We end up using the Elder Scrolls series as an example a lot because it’s the biggest budget, most marketed, longest running fantasy Open World series out there, but it’s a good example of the first design philosophy. In the second structure, you compose the world as a patchwork of loosely defined areas, that each have their own adventures running through them. In the first structure, you build out towns, dungeons and encounters and then you slot them into the world as they fit. You can conceptualize it as a game made up of town, dungeons and Open World encounters or you can conceptualize it as a game made up of modules in the old D and D sense.
So, Open World games: There are at least two fundamentally different structures for thinking about how to construct an Open World game. So, it falls on us as designers, when we have the luxury, to examine our premises before we dive into the thick of the actual design process. If you view Action RPG combat as a way to make the player more connected to the character rather than seeing it as a weigh station between moments of character development, you get Demon’s Souls instead of Fable III. If you think of jumping over a pit is being about precision, you get Super Meat Boy, but if you think about it as being about speed, you get an Endless Runner. People can approach the same design problem and choose to solve it in radically different ways depending on their perspective of the problem, which in turn, results in radically different games. Today, we’re going to go over the same problem because it lets us to talk about something we rarely get to discuss, the fact that sometimes when designing, the most important thing is how you conceptualize the problem you’re approaching.