Something that’s talked about a lot these days is how open-world games need to be filled with things to do—the idea that every inch of land needs to be “populated” with NPCs and sidequests. Very often, you hear open-world complaints from Internet game gurus to the effect of “it looks barren” or “it feels empty”.
In keeping up with these complaints, the Legend of Zelda development team have found themselves going from one extreme (Twilight Princess: ”it feels empty”) to the other (Skyward Sword: ”there’s nothing but dungeons”). After having worked on both games, taking fan feedback into consideration, and weighing it against Nintendo’s own experience designing worlds, series producer Eiji Aonuma has come to the conclusion that pockets of empty spaces in an open-world game aren’t necessarily a bad thing.
Speaking with IGN at E3 2016, Aonuma stated:
“We talked a little bit about the idea of density, how dense do we make this big world. As we were developing it, we realized that filling [Hyrule] with things to do and explore is going to be a lot of work. It’s going to take a lot of people and a lot of time. But when we actually started doing it and experienced things like moving around on the horse or climbing up to a high place and paragliding down, we realized that our desire to see what’s ahead was more than just wanting to see what’s in the world. So in that sense, we realized that it’s kind of OK if there are pockets of emptiness.”
I’m personally quite glad to see Aonuma of this opinion, since I’ve never really agreed with the “it looks empty” stance on open-world games. Some of my favourite open-world games—Xenoblade, Xenoblade Chronicles X, Batman: Arkham City, and Zelda: Twilight Princess (which was as open-world as Nintendo were willing to go back in 2006)—were never any less fun for me because there wasn’t a sidequest or NPC waiting for you every two miles. In fact, the pockets of emptiness in those games, which were primarily filled with enemies to fight and collectables to find, were a nice change of pace from the frantic, goal-driven pursuit of the main story.
I’m of the mind that if an open-world game has interesting landforms or architecture, and a fun way to get around, it doesn’t need to fill every inch of its landscape with distractions. It’s okay to let players explore for the sake of exploration. Rewards can be as small as a hidden area with crafting materials tucked away, or as big as a story sidequest involving a bunch of NPC dialogue. Ultimately, though, you don’t really need the latter in my opinion—not as long as your world itself is designed to be interesting to explore.
Maybe a GTA, which takes place in a fairly familiar modern-day urban environment, needs to have helicopters and expensive cars to steal at every turn, but if your game takes place in the kind of world the player hasn’t seen before, you have the opportunity to encourage exploration for exploration’s sake—and you should.
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