Fair or not, many gamers have long considered open worlds superior to linear ones. If it can be said that a competition rages between linear and open world games, it has been seen as open world games’ game to lose.
Open worlds promise greater freedom, gameplay depth, replayability, immersion, and content. They allow players to go where they want, do what they want when they want to, approach objectives from any direction, and take a break from the main story to mess around in the world and do side activities. The idea of all this freedom makes it easy for open-world games to generate excitement.
Linear games, by contrast, have long been associated with gameplay limitations, short runtimes, and overly scripted cinematic sequences.
In recent years, however, excitement at the news that a game will have an open world has tended to be more subdued. Excitement is still generated relatively easily, but are now met with more skepticism than ever before.
Many open-world games have been released in the past ten years, plenty enough for gamers to better understand the advantages and limitations of open-world level design. Now is as good a time as ever for game developers and consumers alike to take a step back and ask ourselves: What do we actually like about open worlds, and are they really necessary?
Metal Gear Solid V
Metal Gear Solid 5 is a good case study to help us answer these questions. Despite its unfinished condition, it is a popular and critically successful game. Many fans consider the Metal Gear series’ transition to an open-world format a natural evolution of the series. It holds all the advantages that an open world is supposed to have: it lets you go anywhere, complete missions you want, approach objectives from whatever angle you choose, ignore the main story and do side missions, and mess around in a giant open sandbox.
I enjoyed MGSV for these reasons. But I was also frequently bored by it. I could go on for hours about all the annoying features that plague the game, many of them deliberately inflicted upon us by Kojima and his obsession with being quirky for quirkiness’ sake (I must remember to do a rant essay on Kojima one day). The main source of my boredom, however, surprisingly came from the game’s open worldedness.
I say surprisingly because I, like most people, saw The Phantom Pain’s open-world format objectively superior to the series’ linear past from a gameplay standpoint. The past Metal Gear games may have tighter narratives (if any of Kojima’s narratives could be called “tight”) but in terms of gameplay, I instinctively assumed, even before I played it, that MGSV would be the best in the series due to the greater freedom its open world would supposedly facilitate.
My early hours of play seemed to support this assumption. The prologue was stiflingly linear and scripted, and then the world opened up and I could go wherever I wanted.
Only after many more hours of playing and progressing in the story did I begin to detect problems. And only after comparing The Phantom Pain to Ground Zeros, the prequel to The Phantom Pain, did I start to understand the flaws and–worse–the utter pointlessness of MGSV’s open world.
The Good, the Bad, and the Pointless
Freedom is not always a good thing. A choice between two bad options isn’t much of a choice. If you had no choice but were guaranteed something good–and we’re talking in the context of a video game–then most gamers would prefer having no choice. Why would anyone choose to play a bad game?
Open worlds distinguish themselves from linear ones by offering more spacious environments. Spacious environments provide greater freedom of movement. But is this always a good thing?
What if there is nothing to do with all the extra freedom? What if the increased playspace is mostly empty? What if the game’s content must be stretched thin to fill up the world?
In such a game, the consequence of freedom would be the dilution of quality and an unnecessary increase in travel time. Unless traversal itself was a deep and engaging feature, such as in Grand Theft Auto, the open world could be said to hurt the game overall.
This is the case with MGSV. The open worlds offered (there are two) are practically empty. The land between the outposts is all but useless. In Afghanistan, most of the land is made impassable by mountains anyway. There are plants and animals to collect and some tiny checkpoints to fight, but all these features do is dilute the series’ formerly dense standard of quality. The environment can be traversed by foot, horse, and motor vehicle, but the checkpoints that guard the roads make travelling a pain. Other than swerving around the roadblocks at these checkpoints, there is no depth to the traversal aspect of the game other than pointing yourself in the right direction.
It is clear from the barrenness of the worlds, the lack of civilian life, and the frequent repetition of missions that the studio did not have the resources to make a proper open world. You can’t even blame the game’s early release for these issues, for there is no evidence within the game that such features were ever planned. A game is not made better simply by being big and open. To make an open world as detailed and immersive as a linear one, a massive increase in resources is required, something Konami couldn’t or wouldn’t afford.
Ultimately, the only benefit MGSV gains from its open worlds is the ability to approach objective zones from any angle. This is a neat addition to the gameplay, but it’s hard to say it was worth the vast amount of time the open world wasted for the developers and continues to waste for players.
The uselessness of MGSV’s open world is made blindingly apparent by the existence of Ground Zeros, ironically released as a gameplay demo for The Phantom Pain.
Ground Zeros takes place on a single base. It is an open-ended space with many ways to navigate it and several objectives to complete. This single base is so replayable that I replayed it about a dozen times across all five missions, learning something new about it every time.
The base benefits from not being surrounded by miles and miles of empty desert. Such would be superfluous and would’ve delayed players getting to the good bit, which is the base itself. The thin band of land on the southern perimeter provides plenty approaches. The addition of even more surrounding land would only have distracted the focus of players and developers alike from the base itself.
How Better Open Worlds Do It
Good open-world games justify their size and openness in a number of ways.
They enhance immersion by simulating an authentic world. Red Dead Redemption 2, for example, is filled with interesting locations to visit, environmental stories to investigate, secrets to discover, events to happen across, and NPCs to watch and interact with. This makes RDR2’s world feel like a place that existed long before the player’s arrival and will continue to exist after they are gone.
MGSV fails at all this, its two worlds being utterly devoid of neutral human life. It is as if the soldiers just appeared one day only to stand around their checkpoints for eternity and occasionally drive around in their trucks. It makes one wonder why they even bother occupying the place. There’s no population to exploit, no unruined settlements to live in. No work is being done. No battles are being fought. Only the presence of animals reminds one that the world is populated by more than dumb soldiers walking an endless looping patrol route.
Good open worlds also allow the player to do more than main missions, offering side missions, activities, and various ways to interact with the world besides running around and shooting at things. Again, RDR2 is a great example. The world is filled with shops, taverns, services such as carriages and trains, police stations, and setting-appropriate activities such as fishing and poker.
MGSV has nothing like this except an ability to transport yourself by going to a delivery point and hiding in a box, the intervening transportation of which you never get to see. All the shops and mechanics and other services the player needs are not physically rooted in the world but accessible only through menus which can only be accessed by exiting the world. Even the base Big Boss is building throughout the game is not rooted in the world but exists in a separate zone out in the middle of the ocean, the visiting of which requires a time-consuming helicopter ride. MGSV is bizarre because it is an open-world game that seems more interested in finding reasons to remove the player from the world than immersing them in it.
MGSV’s world is not totally empty, though: there are animals to hunt, plants to pick, and collectables to collect. Putting aside the fact that RDR2 handles all these things better, collectables, pickable plants, and wildlife cannot make up for the daunting scale of the game’s emptiness.
MGSV also offers side missions, though these missions are repeated from a small selection of templates and offer little to no narrative flavouring. Comparing again to RDR2, it is clear which game deploys side missions more effectively to enhance the believability of its world and the worth of exploring it.
How to Fix The Phantom Pain
There is more to level design than the open/linear binary. An entire spectrum of level design exists between these two extremes.
Ground Zeros demonstrates such an alternative possibility; it is neither a vast open world nor a series of linear ones, but a small open-ended level. This level does not waste space. It does not waste the player’s time with unnecessary traversal. It recognizes that the game’s strength lies in its core gameplay loop of stealth and action and that a vast open desert is not a good place to facilitate that.
Ground Zeros shows that you don’t need a huge world to provide players with the freedom to approach objectives how they want. Small, open-ended level designs can achieve this aim much more efficiently. A large world is more suited for games with deep traversal mechanics and enough content to fill their huge space, which The Phantom Pain clearly did not.
Ironically, the better approach for The Phantom Pain would have been to follow the example of its demo. Instead of making two big worlds, Kojima should have taken the concept of the small open-ended map from Ground Zeros and made several more of them. Slap “The Phantom Pain” on it and you have a much tighter experience.
Big open worlds are fantastic in theory, but without the appropriate gameplay mechanics and a massive budget and development window, the result will likely be a diluted version of a hypothetical smaller, better game. Metal Gear Solid 5 is demonstrative of this, though it is far from the only example I could’ve used.