Whole new worlds
Open-world games made some of game designs most significant leaps forward last generation. We saw established open-world franchises take their biggest, boldest steps, and saw genres we thought of as set in stone (read: a bit boring), like driving games, try their hand at the formula. Theres something about setting off to journey through an open landscape, constrained only by a developers imagination, that instantly captures ours - not to mention quells any of those pesky urges to leave the house, learn to cook or create beautiful music. Ugh.
Hubs make for more variety
Remember that tropical beach in Skyrim? And what about the fully explorable English countryside village in GTA V, complete with a quaint, family-run post office to burgle? You havent had a catastrophic brain event, I made them up. Jokes on you, it was all a ruse. But, like all the best ruses, it contains a lesson in game design at the end. While a traditional open world offers a huge swath of land to look around, its more or less hamstrung by having to, like, make sense. Hub worlds can ignore this sticky geographical issue.
Being smaller means you can actually be bigger
Some games simply dont allow for an open world in the way weve come to expect it. The recent return of the space sim has led to several games that use the hub format out of necessity rather than any kind of overt design philosophy, built to offer millions of locations to look around, fight in and be damaged by on an existential and spiritual level.
Hub design gives procedural generation space to work
The likes of Elite also raise another particularly modern issue for non-linear exploration. As we crave more and more from our game worlds, developers cant physically keep up. Unless we want a group of haggard, sleep-deprived nerds whove worked their fingers down to bloodied nubs through sheer force of keyboard presses, they need a way to make big content without spending their entire lives on it.
Smaller environments mean you can put more in them
Why cant I go into this laundromat? you scream. I mean, it has a door, I can see it there. Yes, it has a less detailed texture than doors Ive been allowed to use previously, but it is certainly a door. I recognise all the door-like features, barring one. The only thing missing is my ability to go in and snoop around peoples baskets of soiled clothes. Ive been there, friend. I too have wanted to see every mundane detail of a citys thousands of buildings but, again, it can prove too much work for designers otherwise trying to accurately simulate a dangerous crime spree.
Intricate level design is better than size for sizes sake
Just as building multiple areas lets developers focus on the detail of each, it also lets them focus on the design of it, too. Game design as opposed to art design, that is. I wasnt suggesting Just Cause 2 takes place in a featureless world of undulating white topology.
Hubs are a simple solution to the old fast-travel conundrum
This ones less about design, and more about how you, the player, are a fickle, spoilt, toddler. Dont worry, I am too. We expect the world on a plate or, at the very least, an easily accessible inventory map. The problem with a traditional open world is that its unwieldy - a single, gigantic bit of architecture were expected to look around ourselves. Which is why fast travel was invented. But then we also complain that it becomes too easy to get around without seeing what the game actually offers between its major landmarks. So a game like the oft-overlooked Dragons Dogma comes along, makes fast travel a tough and arbitrary experience, and we all get up in arms about it.
Right now, its the most practical thing to do
Of course, behind all of this pontificating, theres a fairly major point I havent addressed yet - making a decent open world is really hard. Los Santos is an incredible place, but it also took five years, hundreds of people and millions upon millions of dollars to create.Throw in the fact that a new console generation means almost every third-party developer will be spending the next year or so performing the programming equivalent of trying to make a sculpture out of thick yoghurt in the dark, and theres a reason relatively simplistic hub design is so popular right now, in the early days of the new consoles collective regime.
Todays smaller worlds will help shape tomorrows bigger ones
But perhaps that practicality is a necessary stop-gap and nothing more - a way of capitalising on our machines newfound power while everyone relearns how to make huge, complex games. Were fairly certain Just Cause 3 will return to the single open-world format (which works, primarily, because getting across the map using a grappling hook and parachute is about as much fun as anything else in the series), and who knows what else is on its way?
New frontiers
The recent, perhaps necessary, boom in hub-based games raises the question of whether anyones really perfected the open-world yet. Theres more to come, and when it arrives, Im willing to bet youll have seen its early form in the hub games Ive mentioned. Any further thoughts? Liking the way open-world games are going, or do you crave a traditional Grand Theft Auto 6, stat? Let me know in the comments.
