How do you make a open world game that's actually fun?

t. retard

BOTW is a good example. Not great, but good.
It needed more content but the piece were there. You had weather systems that interact with conductive and flammable items, you had magnesis and freezing abilities, items to attach to things to make them float, and items to mess with the wind (albeit briefly, a wind baton would have been awesome if a little game-breaking) etc.
You could fuck around all day with them, but there just wasn't enough to fuck around with.
BOTW is the perfect example of a game that is a proof of concept, without actually delivering on its potential.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_world

This is said about every single open world game, regardless of the amount of content. Do you know why? It's because open world implies a substantial degree of "freedom," but freedom is boring in a video game. It's like walking from one place to the next in an MMO. It's the least fun thing you can do in a video game. You don't have to do that, but it's prerequisite to the rest of the content. Open world games are exactly the same as linear games, just interspersed with pointless periods of boredom between what you actually want to be doing.

You find good creators first and populate the game with them.

A pencil is worthless without someone who can use it well.

Make the engine robust and everything moddable. Plus good writers like kirkbride that can make a solid lore on which the modders can work on.
The ES series are at this point just a game design software. Look at Enderall and what the germans did.

No producer has time or money to develop a all round good open world game.
Maybe in the future, with AI taking on menial tasks, things can be better.

Open world games are designed with different intentions and goals than level based. Level based is supposed to test ability to understand and traverse the area utilizing static and abstract mechanics. If you're audacious enough to make you're vidya open world, it means that you're saying that you're game is fun even without intense periods of gameplay, whether it's inane tasks like minigames or the simple appreciation for design. Very few developers understand this, as most activity is relegated to linear missions despite most of your time being without one and just existing or traversing. There needs to be something that you can do besides walking from point A to point B. Another fundamental flaw is how inanimate everything is in a huge chunk of them. Things don't happen until you and only you make it happen, which is something that never happens in reality.

WARBAND

Make a proper sequel to Crackdown. That wasn't that hard. I don't see why making a good game is hard if you have unlimited money.

The player need the option to:
No matter how shit the actual world is, with this options it will work.

You don't.

Skyrim was fun. Lots of dungeons filled with enemies, random events like massive dragon battles, hundreds of spells and weapons.

By making game mechanics and content focused around it, not just by slapping "Hur Durr Open World Goyim! See it's interesting!" and calling it a day.

It was in L.A. Noire. It was boring, there was nothing to do and you would always get penalised for breaking road rules

After 1/5 through the game, I just fast travelled between missions. I only ever explored where the missions were based. I probably only explored less than 50% of the map. R* should have built upon True Crime and allowed you to role play as a cop inbetween the campaign.

Make every location unique and focus on quality over quantity. Secret areas that reward exploration. Give all NPCs unique dialogue and update their dialogue during the course of the game. Lots of "meaningless" side activities like minigames, drinking at a bar etc. Lots of lore building that makes the player want to know more about the world. Design your quests like they're short stories instead of generic backstory to justify a collectathon. Have a good combat system that doesn't get stale and introduces new things as you progress. Bonus points for interesting enemy designs that makes the player want to see what new wacky shit might appear.

You go outside.

The easiest approach is the sandbox, be it the popular stuff like GTA or the lesser known stuff like JC2, basically all you have to do is make a world that's both easy and fun to fuck around in, the most satisfaction you get out of something like GTA or JC2 is blowing something up and then dealing with how the game responds to you fucking around, be it the ensuing police chase or militarry response. The world doesn't have to be that big, and realistically the bigger it is the harder it is to make it fun, though JC2 is the exception with how stupidly larger the map is. You gotta make exploration fun and rewarding too, otherwise why would you go anywhere that doesn't directly tie to your main objective (looking at you BotW)

-Sandboxy with various options for objectives and locomotion (Just Cause)
-Contained but with lots of detail and no minimaps and direction arrows with different ways to play the same sections of the map or actually change said sections mid game (Yakuza)
-Mid Sized with lots of random events but with detailed quests that take advantage of said random events (S.T.A.L.K.E.R Call of Pripyat)

The problem with most Open World games I find is not rewarding exploration and holding your hand throughout it.

Seriously, just let me find stuff by actually designing the maps around gameplay, make big keypoints on the maps see you through epic quests and loot, have directions and roads on the map that people have to pay attention.

Make people care about their surroundings, the game world they are playing in instead of an arrow they have to follow or a barren wasteland with a fucking chest on it.

The best way to make an open world is to simply engage the player with the rest of the game to the point where they're sucked into the world regardless of how much shit is in it
The open world could be entirely irrelevant to the game but still have a magical quality to it if the game it's put in is immersive enough
Not having the game be immersive and pelting the player with gamey bullshit and intrusive UI only leaves them to judge the open world from a purely mechanical standpoint, which outside of a large scale sandbox will always fall flat because it's missing the primary purpose of an open world, to get the player to feel that it's more real

BotW had a lot of crafted content, it was all just centered around bits the devs knew players would find like towers and shrines

Easy make a sequel to this

I genuinely enjoyed this game and would welcome a sequel, so long as there was a guarantee that the ending wasn't anywhere near as disappointing.

It'll be the best game ever known

Well it might actually get a sequel depending on if Disaster Report 4 sells well.

Please don't remind me

I'm mainly thinking of shit to add to GTA, but allow building destruction that lasts days as construction crews fix it. Allow more interaction with random pedestrians other than just saying hi. Have news stations on TV or newspapers that report about your recent rampage/shenanigans. Allow kidnapping people to keep prisoners in your safe house. Allow hostage negotiations. Add dismemberment with explosives and axes. Be able to enter literally any building. Have longer lasting wanted levels. If you do homicides, cops shouldn't forget after a few minutes. Maybe after you escape chase, have wanted posters and news reports that last days, and be able to disguise yourself. If a pedestrian recognizes you, they call the cops. Be able to go innawoods and hunt/camp to hide.
Those are just a few autistic ideas I have for GTA. If any of those are available as mods, please let me know.

How about having it where every building is basically a glorified rock except for that one ammo shop here and there
I'd like to see one where pretty much every building even if it's just the commercial stuff have actual things

Good combat.
Good traversal system where just moving around is fun.
Good story.
Good characters.
Good side missions.
Good exploration with tangible rewards.
Good supplementary mechanics like upgrading/gathering that is both satisfying and helpful in combat.
Large and beautiful world map where every screenshot can be used as a wallpaper.

Problem with open world games is that they are not detailed. Basically, they are low density worlds where interesting bits are spaced out by kilometers of nothingness. In order to make a good open world game you must reduce the scale of the world and simply make a regular but slightly oversized game level. Bethesda has the right idea, but ultimately fails victim to oversizing and spreading out resources instead of concentrating them over a smaller surface, because it is apparently more marketeable to compare your procedurally inflated open world dick size in m2 than in actual gameplay possibilities.

Hover actually gets it somewhat right. Some people complain that it has worse level design due to being open world, but it feels as if they designed several levels individually and then mashed them together in a single map, sometimes one over the other, which makes the map pretty fucking dense.

xenoblade 2 was such a turd, just like the first game

have the open world a secondary feature to the main game that ends up being what players come back for

put ur mom in it.

Have a free (you) my friend.

This game was a massive letdown.

IF OP PUT HIS MOM IN IT THEN THE GAME WORLD WOULD BE TO BIG

MORE LIKE OPEN UNIVERSE

MORE LIKE EVER EXPANDING UNIVERSE

MORE LIKE INFINITE SPACE

Interactivity with the environment is a big one for me. I really like Gravity Rush 1&2 in this regard because you can go anywhere that you can see, you can walk over every surface and you can pick up loads of different objects with the stasis field power. The different game worlds in both are also helped by being relatively small but densely packed with unique landmarks. These games are two of the few open world games I've played whose worlds feel like playgrounds rather than static, empty wastelands.

Off the top of my head, I also liked Hulk: Ultimate Destruction for the same reason. You could run up or along any wall you saw, destroy certain buildings and pillars of rock, pick up pretty much anything you can see and use it as a weapon (or as a skateboard, in the case of buses) and the game worlds weren't overly big.

Those aside, I liked Just Cause 2 mostly for the same reasons and I didn't mind its huge size because it was full of things to do and there were plenty of ways to move around it quickly. Saints Row 2's world was also pretty densely packed with fun sub-missions.

This too.

do you think youre sneaky dobson?

It's impossible. Open world games are all fucking cancer filled with vacant emptiness and a threadbare amount of content stretched across said vacant emptiness.

...

...

Name one open world game that isn't cancer with a barren world.

HA
HAHA
MORE LIKE
MORE LIKE INFINITY SPACE

Hover is super fun just because of the movement. The story is shit, but you dont think about it as you run around the city. Open world is best when your mode of transportation is fun, cuz then you can do literaly anything as long as you keep the player moving, and the gameplay coming from transportation can hold up the rest of the game.

"It just works."

Zelder is fun

I thought the first Crackdown had some very fun challenge as if you went into an area that was really tough at the start of the game you could grab some better weapons etc…
Rewarding exploration and braveness is key. I recall in FF12, you could go to this area that would kick you ass early in the game, but if you poisoned these tough creatures and ran you could sometimes get some good stuff and level up faster. Morrowind was so fun to explore at times that you forgot all about the main quest.

by focusing less on making the world four times the size of the real earth and focusing more on having lots of stuff to actually do. no one wants to spend 2 hours walking/driving through endless fucking fields to go kill 2 guys in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere and drive/fast travel back. I always think about the Yakuza series when debating this stuff, its not really open world and its hub is about the size of 5 cities blocks squared, but each street has like 4-5 things to do on it along with plenty of side quests that even though are mostly solved by battering some nip into submission, have unique little stories that are usually a good laugh

tl;dr oversized open worlds are fucking cancer and ruin good base mechanics, examples of that are MGSV and BOTW

Whoa there shirutachi, got any gameplay vids to back that up?

You could start by making encounters fun to interact with, thing bethesda suck at. Make questing challenging and rewarding thing you no longer really see today. The lore should also be rich and able to pique all demographic's curiosity. It has to work at several level and not only cater to the 13 yo console cash cows.
It takes work and dedication, things no longer in the realm of current year +2

Make the open world smaller, and make a game that isn't skyrim or GTA. How about a game where your main enemy forces are always loaded in to the game and hunting for you? Squads are produced at bases, and try to figure out where you are to hunt you down. When a squad gets in render range of you, the enemies in the squad spawn in and aggro on you. You can abstract the whole thing to a sci-fi or fantasy setting, maybe it's something like TRON and you're trying to fight against the overlord system. But the game has to be built around being open world for it to make sense. Too many games just have things happen in 'levels' INSIDE the open world. Like far cry with it's stupid bases, it's a cop out. For open world to make sense, you have to do something crazy, like make the enemy strongholds move around the map to mine resources ala Mortal Engines, that way the world beyond those strongholds actually MEANS something. In a game, you're interacting with the game world. In a proper open world game, your main forms of action would be in the whole open world at once, but in actual open world games you instead have linear missions and the world is just a level selector with the on-the-side minigame of 'run over people and fight bad guys'.

TL;DR: have the central game mechanics be built around moving/fighting in a big map, any mission you load into with a loading screen is a minigame.

Friendly reminder that Veelan is the meta for racing

or just git gud

Most vids out there are made by fags, you sure you want to see those?

Put the player's home in the center of the map and focus as much content on their local neighborhood as possible. Emphasize deep interactions among a small selection of NPCs in a tight geographical location over shallow copy-and-paste enemies dotted around a wasteland.

Not kidding, both were the most fun I've had in years.

JUST Cause 2 is fun as well but someone already mentioned it.

Most open world games that have shitty open world are just shit in general, if the developer can't make something that's more fun than pressing random buttons on menus then the game is a lost cause. All you need is to make traveling around be better than holding W until you reach your destination. For instance the crew is a shit game in general but traveling on the open world is quite fun with the things you can do between races. But that doesn't matter because it's open world is shit for the same reason NFSU2's is, there's no reason or motivation to go around in it so the developers wasted huge amounts of time developing something useless instead of making the game better, or in the crew's case good.

Plenty side activities, exploration, spots and NPCs that are worth the travel and make you want to go back to them, as least repetition as possible, Player/NPC/Enemy environment effects and destruction, no easy fast travel, no fetch quests.

How do you make crafting fun though?

You do literally anything other than "gather a bunch of materials, drag them into boxes, press button and wait 3 hours"

The world has to actually be open and have things in it. Making a game that is Open World™ but has everything in certain locations with fucking nothing but scenery between then you might as well just have a hub world and portals to the action and save the players the walk.

Copy dead rising 2.

By making the simple act of traveling and moving around fun.

This thread just reminded me
Ultimately it doesn't matter because it happened after video games were all shit but still.

It happened after loading screens stopped being an issue for anything other than shit like bethesda games

it depends on the setting really, but sometimes by being creative and silly.
i dont like mines, but if a game let me stick mines on frisbees, rc cars or a hammer that would be fun.

Make it simple (not requiring a million different materials that only drop from that one enemy in that one area) and let you do fun combinations.

Put more thought into it than none at all, that's how.

rape

instant fuck up

well said

I honestly beleive assassins creed 1 did it correctly

You've got it backwards. Rather than starting with an idea of an open world game and trying to make it fun you should start with a number of core mechanics and then ask if they necessitate the presence of open world. Most of the time the answer would be "no".
But the key to making any good open world game is obviously interactivity. If you can't have meaningful interactions with your surroundings there is no point to make anything but linear levels. Moving from point A to point B should also be interesting - whether through fun movement mechanics (like hook and parachute in Just Cause 2) or some sort of challenge (like surviving in the Zone in STALKER). If you need to use fast travel often to make the game bearable you have already failed in this regard.

Make the world a giant butthole.
Ass autists will rejoice.

You don't. You make a game with solid mechanics and linear level design that encourages you to explore the nuance of those mechanics in order to solve ever increasing challenges that enable the player to think in different ways about how they can approach the game.

That's what you do. You don't make a timesink game with 10000 randomly generated quests. You don't make "le biggest game EVER" and populate it with nothingness. You direct the player with good levels, engage them with fun and interesting mechanics, and if you want to, tell a story between those two.

Otherwise, fuck off.

What if the gameplay mechanics' appeal vastly overstays the appeal of said well-crafted linear levels?

the trouble with ass creed 1 is that it was one little game copy pasted 3 times, then the sequels were just copy pastes of the 1st

you find a balance and ship on time, and whatever's imperfect is imperfect.

So is everything. The problem is that it is used as a device for linear (or really any) story-telling when it's best used as an action game formula.

Do you think that GTA would've been as fun with a number of linear levels instead of the open world?

I dont mind the three cities, lets say you have x space in your world, and its one big circle, it might take a while to get from on side to the exact opposite, but if you make it three unconected big circles you can get from one side to the opposite in any of the circles in 1/3 the time, everything becomes closer together.
so yea the secret is to have it be open multi-world instead of open world
I agree that the sequals were re-hashes and worse though.

This raises another issue: GTA series are inherently open world games, whereas most shitty open world games are just something that could be closed world but is open world.
GTA 5 suffers from exactly that and is one of the many reasons why it's shit.

True, and I've already mentioned that in , but makes no such distinction.
Speaking of GTA 5, it mainly suffers from the fact that wasn't really built around the open world. There's barely anything to do apart from a couple of side activities, said activities don't give you any meaningful bonuses and even random rampages are much less fun due to fucked up police behavior.

You make a world with things to do.
Fuck GTA games where all you get are buildings that you can't even enter.
I want a free roam game where you can enter lots of places, even if it means guards fucking you up because you aren't supposed to be allowed in.
I also want things to make sense. Fuck Skyrim and it's stupid fresh bread and cheese in every fucking dungeon with lit torches everywhere, with draugrs in every fucking place.
There should be some sort of biomes that fill these places to keep things fresh, and enemies fresh as well.
Quests should be made to take advantage of the whole game being open-world, but none of that fetch me X number of shit quests. At least make it something like:

Its pretty easy actually, devs are just lazy because they know Cuckishit tier of open world is enough to sell for casuals because they wont even play the games anyways

Of course there is always the buttblasted retard that wants everyhting to be corridors like the "gud old days"

I doubt even 1% of rpgfags would play that game. Rpgfags are all casual cancer, thats exactly why the whole genre is nothing but brainless grinding and fetch quests when it could easily be much more.

Compress the amount of space required for all your content into as small of a world as reasonably possible. If you end up with something that isn't really an open world, then you didn't want an open world in the first place.

This wouldnt be bad IF the game was designed around to have vast swathes of land like say… taking place in hell Australian outback which is pretty much
And then giving the player some solid tools to relatively quickly traverse that empty space to the next objective but nah either the game-world is small yet over-saturated with shit every other step (Skyrim's a prime example) or it's huge but the traveling around sucks big time (Just Cause 2, fuck those physics/controls on land-vehicles and indestructible palm trees).

Fucking this x10.
Keep evolving, don't cling onto the past nor fucking make it a literal casual childrens puzzle. People want to be challenged, not play a fucking walking simulator. How hard is THAT?

Its the australia track from crusin world

in general, making things you like out of things you dont like.
if equipment is made up of components, let the player take the components and add swap them with something else.
if a game with borderlands-like weapon generation had weapon durability this could be fun to play with. or even if it didnt have durability, although then you get in to the zone of how you balance something like that but still keep it fun and relevant.
maybe certain parts wear out faster than others and youll just need to find or make replacements instead of having the whole gun shatter into nothing.

this fucking thread

It should be at least possible to make a game while avoiding every single rookie mistake that plagues the industry
But they don't because that shit game design is actually a feature, a bunch of popular trends that somehow print money for big companies despite nobody actually liking them

Make Gothic.

Some examples?

it should be so easy, its calling out to us. but who will make game?

Why don't you?

Everything people complain about with open world games
You know, the shit people were talking about fixing in the hundred previous posts in this thread that you didn't read

Recently played Mafia 2 and this was probably the worst implementation of an open world game. There was absolutely nothing in the world to interact with. Not to mention all the money you earned in the game(which was basically pointless) was randomly taken from you at multiple points throughout the game.
I did finish it because it was short and the story was alright. Got pretty burnt out near the end because of how much driving you had to do and not being allowed to break the speed limit. Almost every mission was 1. drive here and pick this guy up. 2. drive to the location with the passenger 3. short mission or cinematic 4. return passenger to home. 5. return to your home.

im lazy and i cant focus, every step of everything i do i have to put failsafes to make sure i remember what im doing and im just not willing to put fourth that kind of effort when its already such a daunting task.

But its easy

I guess what I'm saying is a lot of open world games stretch the game out by making you travel through the world. Mafia 2 was a 2 hour game stretched to 12 hours by making you drive for 10 hours. I'd rather devs just make a smaller world full of meaningful and fun things then a large empty world.

Also a lot of devs seem to think putting random check markers(like in assassins creed) is the same as putting content in the world. I don't want to run around and collect shit. If there is no purpose for that part of the map, don't create it. Just focus on filling up the parts of the world that matter.

Patents cover an implementation of an idea. They do not cover the idea itself. You cannot patent the camera; you can patent one way to build something that can be defined as a camera.

No one was prevented from making loading screen mini games at any time for any reason.

Here is one:
en.cataclysmdda.com/
Download the latest experimental

Now i'm not the biggest fan of botw, but it did have a cute femboy mc to play dressup with and get molested by giant large-breasted women. That's something i desire for more of in video games.

Does it look like I speak moon, motherfucker?

Open world? More like closed game.

well this is what mine looks like

Make the core gameplay- whatever that happens to be- totally and robustly functional, expand outwards on content bloat from there. Main plot, side missions, general visual & audio fidelity outside of not being totally abhorrent to play, and anything outside getting a good engine for whatever the intended gameplay style and how the open world colors that as a base is all secondary. Concept before alpha, alpha before beta, so on. Seems people are skipping steps these days.

Use as few statically defined craftable entities as possible (ideally none) and make actual voxel terrain & entities instead of lego cubes while making the crafting involve player thought & agency beyond knowing the best way to do busywork resource harvesting and how to finagle unintuitive cubic function blocks together to get the biggest soft stat bonus. The thing I hate most about open world crafting/building games is that they either use boxels, a small stable of self-contained entities (taking months on end for the devs to add new ones and make the old ones relevant/irrelevant) with one set of dimensions and unchanging function, or both. Some avoid or mitigate these problems like Starmade, which has some interesting algorithms for how groups of blocks will affect each others' function at the cost of being disgustingly inefficient and tedious to work with, or From the Depths, which has a similar system and also has changes to physical weapon dimensions with certain blocks, though I don't have any personal experience with it. But it's still dependent on having a big blob of function blocks that fill the place of actual subsystems like shell elevators and dedicated magazines, resulting in subsystem space too large or too small for what they are.

If I had to lay out the ideal arrangement for the Mineycrafta genre and in particular one with worthwhile crafting, it'd be either a fantasy world generator ala Dorf Fortress with first person dungeon crawling and a side order of resource prospecting, construction & light factional/racial/religious warfare simulation, or a dieselpunk bastard combination between Factorio industrial management and some brand of RTS control- maybe Men of War at the lowest level and Graviteam loose macromanagement at the highest, barring grand strategy style theater direction being practical- with Executive Assault style of drop-in to first person level. A degree of cross pollination between the concepts is obviously possible. Continued below.

To free up the necessary resources for this amount of complexity and to allow for an object design system with sufficient granularity, the sheer bloat of individual-but-interrelated cube entities is ripped out in favor of a relatively complex weapon/armor/vehicle/machine/structure designer that tears out a lot of the backend calculation weight by allowing the player to assemble entities rivet by rivet and plate by plate, including the industrial processes applied in construction, such as different welding methods, and have the designer spit out a functional entity or component that does not necessitate scores of cross-checks on a voxel grid. In the case of the fantasy end of things, this is a little more simple and fast & loose, coming down to forging temperatures, tempering methods and so on. The necessary checks are made as to the functionality and reliability of a machine (in the latter game) or arm/armor (in the former) in the designer, identifying relative points of strength, weakness, average wear rate of subcomponents, myriad things. With this base concept, you can have complex modeling and accurate graphical representation for arms, armor, repeating firearms, vehicle chassis, engines, transmissions, and so on under player control, without the need for massive computational bloat due to boxel entity spam and constant recalculation. Vehicles can be simplified down to tank and plane-simulator style entities, with key points being capable of disassembling from one another, and armor in general- vehicle plates or personal- can be visually and physically punctured or otherwise damaged with a small amount of calculation for destruction & remodeling of voxel surfaces, at least relative to constant checks for moving boxels and a thousand HP values for each.

That's the vague conception at least; without any programming background this is probably all drivel, but it seems vaguely plausible. The greatest virtue for the concept, I think, is that this kind of system would allow for meaningful design ethics and player/factional logistics to emerge, as weapons and other objects are designed down to bolts, rivets, welds, caliber and cycling system, blade width & shape, so on. By putting the checks for functionality in the designer, Even in the former case of a fantasy game with industry deemphazised, this level of detail remains useful, as combat and cost effective designs for munitions armor and mass troop bloc weapons can emerge, and player adventurers can craft or commission items tweaked to their liking. I will reiterate that the worst aspect of any open world crafting-survival-whatever game is the use of endless proprietary dev entities or resource hogging yet very ungranular meter-by-meter cubical world grids, or both. The key is in finding the most efficient way to put the largest amount of meaningful entity design capacity in the hands of the player while minimizing weight on the engine, and with a likewise efficient physics simulation, everything else will come naturally.

tl;dr slash the inefficiencies inherent to survival-crafting, shove as many complex checks for designed entity functions into a clientside designer that spits out the necessary information into a canned entity and entity file to make it run reasonably well when a lot is going on without a supercomputer and/or endless multiplayer lag, focus on using on-the-fly physics calculation where they count and nowhere else whenever possible, and faking the simulation in a functional and belief-suspendable fashion wherever you can get away with to make room for the important parts, namely having crafting that appears to be properly simulistic and meaningful. Channel that into a world-scale and substantially more varied Chalice Dungeon with fancy dungeoneering equipment selection or the bastard child of Factorio, War Thunder, and RTS through GSG scale base building/map painting. Or anything else that would benefit from this level of construction & industry fidelity. A good engine, a good vision and the practical mindset to pursue it properly would be magical with this genre and modern technology, but the genre and open world in general is all about minimum investiture and maximal profit. Even if you could hog the entire market by putting in the effort to do more than the rest of the half-vaporware shits, no one is inclined to.

should be easy.

The first step is not making it open world

It hurts.

my fucking nigger. That kraven the hunter level was the tits

No fast travel. Makes world feel small.
No voice acting. Vastly limits your NPC dialogue
No minimap. Makes players navigate via that instead of looking at the game.
No world map that shows your exact location at every time. Makes game world feel small. Prevents you from getting lost.