Despite the vast number of open-world games that exist out there, many of them are surprisingly hollow. They exist as the empty space between point A and point B, offering little more than some eye candy along the way. On the flip side, you will often have games with gorgeously detailed worlds, even in linear scenarios, that you can only look at.
If you’re going to the effort of creating such large, detailed worlds, you really do need to make them interactable to some degree. Not only does it help the world feel more alive, but it offers up more gameplay variety to boot. You have a treacherous world packed with monsters and unique weather phenomena? Then the world should support that! And in these games, it does.
Far Cry 2
Getting On Like A Savannah On Fire
With Far Cry 3, Ubisoft firmly settled into the way it was designing just about everything. The open-world structure, the combat style, the environmental design, everything. Good game, but feels lesser in hindsight when every successive Ubisoft game is the same. You step back just a single game to Far Cry 2, however, and you get a game quite unlike any others.
Far Cry 2 was quite open-ended in how you approached just about everything, but waht really made the game stand out was its fire propagation. You set one little fire and it will rage wildly, burning down anything it can touch, not ceasing until everything is cinders. You could also cut down lots of the overgrown vegetation, which was pretty cool.
Yakuza
You Never Realise How Many Things Are Around You On The Street
Up until more recent entries, the Yakuza series was exclusively centred around street brawling. No finesse, just raw strength. Eve when this got expanded to multiple other characters, the joy of landing a solid hitting and sending an enemy spiraling never got boring. But what made that brawling so fun was the sheer number of objects all around you.
In Yakuza, you can pick up just about everything. Broken glasses, store signs, mysterious syringes, bicycles, motorcycles, uprooted stop signs, you name it. But it doesn’t end there, either. You can swing from lamp posts, slam enemies into walls, throw them into the river, slam their head inside a car, roll them into a snowman. Where you are determines just how the battle will flow.
Prey
Sure, Become A Cup. Why Not?
The immersive sim genre is well-known for having obscenely detailed environments you can interact with, it’s a major selling point of the genre. But Prey at times feels unprecedented in the degree of control and interactability it offers you. You can become just about any loose object and take on its traits. You become a cup, you can squeeze through cup-sized gaps.
But also the stronger you are, the heavier objects you can pick up and throw at enemies. You can straight up use telekinesis. You can use the gloo cannon to just make bridges wherever you want. You can repair turrets and bring them wherever you want. You can track every single NPC in the game through their name tags. It’s a frankly obscene degree of detail, especially with how much you can do with it.
Death Stranding
As it stands, there aren’t many games like Death Stranding, and considering its scale, it’s unlikely there will be any soon, either. Set across massive swathes of land, Death Stranding is defined by its asynchronous multiplayer elements. Individually, you can’t do much with the environment. With every other player? You can literally change the world.
Exploring in Death Stranding, it’s great to place navigation tools literally anywhere you want and see them function according to the game’s own geometry. But it’s even cooler when you and other players walk a path so much you literally wear down the environment to make a path everyone can use to walk a little faster and smoother. Death Stranding 2 takes this even further with floods and earthquakes that dramatically change the shape of the world.
Dragon’s Dogma 2
The original Dragon’s Dogma was a great game famed for its combat and enemy design, though its open world was really more of a glorified linear path with some branching paths to the side. Great fun, but didn’t fulfill the fantasy of a massive world you could get lost in. Dragon’s Dogma 2 shifts in that direction entirely to dramatic effect.
Everyone in the game is meticulous. You need to build momentum for your running and jumps. Jump onto an enemy with enough momentum and you’ll knock them right over. Turn an enemy into a bridge. Summon a tornado and watch it tear up the trees around you. Call down meteors and watch the world burn and your enemies turn to bones. Leave enemies and they will turn to rotted meat, calling other predators to their carcass.
Where Everyone Learned The Phrase ‘Environmental Storytelling’
Skyrim
- Released
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November 11, 2011
We’ve all heard of environmental storytelling. It’s a concept as old as gaming itself, though many latched onto the phrase more heavily during the release of Skyrim. All of the Elder Scrolls games do it, and Skyrim does not do it differently. What makes the environmental storytelling of The Elder Scrolls series so alluring is the level of environmental interaction.
When you see a scenario occur in these games, it is not static. You see the spell that burned down someone’s house, you see the treasure they died searching for, you find and defeat the enemy that shouldn’t naturally be here. The games enhance their storytelling by making you interact with it directly.
Hitman
An Accident Just Waiting To Happen
Back to immersive sims, Hitman is a very different breed of game compared to the likes of Dishonored and Deus Ex. Instead, Hitman focuses on more singular, sandbox-style levels focused on social stealth. Agent 47 is allowed to be here for the most part. He is a guest. He just needs to use the other people he meets and the world around him to end his target.
In that way, the Hitman games excel in forcing you to interact with the environment. Every locked door becomes a way to break line of sight. Watching a character’s route may let you slip past them or take them down and take their outfit. The right scenario may even let you kill your target in plain sight. There are countless ways of doing everything.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Not Everyone Has Rockstar Money
Whenever a brand-new open-world comes out, you can guarantee it will be compared to Red Dead Redemption 2. Ah, this game doesn’t have water physics. Oh, my hair doesn’t grow dynamically in this game. Why don’t my horse’s testicles shrink based on the temperature in this game? The answer to that is not every game needs it.
The second answer is that not everyone has Rockstar money. Yes, Red Dead Redemption 2 has absurd detail. Every character has a personality and memory, every animal has unique ways they exist in the world, hidden missions feel incredibly organic, you can pick all the herbs around you based on look, you have to clean your guns. Everything is detailed to a degree that frankly no other game likely ever will be.
