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One of the fantasies I have for a game is some kind of big budget story-game that is set in a truly huge open world.
A problem I find in things like GTA, Skyrim, Red Dead, WoW, Breath of the Wild is that to provide a certain ‘content density’ to the easily distracted player they all have these toy worlds, where towns have ten houses and cities have fifty, where travelling from the capital of one region to the capital of the other takes five minutes by horse but the characters talk about the huge distances in the world. It’s not that I can’t suspend my disbelief, it’s that I imagine sometimes what it would be not to (in this specific way).
I imagine a huge world, maybe fifty or a hundred times the size of Red Dead Redemption 2. The vast majority of it would be empty, the amount of content would probably similar. The major settlements would be mostly the same size, but the smaller ones would be more realistic than a thriving town that has like six buildings. There would be no instantaneous fast travel. You might be able to sail along rivers or the coast, ride a horse, whatever, but these things would all happen without ‘skips’.
Large amounts of the player’s time would be spent travelling, although there would be a lot of dialogue, camaraderie, interesting conversation choices on the road, while sailing, in a caravan, some random events. The game would take the player on a journey around the map, such that you would really feel, when looking at it, the distance traversed. If you wanted to backtrack to a city you were in at the start of the game, it might take several hours of real time to get there, which would require a difficult trade off.
There would be a lot of downtime to get to know companions, or maybe other players if it was multiplayer. You would feel, at times, truly far from civilization, have to prepare for excursions. In remote corners of the world there would be secrets to find that would feel off the beaten track, not like those RPGs where the secret dungeon entrance is spookily signposted fifty feet outside the entrance of the capital city.
I like the concept, but I think probably the best way to make it work is to make the environment itself dangerous.
Just for an example, imagine a space based game. You’d have to worry about resources, crew morale, environmental hazards like radiation or asteroids or gravity wells or something. And that makes the “boring” bits a lot more intriguing. You don’t just travel, you have to plan the trip knowing that if you run out of food you starve, if you break a critical system, you can’t make it, and if you run out of laser battery power or missiles even a weak attack will kill you. So now, instead of traveling being just a boring trip to the exciting parts, traveling is the excitement and planets and star bases feel like oases in a dangerous world.
Regarding the environment itself being dangerous, how about importing Death Stranding's literal-walking-simulator gameplay? On top of being an RPG world with goblins and such.
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