Madiator's CornerFor those of you who enjoy open-world games, how big of a world is too big?
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There are already some huge maps out there, Just Cause 2 and 3 both have maps at around 1000km2, and those games are beloved by their players. But if the next Cyberpunk game was announced with Night City now being the size of an actual large metropolis, say like New York, would you say that’s too big? What determines what “too big” is?
It’s too big when the developers are unable to fill it with enough interesting things to do and discover to keep my attention. But there’s no absolute size I’d automatically consider too big, as it also depends on things like traversal. If you ride through the map on a mech going 400km/h, it can be much larger and more spread out than if I have to traverse the entire map on foot.
That’s definitely a key point. Absolutely loved the first Forest game, the map was just the right size for what content it had, then the sequel has a map 4x the size that is just completely empty for 90% of it. They did make some improvements over early access but it was still mostly a waste
To summarize this thread: It’s not the size of the map, it’s how you use it
Hey it’s a totally average sized map! Some would even say it’s too much!
It has pools in it!
It’s not a question of the world being too big or too small, it’s the density of interesting things. A giant world with very little worth doing doesn’t accomplish much, but similarly a small world where you’re absolutely tripping over things that feel like you shouldn’t skip them will also feel claustrophobic.
Additionally, the traversal system can help a LOT here. Even a world that has a lot of wide open dead space can feel good if the process of crossing that space is itself fun. Dune: Awakening comes to mind here, where there are large spans of open desert that you need to cross, but ripping across the dunes on my sandbike was so much fun I didn’t mind the dead ground.
Do you remember LoZ Wind Waker? Maybe it’s the nostalgia goggles, but ripping through the open water just felt good. I don’t even think it was particularly mechanically fun. Maybe it was just the music.
The music and the bright colors in that cel shading style were great. They also did a really good job with the seagulls and the barrels and the silhouettes in the distance as you were sailing. Maybe it was just the contrast with all of the ‘dark’ games at the time. It was a gigantic mood swing from majora’s mask. The music really helped sell it.
I think wind waker is good example of how to handle ’open world’ without letting on that you’re controlling the experience. I don’t think any of the official ’next steps’ ever had you sailing more than three squares away. The teleport was right when the world ’opened up’ to you doing whatever you felt like, and the easily grasped concept of one square=one island with some interaction made sure there was no loss of focus on the developers or players. Obviously the main islands had more to do than the ones with just a platform/reef, but it worked.
It can never be too big, but it’s a problem if it’s a big city with nothing to do (Cyberpunk).
More than bigger, I want more accessible interior spaces. Like cyberpunk, but you can go into other people’s living spaces
Yes, this. Even if some of it is procedurally generated, how fun would it be to go in ANY door in cp77??
First mod I put in fallout puts mor interiors into city buildings. Frankly I’d be happy of 70% were recycled but 100% were accessible.
Everything except the story bits would be procedurally generated. And it would probably get pretty boring having like three interior types repeated over and over.
I say density, though Elite Dangerous puts a spin on how large the map should be.
In Elite Dangerous, most of the galaxy is unexplored. The Bubble (human inhabited area) is fully explored, which steadily dwindles as you go to about 1k ly outside the Bubble. Out there, you’re basically on your own.
When you explore and map unexplored areas, you actually get some money depending on the quality of your finds. If you find some Earth-like planets, for instance, you can get a lot of money from exploring. There is also an inexhaustible supply of systems to explore, so there’s no need to worry about running out.
I spent 3 months in the void, didn’t see another player for the entire run.
There is no open world that is too big. They can only be too small.
However, the quality of an open world is not predicated on the size of the open world, but rather what is actually in it.
And this doesn’t mean that open worlds must be drowning in content, as the quality of the content itself also matters, and certain worlds that are large and empty can still be interesting due to its traversal being good, or the sandbox nature of a large empty world.
Some of the worst examples of open worlds are the kind that are just filled with isolated little fetch quests; busywork that’s all marked on the map with no element of organic exploration. Or the kinds of open worlds where nothing actually happens “organically” without the player starting it.
The best kinds of open worlds are the ones that emphasise exploration and/or have background systems governing the world in some way (i.e. factions that interact with each other without the explicit involvement of the player).
I feel Daggerfall would be too big without the quick travel systems, but thats the only game Ive felt dread about slow travelling to distant locations
It’s not about the size, but more about density of meaningful content. I like Elden Ring because every nook and cranny feels worth exploring. It’s the game that dares to hide optional areas behind optional areas, all with their own unique enemies and bosses.
On the other hand, taking Elden Ring as an example again, the mini dungeons were too repetitive. The first time visiting a catacomb is exciting, but it turns into quite a chore after the third time and onwards. You’ve already seen it all. Same thing with the dragon battles.
I think Elden Ring overall strikes a good balance with amount of surprises per square meter.
There was one maze type catacomb with teleporting chests that was like a breathe of fresh air.
I think it’s really interesting to compare a game like elden ring to something else like BOTW
My first time playing through elden ring I had an amazing time, and thoroughly enjoyed the open world experience. I made sure to explore every crack in every wall, not necessarily for the rewards, but rather for the exploration itself because that exploration felt magnificent
However, I’ve now played through elden ring four times over the years, and I quickly realised I was only playing for the bosses, with the open world merely being a hindrance to my journey. This problem quickly compounds, as the first few hours of a save is usually you running around buck naked looking for your weapons, smithing stones, flasks, etc.
This is opposed to something like dark souls 3, where your journey to get the build you want usually means you can a 30 second detour from your main path.
Compare this with BOTW, which I’ve also played through a fair few times, and it’s easy to understand why these games are different. Unlike ER, I honestly thought of the bosses as more like hindrances to getting the powers, which would help me traverse the open world. To me, that traversal was the most enjoyable thing about the game
This might just be a tinfoil hat theory, but I think this is because of the difference in rewards between the two. Unlike ER, which most rewards being clearly defined and memorable, in BOTW the vast majority of rewards are either
a) spirit orbs from shrines
or
b) korok seeds
While the shrines themselves can be memorised, I’d say it’s practically impossible to remember the location of all these things, mainly because there’s no point - there are so many, you’ll run into your fair share anyway. There are exceptions of course, with weapons and shields and the like, but for the most part it holds true
Anyway, this went on way too long lol
I think that all comes down to how the travel, visual appeal, and POIs are handled. As well as a personal interest in the gameplay loop. The following are my general opinions on a few games for why I think they do or do not work.
Daggerfall would be way too big, because the POIs are few and far between and there is no visual interest between, but it worked because it had fast travel.
Each of the successive TES games had more visual interest to them and wel spaced POIs and I spent a lot of time walking on first playthroughs without fast traveling anywhere.
Similarly No Man’s Sky could seem too big at first blush, but if you like the gameplay loop it’s infinitely fascinating. For anyone wanting to move further in it’s also helpful that there are gates to help make large jumps, without them being a requirement to enjoy things.
Cyberpunk 2077 was very visually interesting and had a ton of POIs and was fun to traverse on foot and in a vehicle. I thought the size was fantastic on my first two playthroughs. The third time the badlands areas got a little frustrating though.
Stalker and Stalker 2, are very fun to traverse by foot for me despite being very large. They are visually very interesting, especially 2. There are plenty of things you can stumble on and explore. In fact on my first playthrough of Stalker 2, I didn’t even realize it had a fast travel option for over 60 hours because I didn’t feel the need to look for one to use. Loved the huge size of those.
WoW was horribly oversized, as are many MMOs. WoW was(and imo still is despite many upgrades since I played, just not a fan of toony looking games) completely uninteresting visually, had no “on the way” POIs and had no motivation to look around. Long travel was a chore on top of a burdensome gameplay loop. I hated WoWs size. It felt big just because it would take people longer to play. I can’t express how fucking boring it was to me. And exploring had zero reward. I remember wandering into the water and swimming for like 30 minites to get behind some massive tree or something (all I remember was it was a brown gradient that’s how dull the visuals were) and I get behind it and there was fuckall. That was the last time I played I think. More brown gradient and uninteresting light blue water gradient stretched off into a foggy white gradient. Fucking hated WoW but especially its size. MMOs like that are the equivalent of having a rail shooter that’s more train ride simulator than shooter. It works for other people, I just couldn’t stand it.
Outward is a fantastic game but it’s world feels a little too big sometimes. I don’t really enjoy wandering it that much even though I enjoyed the game on the whole. Just felt I got to the point of sprinting from one objective to the next because I was tired of traversing the map.
So it’s really game dependant imo. If they nail some key aspects, size doesn’t seem to matter.
Nothing much new to say, just reiteration. A big or huge or gigantic map is fine, so long as it’s populated by meaningful content.
Really wish Forspoken had been more populated. It’s a huge world, and combat/abilty wise it’s a great pure-mage action game, which I really really loved about it, that’s not a very common thing. But my god, the world is so empty despite being so big, and most side objectives are just collectothons. There’s some more difficult endgame content, but no real reason to grind up for it.
Having played Minecraft and No Man’s Sky, I can say that no world is necessarily too big, because infinite is not too big.
This is it.
GTA 5 was boring when it came to exploring, much of it was pretty empty unless there was a mission. Elder Scrolls Arena was just random generated repeated stuff - miles of it. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was a lot of copy and paste.
I am looking forward to Light No Fire and have played countless hours of Minecraft and Star Citizen.
“Too big” doesn’t exist as long as I am enjoying myself.
WoW is objectively huge, but they made it feel tiny by putting fast travel options everywhere. I would guess that any two points in the world are no more than 5m from each other if routed perfectly.
I want there to exist one MMO where you “live” in a city, and traveling to another city is actually so inconvenient that you only do it if you have to. Not because I want to make the trek, but because I want there to be a world just large enough that any one person has usually seen only ~1%, but the playerbase in entirety has seen >50%. I don’t know if any such game exists.
They don’t work. Vanguard did it way back when, with their three continent world. Each one had enough content to get from lvl 1 to lvl 50, the max, and your starting race determined your starting location. It could take up to an hour to get to friends. Even on the same continent, with a mount (before they added flying mounts), it could take a half hour of running to cross the map… and players complained so vociferously that they were forced to add fast travel options.
I don’t think that means it didn’t work, I think that just means it’s not for everyone. I’m a firm believer that, “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”. Small indie games take firm stances on their gameplay all the time, not every game is for everyone, and that’s ok, that’s how you get unique and interesting gameplay experiences. But that’s easy for and indie game to do because making an indie game is cheap.
MMOs have the unfortunate reality that they’re architecturally complex, and expensive to operate, and thus need to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible to justify their existence to investors. They don’t have the luxury of making the experience they want, which is why they all end up just copying WoW’s enshittified gameplay, but with less polish.
My hope is that this indie revolution we’re in expands to “large scale” multiplayer games. Not so massive that it’s prohibitively expensive to run, but not so small that it’s a ghost town. I think that’s when we’ll start to see interesting MMO experiences again.
Yeah, you’ve identified the problem. You might be able to do it with a non-massive multiplayer game, with significantly lower resource needs.
I guess Light No Fire has a good chance of becoming such a game. It’s gonna be No Mans Sky, but on one earth sized fantasy planet. I don’t think it will have large cities though. 🤔
I don’t consider NMS to be an MMO. If everyone went to the same location, at best, you’d most likely only see a handful of players you’re instanced with (up to 32 from what a cursory search gives me). That’s kinda the sad state of what passes for an MMO these days, but I don’t accept it. That’s not even a full raid group in WoW.
But yeah, you could squint and say that that otherwise effectively produces the experience I’m asking for. I am looking forward to LNF for sure.
I’d love for just any game with a scale that large. I think it’d be awesome
There are space games with procedural large scale galaxies to the point that the entire playerbase can only ever hope to see ~15% of the systems, but that’s why I put the >50% qualifier in there. That’s TOO big. Anyone can generate an effectively infinite procedural world, I want a large world.
When I had originally conceived of this, it was in the context of a pokemon MMO. You would have your home town, and as a trainer, or researcher, or rocket member, etc, you’d travel at a real-time pace akin to the show.
Alternative IP that it could work with are dragonball (imagine the playerbase on a months long search to find/fight over the dragonballs so they could awaken the dragon and make a wish to the devs), or Avatar (each player would have a chance to spawn in as a random bender. One player at any given time is the Avatar. Events happen to strengthen some benders and weaken others. Players make war and peace at will).
There would obviously be challenges in running these types of experiences, but currently it feels like the cost of standing up an MMO is so much that no one ever does anything interesting. Instead they just copy WoW.
It’s about how much time is spent between points of interest. The size doesn’t matter.
My go-to “too big” is True Crime: Streets of LA. If memory serves it’s a decent chunk of LA at 1:1 scale.
It’s far too big and there’s not much to do. It doesn’t help that the game is dross.
It’s never too big. That’s why I’m pumped for The Wayward Realms (from the creators of Daggerfall, easily the largest world of its time).
Damn it looks good. Still going to take ages until it’s finished, if ever
Yeah, I’m hopeful for an alpha release next year some time. Might be longer, but should be worth the wait.
it’s our only option, soooo we gotta wait either way.
Measuring size alone is meaningless, as gameplay affects perceived size, and density of meaningful content in relation affects the experience.
Size should match content.
Skyrim is canonically pretty close to the size and shape of Estonia, but in game it’s very small. If the game’s content was spread out to the “real” size, it would feel completely barren.
The map in Deus Ex MD was quite small, just a couple tiny districts, but it punched way above its size because it was so dense in detail.
Agree. If you could go into every single store, house, nook and cranny of Cyberpunk 2077, and talk to all the NPCs, it would feel absolutely humongous. Gameplay significantly affects perceived size.
Echoing what others have said: size doesn’t really matter until it’s notably empty with nothing of interest to justify it.
But also, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
I don’t mind size so long as there’s meaningful activity.
For example, Just Cause 2 is huge with a massive variety of biomes but I enjoy hijacking military jets and blowing shit up on repeat and general traversal.
Infamous 2 and Second Son have very neat and small maps that are action packed and fun to traverse.
But then other open world games just bore me.
There is no limit, but I am also a big fan of Daggerfall and thus clearly insane.
Are you insane, or have you achieved CHIM?
Not that there’s an appreciable difference…looking at you, Michael Kirkbride.
I’m of the mindset that it can never be too big, as long as it has some life to it. I don’t mind games taking a long time to finish. And I don’t mind if the grind is in the traveling. It’s cathartic in a way.
The halo infinite campaign open world was kind of not alive enough so even though I’ve played bigger game worlds I think that’s something to consider…
Ease of travel and speed of travel. Even a small map can feel cumbersome, repetitive, and boring. If the missions are designed poorly, and the game mechanics ignore an entertaining user experience, walking down the same hallway a thousand times can feel like a chore.
“Too big” is a relative feeling that involves many factors.
Morrowind
Morrowind was exactly the perfect size for its content.
I would argue Daggerfalls map is unnecessarily large for the content it offers. At least Morrowinds NPCs have regional variation. In Daggerfall every innkeeper is exactly the same NPC. Its a technical marvel of its time, but by current standards is rather shallow.
Yea i think I mixed it up
The Witcher 3 and Elden ring were massive, and I enjoyed them because the world’s were beautiful, non repetitive, and dense with unique material.
Basically, how much of the world is interesting/fun.
For example, Fallout 3 doesn’t do a great job of this, as much of the world is baren with no story or gameplay. Half of the world feels like it could be cut out without much loss. The Yakuza games on the other hand, have smaller worlds but they feel massive and fun because there’s always something to do moments away.
The work-around is to make travel fun, so the “empty-space” is just more gameplay. The Just Cause games are the perfect example of this. All the movement mechanics are quick and satisfying, from the grapple and parachute, to the driving, to the OP wingsuit.
On the other hand, the world of Fallout 4 feels very cramped; you can’t go 5 meters without encouraging something. Bethesda’s games are interesting in this aspect – the worlds of different games are built similarly, but they differ in some small parameters (as in the density of Fallout 4), so they’re ripe for comparison.
Personally, I feel there were two peaks in Bethesda’s worlds – Morrowind and Skyrim. Both for different reasons.
As a Morrowind enjoyer, I find Skyrim to be too shallow. There’s 7 weapons in the game, 7 spells, and nothing really to do.
I was mostly only thinking about Skyrim’s world. Skyrim as a whole has many flaws.
Yeah, looking at it in a strictly dungeon distribution lens it’s actually pretty solid, and I find it feels a little crowded when you mod in more locations. I guess world distribution is the one thing they actually got right.
I’d be broader and talk about points of interest instead of dungeons, but yeah. This, the art design of the world, and the music. Those are the strongest points of Skyrim.
I would argue that Fallout 3’s map is ridiculously tiny.
It has been a little while since I last played it, but I found that scale-wise, it felt small (I’m guessing this is what you mean) with major locations too close together, but content-wise, it felt sparse, empty and ultimately pretty boring.
A wasteland that one can throw a stone across doesn’t feel like much of a wasteland to me. I don’t want realism, just big enough that I can suspend my disbelief. I want to get immersed but a “town” with six people isn’t a godsdamned town.
Witcher 3, gave I multiple tries and just got overwhelmed every time I looked at the map.
Huh, I loved it. I could either fast travel to get to the content quickly, or ride there and enjoy the scenery.
ARMA 3’s Altis map is too big.
Unless you’re flying a jet. Then it’s still too small!
It is too big when the density of reasons to go there and explore becomes to little.
Personally, I don’t really care for games that have huge maps just to pass through while traveling around. There needs to be a reason in the story for every place to be there.
Every village, town or city needs to be filled with quests and stories, and the space between them as well to a lesser extend. They serve as immersive distractions. They need to be alive.
The map is too big if it cannot be filled with enough stuff to explore and experience. And I don’t mean climbing yet another tower, or doing yet another variation of the same puzzle.
TBH, I am not much of a sandbox game player and the JC 2 and 3 maps looked nice, but didn’t really invite me to stay and explore a single area for a while, because the areas didn’t have much depth. I prefer a much higher density of things to do. Each village should have a couple of hours of content, exploring it and the neighboring area. And larger towns or cities even more.
I want to minimize the ‘just cruising through’ parts of maps.
Cyberpunk as well had too much dead space when it comes to stuff to do in many parts of the city. Some parts of course act as just the background for other parts, which is fine. But other parts where beautifully handcrafted and interesting, but there is not much to interact with or people to talk to there.
To me it is important to have enough content and depth that the player learns to get to know their way around a place, and gets to know characters and develop relationship with each place.
As long as it has fast travel I don’t mind having a big open world but if the open world itself feels empty without much life then I’m immediately turned off by the game
Funny, I have the opposite complaint about Fallout 4. In what is supposed to be a nuclear wasteland of a city where everyone is struggling to keep their small communities going, there are just too many people in such a small space to make this feel real. I liked Fallout 3 and New Vegas more because the world was properly empty, but still had so many things to discover.
Reminds me of no man’s sky and it’s empty bajillions of planets.
I have 90 hours in no man’s sky and I got pretty burnt out on it. After a certain point, every planet feels the same and lifeless.
They have done some good work in last few years, specially the events here and there are fun. But after the event campaign is over. There is nothing else to hope for.
Elden Ring is right on the threshold of too big.
Elden Ring DLC for me.
At least the main game, the world was kind of flat.
The land of Shadow’s map was kind of difficult to read. There was too many layers. Some things were underground. Some were above ground.
If the world wasn’t connected but broken by portals or something, it would have been fine. But condensed like that made it feel too big and I overwhelming.
I feel like having a toggle for overworld/underground similar to in the base game would have been very very nice.
An Open World is only too big if it requires loading screens at transition points that aren’t natural. An Open World can have an insufficient density of relevant content, where exploring it has too little marginal utility to the player, and therefore it is ultimately not useful to exist.
I don’t think there’s a too big for a simulation type game world, go all the way. But for more directed game styles that are narrative driven or more carnival ride than simulation don’t make it boring use techniques from past games; the keeping distant landmarks in view outside like in New Vegas, or hilly landscapes to obscure stuff to discover like in Zelda or Skyrim. Bad examples would be like traveling between towns in daggerfall or those monuments in the middle of nowhere in starfield.
Was that 30GB RAM Harry Potter game real or were my friends messing with me? ‘Cause my answer would be that.
I have not met a too-big open world as of yet.
Its not about being too big but too little stuff to do IMO. The first Assassin’s Creed wasnt even that big but felt like a wasteland going from one side of the map to the other
Hot take, but the open world nature of Elden Ring drove me crazy. Coming from a series grounded by its tightly knit and highly curated environments, I never understood why Elden Ring is so unanimously considered the “peak” of the series.
I enjoyed my time with it, but I couldn’t help but wonder what the game could have been without the open world inclusion. So for me it’s not necessarily “how big is too big”, but whether or not the gameplay necessitates an open world.
I’m with you on it, because my completionist tendencies saw me trekking between one too many copy-and-pasted side dungeons in the 50 hours I gave Elden Ring before I couldn’t take it any more and never came back to finish the game.
It’s not like the moment-to-moment combat is any less fun than the games that came before it, but since the game lets me indulge in my worst tendency of finishing every optional thing before progressing things it just felt like a meaningless checklist slog.
It’s definitely a “me” problem, but it’s just one reason why I tend to prefer a more focused experience than a sprawling open world.
The copy-paste dungeons were a big issue for me. And the amount of reused enemies and bosses. There is definitely a way to “optimally” play the game for the best experience. But I’d say that goes against the nature of what an open world is supposed to represent.
Agreed the level designs in dark souls coupled with the exploration made them s tier an adventure. Elden rings was ok but with all the traveling I felt more like a tourist.
Big enough that I lose interest or notice the padding.
A lot of it boils down to execution. The more urban areas of a Sleeping Dogs or the TW3 map with the Bloody Baron (not the viking map) feel geuinely massive enough though both are on the smaller end. Whereas something like GTA5’s San Andreas actively pissed me off because so much of the game was just driving to and from set pieces on the interstate.
That said: I actively don’t care about completion unless I really love the game. So if something was 40000km^2… I might never leave the two square kilomters the actual game takes place in and not care about the rest.
As for Just Cause 2 and 3? Neither felt overly large but both were broken down into regions and I mostly just played those whenever I felt like over the course of a month or two. So it really was closer to “levels” than anything else.
Contrast that with a Far Cry 2 which is downright tiny and… I’ll never have the patience to drive past even one outpost ever again.
I recall True Crime: Streets of L.A. being too big. The city felt so similar, I just lost interest. It could have been that the hardware wasn’t where it should have been to land a project that ambitious?
I don’t think it can be too large, but like others have said, there has to be enough quality content in each location you can visit to compensate for the vastness of the open world.
It be amazing if you could go inside every single building/dungeon/etc. and have every one of them chockablock full of things to experience, like they did with Elder Scrolls 6, but look how long it took for that game to come out…
I don’t think that there’s a “too big”, if you can figure out a way to economically do it and fill it with worthwhile content.
But I don’t feel like Cyberpunk 2077’s map size is the limiting factor. Like, there’s a lot of the map that just doesn’t see all that much usage in the game, even though it’s full of modeled and textured stuff. You maybe have one mission in the general vicinity, and that’s it. If I were going to ask for resources to be put somewhere in the game to improve it, it wouldn’t be on more map. It’d be on stuff like:
More-complex, interesting combat mechanics.
More missions on existing map.
More varied/interesting missions. Cyberpunk 2077 kinda gave me more of a GTA feel than a Fallout feel.
A home that one can build up and customize. I mean, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t really have the analog of Fallout 4’s Home Plate.
The city changing more over time and in response to game events.
Cp2077 is definitely more gta than fallout by design homie
Depends how full it is, how interesting is it (note this is not the same as full), how fast you can travel, and how fun movement is.
There’s a lot of elements to open world and a lot of devs get the balance very wrong. You end up playing in a map rather than the world.
It is all about the amount of content. If you are just wandering around with nothing work doing than to hell with that.
Depends on the mood I’m in.
Zelda BotW is a giant map and mostly chill game that I have tons of fun just taking my time exploring.
Far Cry 3 has me going around murdering folks and clearing camps non-stop at a pretty good pace.
Far Cry 4 was way too much pew pew and it bored me.