Open World Design
Freedom to explore
A game space crossed at will, its tasks taken in any order while the world carries on. Described for Elite in 1984, weighed against Elite for Mercenary in 1986, and sold as a city that "breathes" for Grand Theft Auto in 1997; the phrase itself appears in 2000.
An open world is a game space the player crosses at will, taking its tasks in whatever order they choose, with the world carrying on around them. The phrase is from the 2000s; the reviews that describe the thing are older. This entry follows four of them: Elite in 1984, Mercenary in 1986, Grand Theft Auto in 1997 and Grand Theft Auto III in 2001.
Fast facts
- Earliest description held here: Acorn User, October 1984, on Elite: build “a simple space ship and build it and your reputation up to ‘Elite’ status” across “2,000 planets in eight galaxies”.
- The comparison game: Zzap!64 reviewed Mercenary in March 1986 against Elite, and gave it 98%.
- The city that “breathes”: Edge on Grand Theft Auto, October 1997, quoting DMA Design’s Brian Baird.
- The phrase: Edge, June 2000, “an open world to explore”.
Elite, 1984
Acorn User sent Tony Quinn to Cambridge for Acornsoft’s launch of Elite, and he wrote it up as impressions rather than a review after “a couple of hours” locked in a room with it. His summary of the structure holds for the genre that followed: “The idea of the game is to start off with a simple space ship and build it and your reputation up to ‘Elite’ status”. The player chooses how. Trading is the safe route; then “it becomes tempting to play naughty. Illicit cargoes such as slaves and drugs can be bought. You could be in trouble with the law but it’s a good way of making a fast buck. Then you can attack space stations for the fun of it, and even try trading with one of the deadlier planets. The risks are high, but so are the profits.”
The disc version added “these things called ‘missions’ where a task is set”, and Quinn ended on “the unknown: no-one has yet reached the ultimate Elite status, and there’s even a ship out there that no-one has yet come across.” Acornsoft’s advertisement in the same issue sold the scale — “you can dock at any of 2,000 planets in eight galaxies” — and the ranks, “nine, from ‘Harmless’ to ‘Elite’”. The authors were David Braben and Ian Bell, whom Quinn identifies only as “Elite’s two student authors”.
Mercenary, 1986
By 1986 Elite was the reference point. Zzap!64’s review of Novagen’s Mercenary opens on it: “Elite never really spawned that many look-alikes because its reputation was so hard to match. However, Novagen have managed to release a game based on a similar approach, yet have introduced so many original elements that the resulting game surpasses its successful predecessor in terms of excitement and playability.”
What the reviewer valued was choice of route. “The main appeal of Mercenary is that there are various ways of achieving the end goal. The most obvious is to act as a freelance fighter for either Mechanoid or Palyar.” A ship offered for sale can be stolen instead: “Mercenary plays just like the real world and instead of buying the ship you may choose to steal it”. There are “three” ways to finish, “but the other two are a bit of a mystery”, and “plenty to explore”. The game took the issue’s Gold Medal at 98%, a mark the magazine said it had given only once before.
Grand Theft Auto, 1997
Edge previewed DMA Design’s Grand Theft Auto in October 1997, expecting the violence to draw the headlines and arguing the game’s real interest was elsewhere: “The city feels genuinely real, with cars constantly on the move, pedestrians crossing and going about their business (until, tragically, out of the blue…) and police keeping tabs on the player’s notorious deeds.”
Programmer Brian Baird described the design goal in terms that later open-world games would repeat:
We’ve gone to great lengths to try to make the city ‘breathe’. Things do go on without your participation. If you want to cause chaos you can, but you have to live with the consequences. There is a lot of logic going on underneath the surface — police cars patrol the city constantly, and if you wander near one while you’re getting chased, he’ll join in. Yes, there are shortcuts going on behind the scenes, but we can still have anything up to 400 cars and over 600 pedestrians.
Each of the three cities “takes several minutes of driving to get from one end to the other”, with “over 2000km of roads, alleyways, dead ends, bridges and tramways”. The December 1997 review added the structural point: “in one more example of the unrestrictive nature of the gameplay, players are not forced to undertake the missions in order to finish the game”, and “Never before has the sense of being in a living city with other drivers and pedestrians going about their own business been so admirably conveyed.” It scored nine out of ten.
Grand Theft Auto III, 2001
Reviewing GTA III from a shop-bought copy, Edge found Liberty City “both intricate and robust. It’s a place that sprawls but doesn’t bustle”, and was exact about the limit of the freedom on offer: “You’re still boxed in by the whims of your current overlords — any schemes of your own ruthless devising are restricted to trivial pursuits for petty cash.” The city’s “coherent and emergent behaviour” was “limited to a local scale”. What the game got right was ownership of the space: “it’s all about owning the streets, strutting your territory and walking tall.” That tension — a world that runs on its own, and a mission structure that still decides what counts — is the design problem every later open world has had to answer.
The phrase
None of the reviews above says “open world”. The earliest use in the magazines held here is Edge in June 2000, previewing Core Design’s Herdy Gerdy: “Core promises an open world to explore, yet with enough structure to prevent endless wandering”. The same balance — freedom against direction — is the one Quinn described in 1984 without a name for it.