best game worlds have meaningful content and are designed to be beautiful and interesting. You can not replace the creative touch of artists and designers. It takes time and resources to create all this. The bigger the game world the harder it is to add depth and keep it interesting.

Anyway, you may want to keep an eye out for Star Citizen on PC. It will have an epic space world to explore and do things in. It features a lot of hand crafted content with some procedural generation as well.

ARMA III on PC also has some very large environments worth checking out if you just want to explore and conduct various army operations.

The Crew has the entire USA in condensed form to drive around in. It is a decent game too now that it has received some big updates.

Also if the map is too big ... I gues they'll have to sacrifice something like graphics ... frame rate etc which would make people whine.

Anyway I don't like openworld game as I feel they are already too big and empty... at least in FF15 they let you skip some driving

As has already been said while you can make huge worlds to explore you have to fill that world with meaningful things to do that keep the player interested.

Not sure if I should respond, since everyone else said what I was already going to say. Size isn't conducive to a great experience. Content is. Meaningful content at that. You can't just make a gigantic open space with nothing to do. That would make it all very boring. I wouldn't mind larger maps as long as there's plenty to do that means something to both the story and gameplay.

in the future , they may digitize the whole world or universe.

I think it would become too dilute. Yeah it's great exploring, but if it takes you ten minutes of travelling time to do a five minute quest every single time, that's an unhealthy work:fun ratio.

tbh I think Dragon Age: Inquisition did it right; break up your world into large zones that feel open, but are not, but allow for a real focused narrative and level design. Best of both worlds, open and linear.

Conversely, games like Mass Effect are kind of cheap in that you have this galaxy to explore, but it's filled with linear levels and no real open world's to explore. Great games, though!

With that said, I do love me a huge game world to play in!

what everyone but the op said

Already covered a lot of my thoughts on Open world map design in the recent GS video (The Drawbacks of Adding Open Worlds to Popular Game Series)

"Open worlds don't make everything better, it usually results in lazy level design. A map should be build around the mechanics given to the player to make a more fluid experience.

I've always believed in this, as such find most sandbox games mediocre.

Open world maps are not completely designed to the rules given to the player, usually resulting in weird glitches and randomness. The Witcher 3 had such problems, as did Fallout 4, and Dragons Age Inquisition. But they sell and many people want that, and that's fine. They play for expansive immersion. Just keep away from my Bayonetta, Nioh, Monster Hunter, D00M, and Dark Soul games that put solid gameplay first.

And with any luck a future Dragons Dogma 2 will ditch an open world design. the linear Bitter Black Isle expansion was the best part of the game, as the BBI maps are built beautifully with accessibility in mind!"

A huge world-map only really works in games that are driven around what the players create. Like Minecraft. And even then, there's limitations on how big it can be before it starts to become self-defeating and inherently empty, which depends on the game engine. Sims 3 is a good example of how an open-world game can massively exceed what the engine is designed for; one of the top complaints about Sims 3 was the worlds feeling empty, no matter what the town's population was.

For most games, a huge open-world just isn't worth it.

I'm getting tired of open world games. There's still a lot for me to enjoy in them, but I want to see more open level games instead. I don't think I'd be displeased with a larger Elder Scrolls though.

According to some scientific theories, it already is! lol

The God Machine knows, and is irritated that there's already people trying to hack the system to look for cheat codes.

@RSM-HQ: this

oh they could be. i mean the elder scrolls daggerfall had a map the size of the UK landmass. it was also dotted with cities and tons and such like. even recently no mans sky allows you to land on any planet. combine the landmass of all those planets and it would be frightenig in its size. from a technical standpoint there is absolutely nothing stopping bethesda from having the entire tamriel in elder scrolls 6 all done to scale.

but how do you fill them with compelling content and gameplay? how do you make it fun?

I think GTA V is great in the way they handle the open world. It's big enough to explore for a long time and also packed enough to provide you with content. Also, TW3 has awesome cities and towns. I'm at Novgorod and it's filled with citizens and some side quests.

People will get burned out on open world games before this gen is over, mark my words. A few years from now we will see a resurgence of the linear game.

Just Cause 3 map is massive and beautiful but with nothing to do. Whatever No Mans Sky did by generating the map is next level we need more of that. Sure older games done it like randomly generated dungeons but we don't see enough of it.

I do like that, our universe computer generated idea too, we just need to crack the code of reality and implement it into software. (I'm computer code illiterate).

I agree that some could be much larger. The Elder Scrolls games were always good. My comment on most open world games now is that they are all so repetitive. I'm playing FFXV atm, and though the story is good, the open world capabilities are limited imo. You cannot go into most buildings, the landscape, though pretty, is repetitive through out each area. Far Cry Primal was pretty good as far as mixing up the landscape, but was small in comparison to most open world games. I played No Man's Sky for a few days and was disappointed, again the potential was there, but ended up being hollow.

So far Elder Scrolls is still the winner as far as open world games go to me.

This.

yep agree with this. i've played through it quite a few times and each time i manage to find new cool areas that i hadn't before seen. it's just the right size with the right balance of detail and content for me. it's also one of the best looking open world games i've played, probably the best actually

Witcher 3 better looking? I mean, it's cut up into segments so I guess you're probably right considering GTA V is all there in one go.

And I agree, in fact, I would not have discovered every location if it wasn't for the online videos I stumbled on like a year after I bought the game lol

i've only played them both on the ps4 so haven't had the luxury of seeing how they compare on pc at their best but yeah i personally would take gta v over the witcher 3 if i had to choose. the witcher was pretty but i was never really blown away with it like some were. everything was a bit too overly saturated colour-wise, the towns felt on the whole a little artificial and lacking... something. they didn't seem to have the kind of impressive attention to detail that gta v had. i don't remember just stopping and admiring a view like i did many a time in gta v or other games. and yeah, even though it was huge, it wasn't truly open world per se so gta v has it beat on a technicality ;)

While the answer has been said. For me I feel the worlds are becoming too big. The ratio of quality versus quantity has tipped in the favor of having menial missions to feed the player along. Similar to an MMO. One of the reasons I was discouraged by Xenoblade Chronicles X. The team took the worst elements from an MMO to pad the game out.

People already mentioned it. But No Mans Sky is a good example why a massive infinite open world game doesn't mean better.

Look at the planets you land on, each one is almost identical to the last, the aliens all do the same things, and theres vast open space with nothing there. I rather have an world hand crafted and unique then a boring empty infinite world like no mans sky.

But most hand crafted open world games are getting bigger. GTA 5 is pretty huge compared to the other games. And Skyrims pretty big. I don't see how you are walking across Skyrim in 10 minutes. Even driving fast as hell in GTA 5 would take you more than 10 minutes to drive across the map.

I think now with games released on bigger media like bluray, the size of the worlds will be bigger each time. Kinda the opposite is true with some FPS games, they release these 50-80gb games and there really isn't much size to them.

Because it´s not just about huge big open world maps, there also has to be things to do in that world otherwise you will have a failure on your hands and misused resources that could have been used better.

Just take Just Cause 2 , huge big open world map but it was a failure because they forgot to fill it and not forgetting that the story was horrible. Or take The crew, big open map where it takes hours to go from one side to the other but noone plays it because it´s a crap game.

They made the biggest map, and it perfectly illustrates why they don't anymore. It's tough to populate a gigantic map with interesting, unique content. Morrowind's map is vastly smaller than Daggerfall, but it's much more interesting. It's also smaller than Oblivion and Skyrim, and it's more interesting then them, too.

Another example, I think Batman: Arkham Asylum has the best map in the Arkham series, despite being the smallest by far. It's not the size of the map, it's what you fill it with.

Spot on.

Arkham Asylum was and is the best Batman game to date.

It had the right size map and content to make it a blast to play.

I like to explore game worlds throughoutly. And IMO current worlds are just the right size for this.

GTAV, Fallout 4, Witcher 3, FFXV, WD2. Theyre big enough to feel huge, but not so big that you would get worn out by exploration.

If GTAV was, say twice of it's current size, I probably would not play it, as it would just feel too big. The exploration would feel like too much work with that size.

So, all in all, I'm fine with the size of open worlds in current games.

filled maps > empty boring maps

As stated by many people above the reason companies don't make larger maps is because they then have to fill the maps they make with stuff to do. If the map is too big then the stuff to do gets diluted and then the game gets boring rather fast after walking for 20+ mins looking for stuff to do. This is No Mans Sky greatest flaw. The map may be infinite but there was very little to do other than go to a planet, harvest material, move to the next solar system, and rinse wash and repeat. At first the map is so big you think that there must be a lot to do, but NOPE. With very little variety in what happens on the planets the game got boring. Now the Elder Scrolls games have always done a good job at having interesting content as well as big maps. Anyone who spends 10 mins walking from one side of the map to the other if they are playing Skyrim I call bs that something didn't find them. The map of Skyrim is big enough to walk through a forest and find nothing but there will always be something on the location finder for you to easily find something at anytime. All in all the companies have learned a good balance of map size to interesting material.

As many women would probably tell you, bigger isn't necessarily always better.

isn't that just an apocryphal tale phallically challenged men circulate to feel less inadequate?

I've been playing a number of open-world games: Far Cry 3, Far Cry 4, GTA V, The Witcher 3, Watch Dogs, STALKER: Call of Pripyat, Fallout 4.....

Of the above, I'm only bored with Watch Dogs and The Witcher 3. But, I'm not bored with them because they're open-world. I simply cannot get immersed with 3rd-person games. It's a struggle for me to try and finish their SP campaigns.

STALKER: Call of Pripyat's world seems organized in the same way as The Witcher 3, but each section is much smaller. Too small, in fact. I wish its world was bigger.

The worlds of Far Cry 3, Far Cry 4, and Fallout 4 are just the right size. Plus, all three have fast-travel in some form although I like to walk around their world and admire the scenery, esp Far Cry 3.

GTA V and STALKER: Call of Pripyat were good while the SP campaign lasted. But, they get kind of boring afterward.

After putting a few hours into Ghost Recon Wildlands Closed Beta this weekend, I'd say that game has a HUGE open world. They only had one zone open in the CB and it was pretty large and the full game has 21 zones.

Talk to some women who have been with guys well over average. Apparently it's just pain.

@foxhound_fox: i refuse to believe porn has lied to me

I think they're overhwleming enough as is, I wouldn't want them to be bigger tbh

I'm not saying I don't enjoy open world, but I'm not always in the mood for it and it can be rather overwhelming, especially if it has a poor save system.