A true open world is the dream of many players. It is hard to make a world on that scale with the necessary detail. If you’ve ever went traveling, you’ll realise that the planet we live in is quite big. Really, almost insurmountably so. And getting that sense of size into a videogame is hard. We need some limitations so we don’t just go off in every direction endlessly.
But what if you could? What if you saw somewhere in the distance and you really could reach there without anything holding you back? It’s a hard thing to achieve by all means, but a few games have done of. And the freedom is grants is unprecedented. Even an empty open-world can give you a terrifying sense of scale if it really is seamless.
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Now, this might be a bit of a contentious choice, as Final Fantasy 15 is far from you traditional idea of an open-world game. Indeed, it’s fairly restrictive in many regards, and much of the later freedom was granted through updates. But all the same, there is a country here to explore, a large one at that, and you can reach every inch of it.
Final Fantasy 15 is very much about the journey, and so the scale of the world is important. You spend the whole game driving across the roads, or running through fields with chocobo. And then you get a ship and can sail the oceans. Finally, your trusty Regalia can become an airship of its own and soar through the skies. And you can reach everywhere, even if there isn’t always a lot to find.
Monolith Soft is well-known for the large worlds the studios make, and the incredible optimisation done for each of them. Truly incredible work. But for all the larges games it has made, none of them have hit the same sense of scale as Xenoblade Chronicles X. Originally restricted to the Wii, Xenoblade Chronicles X is an open-world in scale few can match.
Set on the planet of Mira, you are forced to go everywhere on foot for vast swathes of the game, and it is then you realise how massive the game is. When you finally get your Skell, a mech, you can move through it much faster and reach brand-new areas, giving you a whole new perspective. When you finally get flight, you learn even more of the world’s crevices, and you can’t help but admire that no matter how you are moving through the world, it all feels balanced, and you really can reach everywhere.
The Zelda games have always been about a degree of freedom, offering you plenty of reason to explore, with later games promoting non-linearity. This was brought to its most extreme in Breath of the Wild. Set in the full expanse of Hyrule, everywhere in sight could be reached, from the very moment you pick up your paraglider.
Yes, there are some cliffs to the north that you’re able to’t reach, but you can still climb them until you run out of stamina rather than being forcibly stopped. And literally being able to end the game whenever pushes this idea even further. Hyrule is a truly open-world where you can go wherever you want, whenever. Even if that’s the final boss before you’ve spoken to another character.
After years of waiting, Dragon’s Dogma came not just as a realisation of some of the original’s less-developed ideas, but with a sufficiently different vision so as to let it stand apart from its predecessor. And a large part of that vision came in creating a very large, very grounded world that felt like you really had to journey through.
Every step in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is meaningful. You will tread the same paths over and over again until you may walk them without ever touching a map. Yet even with heavy movement,the game never stops you reaching anywhere. Hop on the back of a griffon and allow them to take you far afield. Don’t think you can reach an area by climbing? Just drop on it from above and revive yourself. Even if there’s nothing there, the game will only reward your curiosity.
The Grand Theft Auto games have always been renowned more as a city simulation than deep open worlds, but the two go hand-in-hand. Even a relatively sparse open-world can feel fathomless if the people within it act organically. And Grand Theft Auto 5, blending a dense city with a sprawling mountainscape, does so beautifully.
Any stretch of land you go to will have people going about their lives, from the narrowest allies to the most barren woods. Easter eggs hide around every corner, and nowhere feels truly thoughtless. You can take to the skies at will and go wherever, but the depths do no allude you either. Get in a sub and plunge into the inky ocean. Unless you suffer from thalassophobia, of course.
Kerbal Space Program
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In Kerbal Space Program, your job is to reach for the stars. You must develop and execute the space program for the Kerbals, a race of aliens.
Really,what broader horizons are there than space?Kerbal Space Program is all about that, stretching to the vast expanses of space and settling there. There’s not an obscene amount to do once you reach those broad horizons, but that’s for good reason - actually getting there is next to impossible.
Most of the time you spend in Kerbal Space Program will be on earth planning your take-off and its return. You can’t send your little Kerbals into space without a return plan, after all. But at least you really can send them anywhere, from the tarmac of the take-off platform, to the vast reaches of space.
Death Stranding is all about reconnecting the disconnected America, be that metaphorically or literally. It is a grand adventure, one that will have you walking a hell of a lot more than you might have expected, and wearing out more than a few pairs of boots. But if there isn’t anything else like it out there.
Yes, the landscape is not reminiscent of actual America, and is in fact styled after Iceland. But that does not take away from the sheer scale. Once you enter the second region of the game, you will see the far-away mountains, which feel like nothing but window dressing. Nope, you can and will have to go there. And you’re not getting any vehicles up there. It’s step by trudging step.
The Just Cause games, beginning specifically with Just Cause 2, always felt like what Grand Theft Auto would be if it leaned fully into the absurdity. Explosions galore, yes, but also a character who can zip around like a high-tech superhero with pseudo-science weapons to make ever greater, more bizarre domino effect of explosions.
But what makes Just Cause all the more memorable is the ability to go everywhere. You can cause havoc everywhere, and you should. The game gives you countless weapons and vehicles to do so, and wants you to explore every inch of the world to destroy it. But what’s all the more suprising is that even among those massive explosions are smaller joys, from islands shaped like pie to statues that follow you when you look away.
Kerbal Space Program may let you explore the expanse of space, but it is restricted to our own solar system. No Man’s Sky is galaxies ahead. Literally. you may surpass not just star systems, but the entire galaxy if you want. There are literally no boundaries, from the most obscure moon hiding in orbit, the the largest gas giant.
Every star you see is a new sytem to explore. Every world can be landed on and explored. Every inch can be terraformed. Even reaching the very centre of the universe just leads you into another one. You can just keep going, deeper and deeper, and almost endless number of planets to explore. If you see it, it can be a destination.
While there is no frontier more endless than space itself, it lacks a degree of familiarity. Our sense of scale is determined by the familiar, and it is only in the familiar that we can truly appreciate scale. And there is basically no other game in existence that quite literally our very planet on a 1:1 scale like Microsoft Flight Simulator.
So massive and detailed that it requires constant cloud connection to even function, Microsoft Flight Simulator offers an unprecedented representation of our world. Real planes, real weather, real airports, all in their real locations. It is the planet, all of it, and you can go anywhere you want. Some locations will be less-detailed, especially when it comes to urban centres, but the scale is there. And there really is nothing else that can satisfy the urge of going literally everywhere like this.
