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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've spent some time toying with a design for exactly such a game, in which a vast world and long-distance travel (on foot or by vehicle) should feature prominently, and of course the difficulty is in making long travel times fun or engaging. You know, actually making players show up and not check out immediately. What I came up with was:
Obviously this would be horribly unsuitable for most types of game. But it is something that I like to think about.
Yes, I think being able to do other things during travel is important. I remember the original World of Warcraft had ships that you had to take between continents, but they only sailed for a few seconds before the instance cut off and you got teleported to the other zone. It would have been interesting to force, say, an hour’s journey there. You might manage your inventory, chat with your guild, play some kind of minigame of cards or checkers or something with other players, trade stories. Of course, some people would alt-tab to YouTube or TikTok, but not everyone.
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