2366: Bigger Open Worlds Aren’t Always Better

Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed has 420 collectible flags scattered around its open world. They don’t actually do anything other than unlock a few achievements — they don’t give protagonist Altair any new abilities or open up any fun bonus content in the game. They’re just there for the sake of it.

WayForward’s Shantae has 12 collectible fireflies scattered around its open world. Collecting all of them is the only way for protagonist Shantae to learn a dance that allows her to heal herself.

Shantae also has 20 collectible Baby Warp Squids hidden in its four dungeons — five per dungeon. Every four Warp Squids allows Shantae to learn a dance that lets her teleport to one of the game’s five towns, providing a convenient shortcut across the game world.

With modern games (I know Assassin’s Creed isn’t that new now, but Ubisoft is still using its basic model for most of its games) it seems the assumption is the bigger the game world, the better — it doesn’t matter if there’s not all that much to do in the game world, so long as you can spout the tired old PR line about “see that mountain over there? You can actually go to it.”

It’s not true, though. I mean, a big open world is impressive to look at, particularly if it’s rendered in lovely graphics — heavily modded Skyrim and vanilla The Witcher 3 spring to mind here — but if said open world consists of vast tracts of nothingness between areas with actual activities to participate in, then there’s really not a lot of point to it all, save to give the player a sense of scale.

Shantae, despite being a Game Boy Color game, is an open world game, presented from a side-on perspective as a platform game: the subgenre commonly referred to these days as “Metroidvania”. But the world of her adventure isn’t unnecessarily sprawling and filled with vast tracts of nothingness; it’s compact and focused, with every area designed around a distinct visual theme, allowing you to immediately know where you are in the world, which eventually loops right around on itself if you get to one of the far edges of it.

This is good design in the context of it being a video game. Sure, the landscapes of Shantae may not be particularly realistic, but they make for a fun game experience that doesn’t feel like it’s dragging things out unnecessarily. It’s also paced such that the player always feels like they’re making progress, and the optional sidequests — the Warp Squids and the Fireflies — feel eminently achievable for most players and provide a tangible, genuinely useful reward in both instances. Compare and contrast with Assassin’s Creed’s 420 flags that don’t do anything, where only the most dedicated achievement whores will bother participating in this pointless waste of everyone’s time.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a big game — I’m enjoying The Witcher 3 a great deal. But if my game is big, there better be something to do or something interesting to see in every square inch of that landscape, otherwise I’m just going to fast travel from one corner of the world to the other. And I’m certainly not going to find all those fucking flags.