How would you breakdown the term "open world"?

[dosboot]

What does "open world" really mean when you examine it closely?  Let's discuss.

"No loading screens" is a frequent association with "open world" when people are explicitly contrasting with something else they deem as not open world.  Loading screens don't seem that significant when you stop and think about it though.  Would Metroid Prime be an open world exploration game if you removed the loading screens?  (It doesn't seem like it to me.)  If you modified Ocarina of Time to have no loading screens (i.e. make every transition seamless) would it become an open world game, or even half-way closer to it? 

How important is the "go anywhere" aspect?  The problem is, open world games can have gated progression too.  "Go anywhere" eliminates arcade and puzzle style games, but a lot of games let you "go anywhere" subject to constraints on equipment or plot progression.  Taking the modified Ocarina of Time example, you can sort of go anywhere but you will encounter plot flags.  What if you removed every plot flag/NPC gate and just let the player do anything in any order that their current abilities granted them access to?  Would that be open world?  Conversely, wouldn't a modern open world game that lets you go anywhere but prescribes a strictly linear mission sequence to complete the game still be considered open world?  If it is still open world --- while the hypothetical "go anywhere" version of Ocarina of Time isn't --- then "go anywhere" is proving to be insufficient.

This makes me wonder if it just a matter of scale.  Many older games might have "big" worlds, but they usually aren't big enough to make each player's physical path that distant from one another.  Like, if you defined a screenful of land to be 20x20 feet or whatever, perhaps an open world game is partially defined by players being unlikely to traverse the same plots of land.

Part of me doesn't like how superficial and cosmetic this line of thinking is starting to get, so I want to somewhat flippantly suggest that a certain style of side quests and side activities is what defines open world games.  Namely, where you have optional things to do scattered throughout wide amounts of terrain.  So not only is the player in control of advancing the story, but there are ostensibly worthwhile places to go instead, regardless of how pointless each individual activity may turn out to be.

The final thing I considered is whether open world just means "outdoors" or "exploration that takes place outdoors".  It feels like this might be a necessary criterion, but it doesn't provide any hard definitional boundary.  Perhaps then every "not open world" game that fits this description really should be considered "open world" on a technical level, you just wouldn't care to describe it that way because the quality of being outdoors isn't prominent enough to be part of the game's topline description.

[Tengukami]

To me, "open world" means the entire map is open from the start, and does not require me to complete a quest or retrieve an artifact or whatever in one world in order to open the next. Some areas may be accessible only by a special puzzle, but the map is still technically fully open.

I think Yume Nikki is a great example of this. And it's a part of what makes that game kind of overwhelming to a lot of people.

[Drake]

Breath of the Wild is open-world
Wind Waker is not

Something like Metroid: Zero Mission is on the boundary due to its design being intentionally breakable. Would I call it open-world? I think it's close enough that it merits discussion on what is meant by open-world in that context.

I wouldn't call the Prime trilogy open-world due to them being designed as locked-off, it's just that the way it's done feels pretty natural for the Metroid setting and so it makes it feel less obstructive than it objectively is, which is good. The more that progress is hindered by natural obstacles than locked doors, the better.

[nav']

To me, "open world" means the entire map is open from the start, and does not require me to complete a quest or retrieve an artifact or whatever in one world in order to open the next. Some areas may be accessible only by a special puzzle, but the map is still technically fully open.

I think Yume Nikki is a great example of this. And it's a part of what makes that game kind of overwhelming to a lot of people.

I was tempted to agree initially, but after some consideration, the definition seems too limiting. The Grand Theft Auto games typically require you to progress the storyline to a certain point before unlocking the entire playing area, yet it's hard to argue they aren't open world games. In certain old Might and Magic games you can't go everywhere before acquiring the skills necessary for swimming and scaling mountains, which is rather easy to do and gives you pretty much total freedom.

On the other hand, in some Fallout games you could technically go anywhere almost right away (there's a reason why the speedrun WR for a game as huge as Fallout 2 is just 18 minutes), but you will be murdered by overpowered creatures by doing so, thus some sort of structured progress is forced.

[CyberAngel]

While the exact extent of how "open" a certain's game world is tends to be influenced by several things, the crux of the definition lies in the core of the game itself - its goals, things you can do in it and the ways you can go through it. The more non-linear those ways are the more "open" the world is. And I'm not speaking about physical paths, but more about how varied your set of major destinations can be. That, in turn, depends on how much those goals, both mandatory and optional, are independent from each other.

To point at some examples, VVVVVV is a good example of an open world game. Outside of intro and finale, you are free to rescue your crew members in any order whatsoever. Now compare that to Blaster Master, or any IGA-made Castlevania. You go through some "hub" locations several times, but the order of "end-point" locations is always the same, enforced by needing to aquire new abilities from them to visit the next one.

Having optional goals (and I mean actual goals instead of just resource pit-stops) makes things a bit more complicated. The main storyline might be straight and linear, but if the game has enough side missions, optional questlines or just plain things to do to increase playtime at least twofold then your exact path through the game can still vary greatly. That's why Elder Scrolls and GTA series are seen as prime examples of open world games. But it's important that all this optional stuff stays independent from the main goals so that you can tackle it whenever you want. Exceptions can exist, but too many of them can diminish the "open-ness" of the world greatly.

Lastly, it's fine for the world to open up gradually, but the speed of opening up can influence how "open" the world feels. "Beef gates" and level restrictions fall under this as well. The downside of the game "opening up" too slowly is the gradual exhausting of the optional stuff. And what's the worth of an open world if it's already empty for you? JRPGs and games like Fallout often fall victim to this issue.

These are pretty much the cliff notes of how I see this question (due to me being too busy lazy to talk more about that). I might be wrong somewhere due to misremembering stuff, but this is pretty much my opinion on the matter.

(Also, "no loading screens" ROFLMAO. Even in "seamless" worlds there's a whole lot of loading and unloading going on. But that's another question entirely...)

[dosboot]

I'm finding CyberAngel's take the most intriguing.  Once we start talking about 'goals' it makes it more clear what is meant by "having the map available to you".  It addresses the fact that there a lot of games with a large, continuous worlds (which perhaps shouldn't all be "open worlds"), and there are a lot of open world games where the critical path has lots of blocked progression, but where side goals are in abundance.

This discussion reminds me of the separate term "non-linearity".  When people say a game "feels too linear" it is often understood to describe a feeling of progression instead of the exact shape of progression.  So games where the player navigates a linear environment in a non-linear way (like Metroid games) are meaningfully said to "feel less linear" in comparison to a straightforward game that is still equally linear in a more literal sense.

Here's a new interesting thought: I would summarize the way CyberAngel is describing "open world" as being what "non-linearity" describes in the literal sense, except where we consider side goals and main goals on equal footing (unlike in normal usage of "linearity") . 

Does that seem to be getting to the heart of "open world"?