Yesterday, a friend of mine surprised me with a Japanese copy of Xenoblade X (and his Wii-U!) to fiddle around in while I waited for Halo's new update to finish up. Initially, I wasn't impressed at all about how XenoX looked and played from the videos and had ultimately written it off for getting Mario Tennis instead. But after a good five hours into it, well after the Halo update had finished it really opened my eyes at how intriguing the world design was for an open world experience. Unlike other dull open world titles that I've played this year like The Witcher, Xeno's venues to explore felt less 'theme-park' like and more like sprawling worlds that are part of hub-based games. It's fun to dink around and adventure more than just killing things and doing stuff. The world design gel'd with me a lot that I started relating it to two other games: Grand Theft Auto V and Sunset Overdrive.
With GTAV, as someone who spent a sizable portion in the LA area driving through the world of Los Santos felt really familiar to me and almost nostalgic in how some of the avenues, expressways and underpasses were designed. Like the back of my head was screaming to me that everything was familiar. I've been here before, maybe. The environments are so delightfully varied and hits the tone so well with the LA aesthetic , that not even games with actual locations like Second Son, Watch_Dogs and AC could replicate.
Then there's Sunset Overdrive, which is wholly unconventional to its design compared to the other two. The game is designed entirely to it's traversal system so in that regard you see the building designs and layouts to compensate for that. That's when everything starts to get whacky enough to nail that 'Tony Hawk'/Jet Set Radio aesthetic: where everything is basically a ramp to do a trick on. No artificial parkour being plastered in to achieve little like in Assassin's Creed. The GDC talk explains the design better than I do
I think, along with other notable examples like Dying Light and Dark Souls/Bloodborne that more open world titles really should look into what these games settled in their open world design and apply it to theirs. It won't fix the issue with tedious quests sure, but at least we can reach a point where open world level design can be as engaging as linear level design.
With GTAV, as someone who spent a sizable portion in the LA area driving through the world of Los Santos felt really familiar to me and almost nostalgic in how some of the avenues, expressways and underpasses were designed. Like the back of my head was screaming to me that everything was familiar. I've been here before, maybe. The environments are so delightfully varied and hits the tone so well with the LA aesthetic , that not even games with actual locations like Second Son, Watch_Dogs and AC could replicate.
Then there's Sunset Overdrive, which is wholly unconventional to its design compared to the other two. The game is designed entirely to it's traversal system so in that regard you see the building designs and layouts to compensate for that. That's when everything starts to get whacky enough to nail that 'Tony Hawk'/Jet Set Radio aesthetic: where everything is basically a ramp to do a trick on. No artificial parkour being plastered in to achieve little like in Assassin's Creed. The GDC talk explains the design better than I do
I think, along with other notable examples like Dying Light and Dark Souls/Bloodborne that more open world titles really should look into what these games settled in their open world design and apply it to theirs. It won't fix the issue with tedious quests sure, but at least we can reach a point where open world level design can be as engaging as linear level design.
