Since quite a lot of people have asked about how we crafted our 'open world', here we go!💡😀 I generally see a lot of 'open world fatigue' in gamers at the moment. The problem here is this: Procedural Generation Tech of today is just still not good enough to actually create good level design. Most developers who make open worlds do it because it's fairly easy to just create a large terrain and then use some perlin noise heightmap to create valleys and hills and et voila, here's your game world. Cheap and easy, but you also kinda get what you paid for: The problem with this approach is that you get vast stretches of emptiness that just aren't fun to traverse through. And you can see that in almost all open world games out there. Vast stretches of nothingness that were never touched by a designer to create really interesting moments. So what do most companies do on top? They go in and level design on top of this randomly generated terrain. That works, but you need an army of level designers to fill up these huge worlds with actual design, which is why you see most of these games having good design in this spot, but then not in all these other spots. Sometimes less actually is more! 👍🤣 By now I'm so trained to this that I can very clearly tell which spots in an open world game were touched by a designer and which ones weren't. And because of this, our approach to creating a huge world was different. We just spent a decade meticulously hand-crafting entire seamless worlds on Ori, so we aimed to apply the same quality and care to @wickedgame: Instead of just procedurally generating a huge world that then suffers from vast swaths of emptiness, we instead hand craft everything inch by inch and then we stitch everything together, create intersections and constantly iterate on the moment to moment gameplay. The goal in our level design department was that there would never be moments where in order to go from point A to point B, you'd simply hold the analog stick forward for 2 minutes. We don't think that's fun, that's just turning your game into a walking simulator at times. So, whenever you play your next open world game, keep your eyes open for this stuff, you'll quickly be able to discern what I'm saying here! Maybe in the future AI will be able to actually create interesting level designs, but with the Tech of today, we still need extremely talented designers that know how to build amazing levels by heart, that get the time to build a huge world with love and care. Based on what I'm reading online, I think most gamers appreciate good level design! Most gamers can't directly explain why they're so turned off by your typical 'open world' levels at this point and this here is the reason. I think most gamers agree that we don't need 10.000 planets or a quintillion areas in our games: We just need one big, intricately designed space that actual designers put their blood, sweat and tears into creating! It's just more fun to play in an area that a designer spent weeks and months on instead of just traversing endlessly through a randomly generated world that's large, but completely lacking of actual design.
Just think about how procedural generation works to understand this further. A lot of people who played our #WickedInside build were tickled to see that we put secrets under a bridge or behind a waterfall. Or a cave full of secrets underneath an old fortress. Or a cellar door in an old tower that's locked by a key that you'll only find later in the game that then leads to a whole new interior that's filled to the brim with cool stuff! None of these things can be done through procedural generation alone since procedural generation doesn't understand these 'rules' and design approaches. Here's what a typical terrain that an engine can produce looks like. Looks familiar?
@thomasmahler Do you think they did this with Zelda BoTW / TotK? Because as great as those games are, they definitely have some vast open spaces with nothing in the middle
@thomasmahler Thanks for the insight. I wonder what you think of things like transmog or even allowing build resets in a run? It is always interesting to see perspectives from inside the industry.
@thomasmahler I completely agree on the overall open world feel I get from some games, even the most popular ones. I hate having to walk for 15, 20 minutes straight just to get to the next quest objective. They feel empty and dull.