The Bigger They Come…

The excellent coffee-table read, The Guinness World Record Gamer’s Edition, recently handed out an award to Codemasters and Asobo Studios for a seemingly impressive achievement – “Largest playable area in a console game.” Open world racing game Fuel is apparently larger than Hong Kong, Singapore, St Lucia and the Isle of Man put together (with duct tape, I assume), netting the developers a rather spiffy claim to fame, a certificate for their wall and an extra press release for their mailing list.

But when the reviews hit and gamers got their grubby mitts on the game, Fuel’s biggest downfall became alarmingly apparent – absolute joyless desolation. It exists in thousands of miles of complete and total nothingness, an absolute barren landscape where tattered oil cans, broken-jeeps and empty sheds pass for exciting finds, making Fallout 3 seem vibrant and animated by comparison.

The genetically-engineered genre of “open world” is one of gaming’s fastest growing archetypes, exploding from Grand Theft Auto 3’s blockbuster release with such vigour that we don’t even have a suitable name for it yet. “Sandbox” works for the toy-like world of Noby Noby Boy but fails to capture the authenticity of Grand Theft Auto IV’s New York pastiche, “Open World” encapsulates Far Cry 2’s giant African plains but dismisses Yakuza’s hemmed in suburbs, and the ineloquent “GTA-Clone” perfectly describes the brazen Saints Row and True Crime, but does nothing to define Burnout Paradise’s mix of relentless driving and free-roaming cityscape.

But, like everything else in game development, open worlds offer a chance for dick-measuring and height-pissing contests for the bullet point and press release obsessive world of game marketing – a way to hide developer diffidence or ineptitude with big numbers and bigger claims. “We have the biggest open world” says FUEL, “ours is completely destructible” exclaims Red Faction Guerrilla. “Mine is an exact replica of New York” says True Crime, before getting beaten up by all the others for being rubbish.

But for every metre the world expands, development time is exponentially increased and the cracks inevitably show. Take the reserved and meagre streets of Liberty City, awash with unique buildings, miniscule details, variety and depth. On the flip-side, Saints Row’s bulging Stilwater is a bland metropolis, slap bang in the middle of the United States of Generica. inFamous’ Empire City is reduced to a microcosmic level by comparative sandbox-super-heroes, but the practical limits of its play-area allows protagonist Cole to have a palpable sense of agency and relevance amongst the bemused pedestrians.

The only truly massive worlds to have any semblance of depth, intricacy and variety are Grand Theft Auto’s San Andreas and World of Warcraft’s Azeroth, but asking the average game developer to match the team size and budget of the average Rockstar or Blizzard game is like asking a Burger Van on an M1 lay-by to go toe-to-toe against McDonalds.

Open worlds are about prioritising quests, allowing missions to spiral outside of typical borders and letting players fanny off and collect hidden-junk to earn upgrades and unlocks. They often schizophrenically pair unlikely genres (such as Grand Theft Auto’s driving and shooting blend), but as complementing ideas, rather than bonus-level exclusives. If those are the differentiators, why do developers assume that monster play-areas are part of the taxonomy?

Dead Rising is every bit an open world game, yet its shopping mall backdrop would be a nameless building in any other sandbox, maybe with a hidden package, orb or pigeon on the roof, if you’re lucky. But despite its size, Dead Rising has more memorable characters than the entire State of Crackdonia and more interesting locations than the buzzing metropolis of Prototype-on-Sea. Games like The Last Express (by Prince of Persia daddy Jordan Mechner) and Bully toyed with shrinking the open world, setting their games on a train and a school, respectively.

As gamers, we’ve spent so much time traipsing from one side of a gargantuan map to the other, often finding nothing interesting in between. Missions that make no use of the sprawling landscape, mindless pedestrians that are unfazed by your sidewalk-mounting SUV and side missions about as enticing as a weekend in Scunthorpe. How about taking all the technology and man power it took you to render seventeen billion square miles of open land, and spend them on making expertly crafted, utterly memorable and, mostly importantly, much smaller locations. Where’s the open world game set in a hospital, a hotel, an airport, a zoo, a picturesque village in the south of England or Warwick Castle?

You can keep your record, Codemasters, but how about gunning for the “Smallest playable area in a console game” next? That would certainly get me excited.