Open world
[1][2] Notable games in this category include The Legend of Zelda (1986), Grand Theft Auto V (2013), Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) and Minecraft (2011).
[3][4] Games with open or free-roaming worlds typically lack level structures like walls and locked doors, or the invisible walls in more open areas that prevent the player from venturing beyond them; only at the bounds of an open-world game will players be limited by geographic features like vast oceans or impassable mountains.
The main appeal of open-world gameplay is that it provides a simulated reality and allows players to develop their character and its behavior in the direction and pace of their own choosing.
[9] Reviewers have judged the quality of an open world based on whether there are interesting ways for the player to interact with the broader level when they ignore their main objective.
Heir opined that some of the critical failings of Andromeda were due to the open world being added late in development.
Other games that use this approach include Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Marvel's Spider-Man.
[17][18][19][20] Rockstar games like GTA IV and the Red Dead Redemption series lock out sections of the map as "barricaded by law enforcement" until a specific point in the story has been reached.
[21] The scope of open-world games requires the developer to fully detail every possible section of the world the player may be able to access, unless methods like procedural generation are used.
The design process, due to its scale, may leave numerous game world glitches, bugs, incomplete sections, or other irregularities that players may find and potentially take advantage of.
[24] According to Peter Molyneux, emergent gameplay appears wherever a game has a good simulation system that allows players to play in the world and have it respond realistically to their actions.
Similarly, being able to freely interact with the city's inhabitants in Grand Theft Auto added an extra dimension to the series.
SpeedTree is an example of a developer-oriented tool used in the development of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and aimed at speeding up the level design process.
Procedural generation also made it possible for the developers of Elite, David Braben and Ian Bell, to fit the entire game—including thousands of planets, dozens of trade commodities, multiple ship types and a plausible economic system—into less than 22 kilobytes of memory.
[26] More recently, No Man's Sky procedurally generated over 18 quintillion planets including flora, fauna, and other features that can be researched and explored.
[27] There is no consensus on what the earliest open-world game is, due to differing definitions of how large or open a world needs to be.
[34] Others trace the concept back to 1981 CRPG Ultima,[37][38][39] which had a free-roaming overworld map inspired by tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons.
[citation needed] 1UP considers Sega's adventure Shenmue (1999) the originator of the "open city" subgenre,[71] touted as a "FREE" ("Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment") game giving players the freedom to explore an expansive sandbox city with its own day-night cycles, changing weather, and fully voiced non-player characters going about their daily routines.
[79] Radio stations had been implemented earlier in games such as Maxis' SimCopter (1996), the ability to beat or kill non-player characters date back to games such as The Portopia Serial Murder Case (1983),[80] and Valhalla (1983)[45] and the way in which players run over pedestrians and get chased by police has been compared to Pac-Man (1980).
[81] After the release of Grand Theft Auto III, many games which employed a 3D open world, such as Ubisoft's Watch Dogs and Deep Silver's Saints Row series, were labeled, often disparagingly, as Grand Theft Auto clones, much as how many early first-person shooters were called "Doom clones".
These include the Holy Land during the Third Crusade in Assassin's Creed, Renaissance Italy in Assassin's Creed II and Brotherhood, Constantinople during the rise of the Ottoman Empire in Revelations, New England during the American Revolution in Assassin's Creed III, the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy in Black Flag, the North Atlantic during the French and Indian War in Rogue, Paris during the French Revolution in Unity, London at the onset of the Second Industrial Revolution in Syndicate, Ptolemaic Egypt in Origins, Classical Greece during the Peloponnesian War in Odyssey, and Medieval England and Norway during the Viking Age in Valhalla.
In the fictional storyline, the Templars and the Assassins, two secret organisations inspired by their real-life counterparts, have been mortal enemies for all of known history.
Anteworld is a world-building game and free tech-demo of the Outerra Engine that builds upon real-world data to render planet Earth realistically on a true-to-life scale.
