skywolfblue said:
Seth Carter said:
Which is fine and all, but there's really no need for the open world to exist. Rather then selecting missions to go visit that valley or ruin off a list or even off a map.
That is actually a fairly good litmus test for the validity of an open world. If fast travel can exist in the game and not be a terrible detriment, then the open world has failed to be relevant. When teleportation around the world doesn't strip away the games content (or worse, is the preferable means), it means that the journey in that open world is itself not living up to its design.
The best genre (at least so far) to make use of open world is Survival games. Because that resource management and en-route scavenging style is all part and parcel of the gameplay. The meat of the game is managing the journey from place to place. Most are far from a perfection of the concept (most are also indie level, so they probably don't have the tech for a more realized world). A runner of up of sorts might be the Dead Rising model, where events are occurring continuously, and the hows and whens of how you get around do factor into how the game plays out.
I don't know of any open world games that don't have fast travel. Even the best ones have fast travel of some sort. I would point to World of Warcraft or Horizon Zero Dawn as being exemplars of open world, but they both have fast travel mechanics. For people who need to get from point A to point B, taking the portal/griffin/campfire is there, but in doing so you miss out on all the scenery/story/events in between. WoW and Horizon pack their worlds to the brim with things to see, they give a compelling reason to visit off the beaten path.
Minecraft (and basically any survival game, as I pointed out. Teleporting kind of eats out the meat of the gameplay there). Fairly sure most of the Zeldas have had none, or very limited. Dying Light (to my recollection). All the Arkham games. Any of the myriad open world RPGs before Oblivion or so. You could make an argument for Morrowind.
Actually, the first game I recall "Fast Travel" as it were in was a fairly interesting case. It was Baldurs Gate. You had that big old map with those tiles you clicked on and whoosh, off you went. Being D&D you might get a random fight on the way, but its basically fast travel. But there's a good note to be made, that all those tiles had some kind of purpose to them. You had this sprawling wilderness to wander around in, but they didn't shove a dead tile in to pad out the space.
This came up a fair bit when I was playing/creating Neverwinter Nights modules too. Periodically you'd stumble across one where someone decided to litigious scale a map into tiles, and they'd usually be just awful dulling filler. I remember on my own Persistent World I drew the map and my build team was aghast that it'd be impossible to render, then the actual design layout was something more like a spider web and certainly not to scale, but with purpose to every location.
With Horizon, there's definitely "tiles" that are just filler. Either nothings in them but sticks and heal berries, or they double up dino encounters. Sometimes the freedom even bites the game in the back end when you stumble on and clear out a dino herd, only to stumble on the quest that was supposed to send you there afterwards and have to redo the entire thing. I got the quest to find the guy eaten by crocobots after having wandered through that spot a couple of times already. What is clearly meant to be the cinematic intro for the big Rex-stand in on the road to Meridian was spoiled because I trotted a bit too far north and found one already. I'd say the same of the big thunderbird too except that just seems like a miscommunication, because the one on the desert road and the one in a quest are both presented well in their own way.
Yeah they didn't go nuts with it. Its not a giant procedurally generated nothingscape. Or the equally empty but reality based desolate terrain of some Ubisoft's stuff (other then their obnoxious random spawns in some). And they didn't do the Mad Max/Far Cry thing where completing an area literally obliterates the core gameplay from it (Biggest sin of Mad Max really. Engaging with the open world just gets rid of *all* the enemy cars, which is the only unique point of the game).