One Ubisoft veteran reckons the key to making a good open-world game is embracing the genre's inherent slapstick comedy and giving up some of that authored control.
Big old open worlds are just as popular as they've ever been. This year alone we've seen Assassin's Creed Shadows and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 let players loose in sometimes scarily dense maps, people are still uncovering all the silly little details in Death Stranding 2, plus GTA 6 and Ghost of Yotei are also still on the horizon.
Looking back on the genre he somewhat helped shape in an interview with Edge Magazine, Assassin's Creed 3 and Far Cry 4 creative director Alex Hutchinson said developers "need to put the player in deep" to really make an open world sing. "You need to immerse players in a satirical world and let them stumble across the bizarre situations and the excessive consequences."
"I think in open-world games, specifically, once you give up the idea that there's authorial timing, and you say that, no, the player is in charge of the timing - and it's like slapstick, and you're just setting up the opportunity for jokes or scenarios that are funny - then suddenly it becomes the interactive comedy, and then that's funny again," Hutchinson said.
For all the criticism, deserved and otherwise, that Ubisoft games get, you can't deny that they're really good at putting systems in place and giving players the tools to make their own fun. What starts as a simple outpost infiltration in Far Cry 4, say, turns into a hectic elephant vs. human beef before you paraglide the heck outta there. Maybe that's what makes the best open-world games tick.
