When I’m determining whether an open-world game is good or not, I’m thinking about how, uh, open it is. But ‘open’ can mean different things depending on what a game is going for. It’s a long running issue I had with the fake buildings in Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City, and I hope GTA 6 can set the record straight.
Urban Vs. Rural Open-World Games
If it’s an open-world game set in a mostly rural setting, like Breath of the Wild or The Witcher 3, that means freedom to go off and explore, to find interesting things in the world, to pick up quests that surprise me. But when it’s an open-world game set in an urban setting, the calculus changes a bit. The landscape is no longer defined by rolling hills and mountains you can climb, but by streets and buildings. I know I can stroll or roll down the streets. The big question is: can I enter these buildings? Increasingly, this is becoming a make or break issue for me.
The longer GTA has been going, the better it’s gotten at this. GTA Vice City was largely locked down, with only shops and buildings that were required for quests opened up. By GTA 5, we had access to many more interiors, with one-off buildings for side quests, restaurants, stores, gyms, miles of underground tunnels, and other buildings that are just there for you to find and poke around in.
In a game at this scale, that’s hard to do, but the thing Rockstar has always excelled at is breadth and density. GTA 5 offered a huge world, but also packed it with secrets to discover. Rockstar further built on that paradigm with Red Dead Redemption 2. There were fewer buildings in the Old West than there were in modern California, but Red Dead was still impressively detailed, with many saloons and movie theaters to kick back and relax in. As we look forward to GTA 6 finally launching this year, the thing I want most is more buildings to enter and investigate.
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The Rural Explorer
We get urban open-world games less often than rural ones. Though games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Tears of the Kingdom, and Horizon Forbidden West do have towns, the bulk of the gameplay, and the majority of the explorable space, is made up of open plains, forests, meadows, mountains, caves, and other features of the natural world. It’s not like it’s easy to design a world like this — you still have to fill it with interesting things to do and discover — but one building needs much more intricate level design work than a big field that takes up a hundred times as much space. The player relates to a field on the level of broad sweep. But they relate to a building on the level of the individual rooms and the objects within that room.
When urban open-world games fail to deliver on that level, it hurts them much more than a single boring field hurts an open-world game. You move through the field in pursuit of the next thing to do. But in an urban open-world game, a good percentage of those buildings need to be accessible or players will give up on exploring. This was my biggest issue with Cyberpunk 2077 at launch, and though Phantom Liberty improved a ton of things about that game, it didn’t fix the issue that so many of its buildings were closed off. Eventually I gave up and just played through the quests.
So, as GTA 6 approaches, I’m hoping that it can deliver where 2077 failed. The first and only trailer makes this version of Vice City look absolutely packed with stuff to do, as dense as it is broad. GTA 6 doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel, and I hope it doesn’t. It just needs to give us the key to the city.
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