What Does It Actually Take To Make An Open World Video Game?

It feels like the ultimate next step for any gaming franchise these days is to break free of the chains, pull up the anchor, and take it into an open world. Something about the liberation and freedom to do what you want within the framework of a universe is obviously extremely appealing, and when it’s done well you can’t beat the immersion and experience it offers

But what goes into making an open world game for a developer? It’s a daunting task. There’s so much more to consider and contemplate when you’re making a world in which everything is theoretically possible. You need to build a convincing world, populate it with believable characters, and give people the illusion they can do whatever they like.
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands faced this exact issue. The Ghost Recon series of tactical shooters has traditionally been set in large but controlled environments. When the team at Ubisoft decided to pull it out into a full open world for Wildlands they were hit with a whole raft of new challenges.
“Ghost Recon has traditionally allowed you a certain amount of choice,” said game designer Dominic Butler. “But with Wildlands we wanted to really expand that choice, and give players the opportunity to use their environment, the verticality, the 360º control… it just made sense.”

Wildlands is set in an alternate not-too-distant future in which a drug cartel named Santa Blanca has taken over Bolivia – the world’s biggest producer of coca, the key ingredient in cocaine – and turned it into a narco-state. You play as a team of elite special operations unit called the Ghosts who drop in with the mission of destabilising and destroying the cartel, eroding its influence in Bolivia.
So the plot and narrative clearly lends itself to a huge open world. But Butler says it’s not just about that – a game needs to justify why its even operating in an open world to begin with. 

“It’s one thing to say I’m in an open world,” Butler says. “But why am I there? Why have we made that – is it just to say ‘oh, we’ve made an open world shooter? Tick!’”

“Or does it actually bring something interesting, something we’ve never seen before?”
The challenge in building this world is that Bolivia is obviously a real nation, with its own myriad environments and cultures. To create the world, Ubisoft sent a team of 1 to Bolivia to painstakingly photograph and video the country – capturing terabytes of footage – so it could be replicated by their artists.
They did a pretty good job of that:
Benoit Martinez, the game’s art director, laid out the means by which a game studio actually creates a world like this. Though artists sculpt and create the landscape in accordance with the photos and videos they’ve been given to work with, the thought of individually laying out the game’s 7 million trees and 800 million kilometres of road is difficult to imagine.
Once artists have created the trees, rocks and features in accordance with the 11 different ecosystems the initial team identified – from rainforests, to deserts, to snowcapped mountains – they are laid algorithmically, along with the roads. Algorithms create a believable and interesting network of roads and features that the player will eventually drive along and survey.
Butler says one of the big difficulties with open world games is finding the right balance once the world has been created. Sure, you’ve got this big, beautiful open world – but what do you actually do in it? Of course, Ghost ReconWildlands has a very obvious remit: you’re there to fight a drug cartel and take down its lieutenants. But how about beyond that?
Though i’s easy to think of plenty of open world games which feel like a big open sandbox with not much to do in it outside of the main quest, Butler argues that its very easy to create a game that has too much to do, therefore losing a sense of purpose.
Even more than in other games, the design of the story has to be tight with the game mechanics, according to Butler. If a player is going through the motions and engaging with mechanics that do not make sense in the context of the world or the story, the narrative dissonance is very strong. 
Bolivia, in the game, is packed full of people. Could a game tell their stories? Sure, says Butler, but only in the context of what this game is: a story about special forces operatives trying to take down a narco-state. They probably wouldn’t be helping the townsfolk with their regular concerns.
He gives the example of racing quests – probably one of the very easiest things you can put into an open world game. A no-brainer, right? People love to take a game’s vehicles for a spin. Not so much, says Butler:

It’s easy to have too much, to make people feel like they don’t know what they should be doing. You need to make sure all the systems in the world are ultimately aimed towards your end goal – in this case hunting down and destroying Santa Blanca. We don’t have missions, for example, where you need to find a farmer’s lost lambs. 


When we made the game, before we laid any of the content down and we had a rough kind of environment, we let our testers take the game’s vehicles for a spin, let them drive all over the map so we could find out where people wanted to go and what they liked to do. And obviously, people like to race, to do point-to-point races. So we thought great! We’ll add point-to-point races on all these twisty roads.


But then you really think about it, it doesn’t really make sense. Why would these Ghosts, these special forces guys be racing? Why would they race over and over to get the best score? They just wouldn’t be doing that. It doesn’t make sense, so we took it out. It’s fun, but it doesn’t make any sense.


Ubisoft say that Wildlands is their biggest action open world they’ve ever created – and it’s clear there’s a lot of effort that’s gone into creating a believable version of the Bolivian environment. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands is out today – check out the trailer below:

Photo: Ubisoft.

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