First thing's first, let's address what is perhaps the greatest flaw any open world game has, emptiness. I'm not saying that every open world game has this flaw, but if this flaw goes unchecked, it can cripple an otherwise brilliant game. Many games have overcome this and have risen to be legends such as The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, Assassin's Creed: Origins, and (my personal favorite) Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. However, the one thing that no-one can deny about these games is that they have limits. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, rather the fact that those games have limits is probably what made them great because the developers could work extra hard to make everything they offered the finest they could. Be it through a colorful and motley cast of characters, utterly unique content, and compelling gameplay. But I'm not here to talk about your average ordinary Open World games, I'm talking about a special, new, and somewhat unrefined form of video game that offers an endless world to explore.
An example: No Man's Sky. No Man's Sky was incredibly appealing because it offered a game world whose vastness was beyond compare. It offered an endless amount of places to go, but that was it's undoing. Video games aren't just about going places, they are about doing things. When I played No Man's Sky, what I got most interested in was finding upgrades for the ship and multi-tool. But it lost it's appeal to me because I realized that despite the fact that you had an endless amount of places to go, you had a severely limited amount of things to do. Sure you could interact with the different species and scan the local fauna, but it was all the same to me, the multi-tool was your primary method of interacting with the world, but you could only interact with the world in certain particular ways.
Another example: Minecraft. Minecraft came close to defeating the flaw of an endless open world to the point where No Man's Sky tried to mimic it to save itself. You can build anything in Minecraft, and because of that, it can offer an endless amount of things to do. But it isn't the kind of thing that appeals to everyone, probably because not everyone has fun being creative just for the sake of creativity. The most creative thing I built was a flat-sided square building, first out of cobblestone, then out of solid stone, to serve as a home base for exploration, but what really appealed to me was crafting because crafting was doing something that could enhance future ways to do other things. I did have fun exploring, but once you've seen one cave, you've seen them all. So in a nutshell, Minecraft offered an endless world and an endless amount of things to do, but it did so in a way that they didn't match up well and doesn't appeal to everyone.
Some of my favorite games were (and are) Super Mario Sunshine, Banjo Kazooie, Banjo Tooie, Ty The Tasmanian Tiger 1, 2, and 3, Okami, Rayman 3, Far Cry 4 and Primal, and Sonic Adventure 1 and 2. What they all have in common is that they're sandbox games. Orthodox sandbox games generally revolve around collecting things or fulfilling goals to collect things, but collecting those things rarely serves to enhance gameplay other than to make a way to collect more of those things. But despite this, I keep coming back to those games. After thinking long and hard, I decided that what keeps me coming back is discovery and testing the limits of my skills.
Now to the hypothesis. The appeal to an open world game is endless discovery and endless things to do. But even with procedural generation, it is impossible to make a game like that without things getting a little stale and similar. Even if the game implements discoverable things that add new mechanics, eventually the players will run out of new things to discover and new things to do. But there might be a method to do it in a way which can allow the player to have a number of mechanics, tactics, and methods at their disposal so great that it would be impossible for one player to uncover them all. Instead of a discovery being just an achievement or new gameplay element, it should also offer the possibility to unlock more achievements and elements depending on how the player matches up or arranges the discovery with others. That way even if the number of discoveries is limited, the possibilities each discovery offers are beyond what anyone could do by themselves. And maybe a good way to go about it is to make the number of uses each discovery has limited so that the player has to constantly venture out in the world to get the most out of their favorite discoveries. But above all, the challenges offered to the player must not call for one specific mechanic, there might be a few that would make the challenge easier, but even if using any other mechanic would make conquering the achievement harder, it would encourage players to test the limits of their creativity and skills without making them feel restricted. How could something like this be implemented? I don't know. That's why I'm posting it here like a thesis so that maybe someone with the right capabilities would read this and make the game I and possibly many others have been waiting a very long time for. I had a few ideas myself, but that is a post for another time.
A few games that I feel helped me realize these ideas were Megaman Battle Network and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (Because of the number of abilities and mechanics they offered) Magika (Because of the mixing up of abilities) and Super Mario Odessey (for the different captures changing up the mechanics).
Like my ideas, want to add or expand on them, or have some of your own? Please, leave a reply!
