★Indie games by Greg Lobanov & friends★
Open-world type games are all the rage lately. I’ve recently played a lot of long-anticipated such titles like Tchia or the most recent Pokemon games, and I’m also eagerly awaiting the new Zelda game too. But making an open-world game is a process full of pitfalls! I wanted to share just one bit of wisdom I’ve gained from experience.
When making open-ended exploration titles, my intuition was simply to build lots of space filled with things to do, and present it all to player equally and let them decide how to approach it. The thinking was to inundate the player with options, so that they’d feel empowered and free.
But this actually had the opposite effect and made players feel totally lost, and ultimately, bored. Because if everything is equally important, then nothing is actually important. And without clear guidance on what they should be doing next, players quickly lose interest. Even when the answer was “you can do lots of things - just poke around and you’ll find fun stuff,” it’s just not a satisfying answer.
What I found works very well is to set very, very clear goals for the player with very, very clear steps toward progress. Make sure the player ALWAYS knows what the next step is, and/or has easy access to find out.
It turns out that in open-world experiences, it’s not actually fun for things to be completely open. What is fun is to know what you’re supposed to do, and then having the choice of doing it or doing something else instead. Players who want to explore and “break the system” know what to avoid, and get the satisfiying feeling of playing outside the intended bounds of the game (even when they actually aren’t). And when players want an easy, direct checklist of things to do to move towards progress, the game offers that as well. I’ve found that when games offer both of these “modes” of experience, they are way more satisfying for way more people—because, it turns out, just about everybody feels both of these needs at different times, and when they have the freedom to switch how they’re approaching the game they’ll tend to stick with it longer and not get exhausted as easily.
There’s a lot more I can say about this topic, but I will leave it here for now. Open-world style games are really, really fun to play and really, really hard to make—I’m excited to share more thoughts on them in the future.
(This is part of my “Game Musings” newsletter where I write thoughts about game design and development. If you just want news and updates on my projects, you can edit your subscription here.)