Teaching the Open World
Mass Effect is a game that’s near and dear to my heart. It’s not a perfect game by any means. I’m not a fan of its style of inventory management or the repetitive nature of some of the side quests or many other a nitpick. Nevertheless, I consider Mass Effect and its sequel some of my all time favorites, despite the fact that the first time I played it back in my first year of high school, I couldn’t connect with it at first because I was scared to leave the Citadel.
Up until that point, I was on a fairly linear path. I had completed the scripted Eden Prime mission, then I was flown to the Citadel, where I completed main story objectives, bought some gear, and completed and gathered some side missions. I spent a lot of time on the Citadel, searching every nook and cranny and talking to everyone I could talk to, learning about this universe and those who live in it. Then it came time to leave, and I froze.
I knew that games had limits. Not just fictional limits either, but limits in budget, time, and what games could actually do with the available technology. 2007, after all, was a hell of a year for video games, and Mass Effect was not the most technically impressive game on the market. I knew there was only so much it could do. But I had grown attached to a specific place, and then the game was throwing me into the infinity of the void. It was scary.
Of course, I eventually relaxed. Mass Effect, after all, isn’t really an open world game, and all you’re really doing is selecting where you want to go and following a relatively linear path when you get there. And, like many, I grew to love it.
But ever since this moment, I’ve become obsessed with how games, particularly open world games, hand control over to the player. How does an open world game teach you what to expect? Where do they draw the line between what to teach you and what you’re expected to learn on your own? How do they excite you into wanting to explore the world in the first place?
Ultimately, there isn’t really one way to answer those questions. Video game genre conventions, just like any medium, are subject to interpretation and discussion, and there isn’t one correct way of thinking about open world games. Moreover, variety in genre is never a bad thing. Sometimes I want my scripted open world games, like those made by Rockstar. Sometimes I want freedom and control, like Breath of the Wild. Sometimes I want something in between, like a Bethesda game. There is no right answer and there shouldn’t be a rulebook.
However, as far as what works best for me personally, I’ve identified some patterns.
Spoilers for a ton of games below. Also, I embedded some gameplay videos. They’re mostly there for reference, but also to break up text, as I wrote this article assuming you’ve played these games. Under no circumstances should you watch any of them in their entirety. But if you feel so inclined, just watch the beginnings.
Mobility and Navigation
There is much we need to know before we begin our journey, and arguably the most important aspect of any open world game is how we move around in them. You’re standing on one part of the map. You need (or want) to go to another. How do you get there, and is doing so fun or engaging? And it’s not just how you move, but where are you moving to and in what environment.
Answering these question, I think, is one of the most effective ways of introducing players to an open world. Be it a scripted mission or a quick tutorial, it’s never a bad idea to begin by having players move around in the world. After all, this is what players are going to spend the majority of their time doing, be it on foot or by car or horse or spaceship or whatever.
One open world franchise that I think does a generally good job introducing its worlds are the Grand Theft Auto games. Starting with Grand Theft Auto III, most of these games begin with an introduction of who we’re playing as, and then they have us drive somewhere.
In Grand Theft Auto III, we play as Claude. (Nothing in GTA III actually says his name is Claude, but Rockstar has confirmed it… don’t worry about it.) We watch a cutscene of Claude robbing a bank with his girlfriend, who then betrays him and leaves him to be arrested. We then watch as an unknown group stops Claude’s prison van and break out a different prisoner. Claude and our friend whom we’ll later know as 8-Ball beat up the remaining cops and break out of their restraint. The game then gives the player control of Claude. We walk over to the car, we get in, and we drive 8-Ball to the hideout with the assistance of our map in the lower left corner. The game teaches other mechanics in later missions. But now we know how to walk, drive, and navigate.
In Vice City, we watch a cutscene of Tommy Vercetti being robbed during a drug deal and driving the lawyer who arranged it back to his office. We’re then given control. We walk over to a vehicle, and we drive to a hotel in the game’s fictional version of Ocean Drive. In San Andreas, we watch a cutscene of CJ arriving at the airport as he explains the circumstances of his return in voice over. Officer Tenpenny picks him up, and then he throws CJ out in rival gang territory. We’re given control of CJ, we walk over to a bike, and we ride it home to Grove Street. In GTA IV, we watch a cutscene of Niko arriving at Liberty City, we’re given control, we walk over to Roman’s car, and we drive it back to Roman’s apartment.
A cutscene, then we drive to the place where the game wants us to save. The cycle isn’t broken until GTA V, when we play a tightly scripted prologue that shows a bank robbery gone bad with Michael and Trevor. Then after a short cutscene with Michael and his therapist, we then play as Franklin as he and Lamar repo two cars and race them through the city to the dealership. In reality, it’s basically the same learning process, only the events are a little out of order.
It may not seem like we’re learning all the much in these little opening sections of gameplay, but I think it’s a bit more subtle than it appears. While also setting up the story, the cutscenes also establish that we’re going to be playing as characters who operate outside of the law. We’re bank robbers or mafia drug dealers or whomever. So when we enter the car, what happens if we start violating some traffic laws? If you were to speed, run a red light, or ram another car and drive away, you’d realize that there aren’t any consequences. However, if you rammed a police car or ran over a bunch of pedestrians, the consequences are immediate.
On top of navigation and basic movement, we’re being taught the attitude of the game and the range of acceptable behaviors. Or to put it more bluntly, we’re being taught that we’re expected to behave like assholes. Too much assholery and there will be consequences. But now that we know what we can get away with and what we can risk, we also know what we can abuse. Just like real career criminals, be it your neighborhood mugger or your Wall Street white collar dipshit.
Another great example of an open world game starting off by introducing us to its movement mechanics is 2018’s Marvel’s Spider-Man.
Like the Grand Theft Auto openings, Marvel’s Spider-Man, which we’ll be referring to as just Spider-Man from now on, starts with a cutscene. As we glide across Peter Parker’s apartment, we learn about the status quo of this permeation of Spider-Man and Peter himself. We learn that we’re not dealing with high school Peter Parker, but post college Peter Parker. We see pictures of family and friends, designs for gadgets, headlines about super villains, empty Chinese food boxes and so on and so forth. We gather that he’s single and that he’s broke. But then Peter intercepts a police call. “Alive” by the Warbly Jets kicks in, Peter puts on his suit, considers the past due bill that slid under his door, and leaps out the window.
We watch Peter do some aerials, the camera moves behind Peter, and then we’re in control. No loading screens or transitions or nothing. The song keeps playing, the game teaches us how to swing thanks to some text prompts, and we’re swinging. In a matter of seconds, we are Spider-Man.
It should be acknowledged that there’s a bit of a meta element going on here. Whenever it’s announced that a new Spider-Man game is coming, the first thing people wonder is “Will they get the swinging right?” By making swinging the first thing the player does, the game is putting our fears to rest. “Don’t worry. We nailed it.”
But even if you you’re like me and you never cared about a Spider-Man game before (and you never played the Spider-Man 2 game), there’s still something to be said by how well the developers wrote and executed this opening. In the cutscene, we get a brief glimpse into Peter’s past and present. There’s death. There’s villainy. There’s money and relationship issues. The world hasn’t been kind to Peter in ways that may seem familiar, only our villains don’t have super powers or augmentations. If only an admittedly corny but effective pop rock song can start playing and we can make it across the city as fast as we can, like nothing can touch us.
Fittingly, right as we’re given control, an objective marker pops up on screen. In the later Grand Theft Auto games, the map shows you the quickest way of getting to your destination by highlighting the route, just like a typical GPS app on your phone. You don’t have to take that route, but it’s strongly encouraged that you do. In Spider-Man, you don’t need to know the quickest route. You’re Spider-Man. The rules that govern basic physics, let alone the rules of navigating a city, do not apply to you anymore. The line the brings you to your location doesn’t twist and turn with geography. It’s straight.
All of this is designed not only to teach you how to play the game and move around the city, but to put one thought to the forefront: You are fucking Spider-Man, and that’s awesome! Sure, you have problems. Problems that Peter Parker has as well. But if you get to swing around the rooftops and skyscrapers of New York City at breakneck speeds and never feel so much as a scratch, how bad can those problems really be?
If you can make people feel that freedom, whatever we do next almost doesn’t matter. I’m not a huge devoted Spider-Man fan. I liked some of the Raimi movies and Homecoming and I loved Into the Spider-Verse, but I’ve never read any of the comics, and if I woke up tomorrow and all traces of the Spider-Man IP suddenly vanished, I wouldn’t sweat it that much. But thanks to the way this game throws you into its world, I couldn’t wait to be Spider-Man.
We’ve talked about two games the introduce the mobility and the actual openness of their open worlds well. Let’s look at one that doesn’t do as great a job. Unfortunately, it’s a game that I personally have a lot of affection for, and one I’ve even written about before. That game is 2012’s Sleeping Dogs.
I love the open world environment of this game. I love the map. I love its commitment to action movie physics over realistic psychics. I love all the visual aesthetic choices, from the neon lights to the design differences in each of Hong Kong’s districts to how all of what we see is reflected in the rain. In fact, writing this paragraph makes me want to experience all of it again. Unfortunately, you don’t get to interact with any of the open world aspects until much later than most open world games.
The game starts with a series of cutscenes and some short gameplays sequences. You are Wei Shen. It is revealed that you’re an undercover cop who’s assignment is to infiltrate the Sun On Yee Triad. For the first section of the game, you’re doing grunt work at the night market, an outdoor bazaar open, as you may have guessed, at night. You do some shakedowns and beat-ups and you collect some protection money. Throughout this section, the game does not allow you to leave the area. You do this for a while and then you’re finally allowed access to the rest of the map outside of the market.
All told, this opening section lasts about forty minutes to an hour. For any non-gamers reading this, that’s a pretty long time.
To be fair, Sleeping Dogs has a lot to teach you, and it could’ve been much worse. The majority of this section is designed to teach you its fantastic fist fighting system, as well as other important concepts such as its running and parkour mechanics and various activities like shopping and eating. There’s also a bit of narrative justification if we want to stretch a little. You’re supposed to be a grunt, and it’s supposed to be frustrating.
However, forty minutes is a long time to put off access to the primary way we’ll be engaging with this game. Moreover, once we can finally traverse the rest of the map, there isn’t as much care put into teaching you how to drive and navigate because the game assumes you already know these concepts from other games. To most of us, this is more convenient. However, the downside of this approach is that any given player might take this as the game accidentally admitting that it’s being derivative of other open world games. Luckily, Sleeping Dogs shows more nuance in that department later. But what if it didn’t? What am I supposed to think?
Nobody likes tutorials. I get it. But if done correctly, they not only communicate how to play the game, but how you’re supposed to feel when you’re moving around in it. In Grand Theft Auto, I feel like a criminal, free to engage in some consequence free mayhem. In Spider-Man, I feel free and limitless, ready to fire off webs and corny quips at my foes. In Sleeping Dogs, I feel restricted. I feel the artifice of the game I’m playing, and the first time I played it, I had doubts about wanting to see more.
First impressions matter. Movement makes an open world feel open. Limitations don’t.
Story and Lore
If the lore of a video game universe seems interesting or the narrative of the game gives one a compelling reason to explore a world, they’ll want to explore it. I know. The profundity of that point is overwhelming.
However, there’s a common thread running through the three examples we’ve discussed so far: All three of these games take place in worlds that operate like our own. Of course, Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos isn’t a real city, Spider-Man doesn’t actually exist, and there’s a good chance you aren’t affiliated with any gangs in Hong Kong. However, Hong Kong is a tangible place, as is New York City, and Los Santos is as close an approximation of Los Angeles as any video game has come close to rendering thus far. If we could jump into our televisions and walk around in these worlds, we could find ourselves living a life not unlike the ones we live in the real world because all three our designed, more or less, to mimic the societies and cities we actually live in. You don’t need to be taught about their history because, to varying degrees, you already know them.
But there are, of course, open world games that take place in entirely fictional universes, whether that be alternative universes that follow a different timeline than ours or other planets altogether or somewhere in between. Of course, maybe we want to explore these new worlds because they may have a different geography and aesthetic than our own. But we also want to know what makes them tick, or even more simply, what’s there. Or maybe we don’t because the game does a poor job presenting the lore. But either way, when I say “lore and narrative,” what I’m really talking about is presenting us with enough intrigue about the world we’re about to explore to make us want to explore it, then taking the leash off.
One good example of using lore as an incentive to explore the world comes in Horizon Zero Dawn. Now, I’ve written about my relationship with Horizon’s open world, albeit briefly and rushed, but here’s the basic set-up of the world: We’re in a post-post apocalyptic Earth overrun by robotic dinosaurs, most humans live in tribes, and societies are beginning to take shape again. (I don’t remember if the game ever states the specifics of the location out loud, but it’s heavily implied, if not said, to be in the American southwest and parts of Mexico.) No record of the Earth’s history has been found, nobody has any memories of it nor have any memories been passed down from older generations, and we don’t know where these dinosaurs came from. Nobody knows what happened, and this is what we spend the story finding out.
The main point I made in that old article is that Horizon uses its lore to incentivize exploration so affectively that it not only made me want to see every corner of the map, but also a bunch of open world shit that I normally don’t bother doing. Collection stuff and the like. I also talked about the game’s decision to literally fence off most of the map until the story breaks into its equivalent of act two, and it’s that choice I want to expand on.
Aloy, the character we play as, is a member of the Nora Tribe. (Well, she’s actually an outcast living on Nora lands, but… for the purposes of this article, you don’t need to know or care.) The Nora believe that a fertility goddess named All-Mother created all life, including humans and machines. They believe that All-Mother’s physical embodiment is a mountain, aptly named All-Mother Mountain. The tribe lives in, on, and around the mountain in what’s called The Sacred Land (it’s really Colorado and the Rocky Mountain area), an area that is surrounded by a large well-guarded wall. As this mountain is their god and their home, they take a deeply isolationist view of the world. Leaving the confines of The Sacred Lands is strictly forbidden. If you choose to leave, you’re never allowed to come back unless the High Matriarchs, the leaders of the Nora, gave you permission to leave in the first place. (Guess what that break into act two is?)
The Sacred Lands that you spend the first section of the game are not small. However, we get hints of what’s going on outside of the wall. Other tribes with more advanced technology and different cultures. Other climates and geography. Other places and other people the Nora have had conflicts with in the past. On top of all this, of course, is the lingering mystery of what happened to this world and why things are the way they are. (As well as who Aloy’s parents are, but again, not strictly important for this article.)
So when you finally get to leave The Sacred Lands, I wanted to cheer. There’s so much I wanted to know, and once the gates open, there’s nothing stopping you from exploring every shadow under every spec of dust.
I saw huge portions of the maps. I saw new cities. I saw deserts. I saw jungles. I saw frightening hubs of mysterious technology and new systems of belief and culture and robot dinosaurs big as the eye can see. I learned more and more about the world. I didn’t have complete answers (and I wouldn’t until towards the end of the game), but I knew enough to understand the machinations. Or at the very least, that all this happened not because of some goddess mountain, but because of the actions of human beings who lived before Aloy was born. Then at some point, before the story would point me back towards home, I went back to The Sacred Lands. I don’t remember why.
In the beginning of the game, the Nora once seemed powerful, imposing, and wise. Then I came back, and I couldn’t help but see them in a lesser light. To be fair, at a certain point, I began to feel the same way about the more advanced non-isolationist tribes as well, and I’m aware of the negative implications of this attitude and how they relate to how we view our own native tribes. However, it wasn’t a feeling that all these people come off as primitives because I know a bit of the truth that they don’t. It was that I was a smarter, more capable person than I was before I left. The Matriarchs felt like they could ruin my life before. Now I could push them aside like they were nothing.
Another game that I feel uses its narrative to maximize your curiosity about the world your free to explore at your leisure is Fallout 3. Or at least I think it does because I’ve never played the original games and Fallout 3 came out during my nostalgic years.
In an opening cutscene, Ron Perlman explains that in the year 2077, an apocalyptic nuclear war broke out, and much of humanity only survived because they took shelter in massive underground facilities called Vaults. After the surface became habitable again, the Vaults opened. Except for one. Vault 101. A vault in the ruins of Washington D.C.
We then play through our childhood. We’re born. You choose a name for yourself. (The last time I played, I named myself Taystee because Orange is the New Black had just come out and I was wasn’t feeling creative.) You’re a baby and you learn the movement controls. We then flash forward to your ninth birthday where you learn some other gameplay stuff, and then we play through a little bit of high school where we learn even more gameplay stuff.
Throughout all of this, we learn that nobody has ever left Vault 101 and that we’re basically living in a dictatorship where the leader of Vault 101, the Overseer, has control over everything. One day, your father, a scientist, escapes. The Overseer goes berserk and you have to escape yourself before he kills you.
Up until this point, thanks to the Overseer’s lies, you believed that the outside world was toxic and uninhabitable. You emerge outside, and you discover that while the world is a bit of a shithole, you can breathe, and thus, you can roam.
I don’t think the narrative hook of Fallout 3, finding your dad to find out why he left, is as strong as that of Horizon Zero Dawn. (The later of which I didn’t really get into, but feel free to take me at my word.) But I did have a sense of wonder. True, I grew up in the D.C. area, and I was curious to see how accurate the game’s representation was. (It gets all the names right and the architecture is close enough, but that’s about it. It’s not really a big deal though, as the actual Washington/Maryland/Virginia area would not make a good video game map for reasons I’ll get into some day.) But more so, I simply wanted to know what was there. If I’m alive, than who or what else is out there?
So upon exiting the Vault, I made a left. Not long after, I was killed by a group of what we’ll later know as Raiders. (Crazed bandits, essentially.) “Shit.” I thought, “I better find someone or something who can help me out.” Then I found Megaton, the town built around an unexploded nuclear bomb. I did story stuff there, I got some guns and completed some side quests. I learned more about the world and how it works. It’s a bleak world, but it’s not impossible to spread some joy and find some humor. Then I left. I would continue dying a lot, but I was more prepared.
Eventually, I become a shaker in this world. There’s a town in Fallout 3 called Paradise Falls that runs the de facto slave market in the area. I stumbled into it by accident. When I found out what was inside those walls, I made a choice to enter. When I left Paradise Falls, there were a whole lot of freed slaves and a whole lot of dead slavers. In the beginning of the game, I didn’t have the skills or the sense of identity to make this decision. But by the time I found Paradise Falls, I knew what I could do and who I wanted to be in this world. I had the skills and the resources to do what I thought was right. So I acted.
Again, Fallout 3’s main story is largely boring and forgettable. Or at the very least, it’s story isn’t as linked to exploration as Horizon’s narrative. Instead, Fallout 3 opted for a more naturalistic approach. You’ve just emerged into a world that up until this point, you thought was toxic. What do you do? If you’re like me, you go left with no real plan. But a more intelligent non-high school aged person might, say, look around. Maybe they’ll notice the giant fenced off town lurking on the horizon.
One way or another, so long as you keep playing, you will adapt. But the naturalism never stops. There’s safety in shelter, but the rewards for venturing out are great despite the dangers of the bandits or the mutated animals. You feel like you’re slowly mastering the world, but you’re never entirely safe provided you’re outside of a protected town. At first, leaving and exploring is scary. Then you think nothing of it. You could stay safe in Megaton, but you’d get bored exceptionally quickly, and you wouldn’t get to see Rivet City or The Republic of Dave (a dumb sojourn I love for reasons I’ll never understand) or any more of the strange and interesting world you now inhabit. After all, you can’t kill a bunch of scumbag slavers in safety.
The gimmick must be served, so now that we’ve looked at two positive examples of games using their lore to draw us, let’s use one that flooded me with that familiar overwhelming feeling that puts me off. That game is 2015’s The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt.
In a way, it’s weird and little unfair for me to talk about this game. I haven’t played either of the first two games in the series and I’ve tried playing this particular game twice, and both times I bounced off fairly quickly. If I had to quickly summarize why, my answer would be “Too much.” There are were too many systems introduced at once for me to keep track of and there was too much backstory and lore that I was expected to either know or look up. I may have been fine will all of this if I enjoyed the actual gameplay of The Witcher 3, but sadly I didn’t.
Yet, whenever I hear the words The Witcher 3, I’m filled with a sense of shame and failure. The Witcher 3, in a lot of ways that are apparent even in the little amount of time I’ve spent with it, is brilliant. Particularly, its visual aesthetic, the way the side quests weave into one another, and the individual writing of said side quests. I love how much The Witcher 3 borrows from Slavic and Polish cultures as opposed to yet another fantasy world that looks like something out of King Arthur, and I love how much care and consideration has gone into the writing. Though I never saw much of the main campaign, everything I’ve heard about it sounds fascinating.
The world of The Witcher 3 is incredible, and it’s why there will always be a part of me that wants to see every part of it. My problem isn’t with the lore itself. My problem is with the way the game introduces that lore.
The first thing we see when we start the game is a cutscene explaining how and why there are supernatural beings in this world, that Witchers are people who hunt them for money, and that a lot of people frown upon Witchers because they study dark blasphemous arts. This scene is animated in a style reminiscent of comic books or more traditional hand drawn media. We’re then led to the main menu, animated in the style the rest of the game. Once we hit play, we watch a full CGI cutscene of Geralt and Vesemir, our protagonist and a fellow Witcher, tracking the movements of a woman we’ll later know as Yennefer through the ruins of a battlefield. We then cut back to the animation style of the game as Geralt and Vesemir sleep in the field. We play through Geralt’s dream. A little flirting with Yennefer. A little bit of training with a little girl named Ciri. A little combat training. Then Ciri is killed by a group we will later know as The Wild Hunt. Geralt wakes up, he and Vesemir discuss the dream, Geralt worries Ciri’s in trouble, and it’s revealed that Geralt received a letter from Yennefer and that’s why they’re trying to find her.
Three different animation styles, the broad strokes of the background of this whole universe, introductions to multiple characters, and the introduction to a complex combat system that involves spell casting as well as basic sword combat. All of this happens in the first twenty five to thirty minutes of the game. When I said I felt overwhelmed, this is what I meant.
To be fair, a lot of this probably would’ve been easier to track if I had played the first two games or had bothered to learn anything about this universe before starting The Witcher 3. Still, this game doesn’t throw you in the deep end so much as slams you in, and I’ve never even stuck my toes in the water before. After this point, at least in my experience, it never really lets up. There’s still a million systems to master, a million bits of lore to learn, and a million other things to do. At a certain point, it was just easier for me to stop.
If there’s a point to this section, it’s this: Interesting lore is valuable in and of itself. But it’s also the pace in which it’s introduced. Horizon and Fallout 3 pace out their lore to allow you some time to digest all of what they need you to know and understand why it matters. Then once you’re comfortable, it starts building. The Witcher 3 does everything all at once, and the onus is on you to keep up. I’m truly envious of those who stuck with it. But I felt left behind.
Consistency, Elegance, and Breath of the Wild
I am not a game designer. I have no business telling anyone how they should make their game. As I said, I’m only pointing out what works for me, and there are a million ways to introduce an open world in a way that feels inviting and not immediately punishing or intimidating. However, I think there’s only one real rule: However you introduce your world, at least be consistent.
The essence of my complaint about the way Sleeping Dogs hands you control is that it spends forty minutes not being an open world game, then all of a sudden it’s an open world game. I got used to one style of game structure. Then I was thrown into another. Open world games beginning with scripted gameplay sections is nothing new, and it can even be an effective way of teaching players how to play if the game involves a particularly nuanced gameplay concept. Grand Theft Auto V, for example, starts with its prologue partially to teach us the concept of jumping between the perspectives of multiple playable characters. But spend too much time guiding us through scripted sequences or cutscenes, and the pacing starts to feel clunky.
On top of that, I also respond well to a lighter touch. I look at some of my favorite open world games, and the one thing a lot of them have in common is a gentleness in handing over control. They introduce you to huge gameplay concepts, but in a smaller, gentler package. They want to make sure you understand as much as you can, but they want to be subtle. They want to gently nudge you into a big open world. They don’t want to push you off a cliff and give you the finger on the way down.
Elegance in teaching the controls. Elegance in exposition. Elegance in creating a game where these two factors jive with one another and making sure one concept leads to the next as smoothly as possible.
One of the strongest openings to an open world video game I can recall in the last few years is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
We begin on a black screen with the opening title and then a light. A woman’s voice tells us to open our eyes. She calls us Link. Link, a boy, then awakens in a cave, floating in a bath above a giant glowing contraption. He gets up and picks up an object. The voice explains that this is the Sheikah Slate, and it will help us out after our “long slumber.” (The Slate is basically a fantasy tablet.) A door opens. We observe more details about the cave. Clearly, this is a manmade structure. We open some chests and retrieve some clothes, and we also learn the basics of the inventory system. We see a pedestal with an orange light, and the voice tells us to use the Slate on it. Once we do so, the orange light turns blue, and another door opens. A light shines in. The voice says, “Link… you are the light—our light—that must shine upon Hyrule once again. Now, go…” We learn how to climb and how to sprint, we get out of the manmade cave, and then we’re outside, where we’re treated to the breathtaking beauty of Hyrule, as well as a looming castle and a volcano erupting in the distance, and what looks like a church and an old man by a fire close by.
I went through the effort of describing all this for a reason. Narratively speaking, we don’t learn much. We are a boy named Link, we are in a land called Hyrule, and we’ve been asleep for a long time. (We will later learn that Link’s been asleep for a hundred years.) We also know that Hyrule is in some sort of trouble, but we don’t know from what, nor do we seem to remember who we are or why we’re here.
So we have a narrative reason for leaving the cave and venturing out into this world: What the hell is going on? But we’re further incentivized to explore because during the cave scene, though we may not know it yet, we were just taught about half of the mechanics we need to know in order to make our way through this world. We know how to move, how to run, how to climb, how to open chests, how to open specially marked doors, how to use the clothing section of the inventory screen, and much more. We were even taught more subtle concepts as well. We now know that if we see an object with that bright orange color, we may be able to interact with it and we know which spaces were built by this world’s inhabitants and what was built by nature.
We learn all of this in the span of about five minutes.
Of course, there’s a lot the game still has to teach. Soon, we will be introduced to combat and cooking systems, as well as environmental factors and upgrading your health and stamina and so on and so forth. I also don’t mean to say that every game has to teach this much in so little. I’m saying that I’ve played games that take a lot more time to explain a lot less, and at no point in these opening five minutes does it ever feel overwhelming or that I’m struggling to keep track of what’s going on. Granted, narratively speaking, it isn’t saying much (yet) and Breath of the Wild isn’t as story focused a game as The Witcher 3 or Horizon. But it goes to show that none of this has to be that complicated.
All of this has me thinking about Mass Effect. Again, I’d argue that while it has open world elements, it’s not what we think of when we think “open world game.” But now that I think about it, it wasn’t just my attachment to the Citadel that made me afraid to leave it. It’s because nothing in the game was messaging, “Hey, go out and explore!” The game was teaching you to play it as a somewhat linear RPG. You begin with a linear mission. Then it puts you in an open space and keeps you there for a fairly significant amount of time. Then it launches you into space.
To some, I’m sure that inspires a sense of wonder. But I felt naked. It’s not that I don’t want to explore or that I need a game to hold my hand. I just need to feel armed. Sometimes, I mean that in a literal sense. After all, put a weapon in my hand and point me at a thing, and I can probably figure it out. But I also want to be armed with a little knowledge. What kind of world am I entering, and how am I going to make sense of it? Like in life real, there are certain things you’re going to have to figure out on your own. Still, it would be nice to have some pointers.
