So far to go, so little to see

This post is going to be largely related to video-gaming again and in particular sandbox or open-world games. I for one adore a good sandbox game, the freedom to explore the entirety of a game's world as you like and progress through its story at a variable pace is great, but it has so much more potential to it than is being exploited. For one thing a lot of games seem to adopt the guise of an open world setting, usually in advertising, then they turn out to be nothing of the sort. Games like the remake of Bionic Commando look to be offering a whole world to explore but then they stick in some macguffin like radiation or robot turrets or giant killer shrimps to keep you following a linear path. Sure, you can see a distant and interesting landscape before you, but it could be a painting of a landscape, just a wall or an endless sea of molten lava, the gameplay would be unchanged.

The issues with the games that actually employ a truly explorable environment are two-fold, firstly: it often feels like a complete chore to travel around them and secondly: a great deal of them are just fucking dull places to be. The first one is admittedly less common, there's a long list of games that tackled it admirably, Spiderman 2 and Prototype made a point of making travel a highly significant aspect of gameplay and making it great fun as well. GTA IV and Just Cause 2 dealt with it by simply offering you so many ways to travel that you were highly unlikely not to find one that suited you. Mercenaries jazzed it up by just throwing random jeeps in your path, if you're anything like me playing that game you'll take hours to get to each mission because every time a technical drives by you cannot help but stalk it like a starving eagle before finally nailing it with an RPG, still one of the most satisfying enemy dispatches in any game. Destroy All Humans made it more interesting by providing you with the option to either blast and anal probe your way through towns full of mid-1950's generic dullards or don a disguise and follow them around mind melding to keep your energy levels up (then getting bored and killing them all anyway). In the lesser games you just walk/drive/hop around counting the minutes of your life tick away as you get closer to your objective, zero fun sir.

The second problem is bigger by far, the worlds are becoming depressingly cut and dry, even in the good ones, Mercenaries with its endless grey field of hills where the sun never shines and Just Cause 2 with its endless repeating power plants and towns that stretch on for miles and miles. The worlds often just feel like a set up for destruction and whatever else, you feel distant, separated. The world should be as much a character as the player and NPCs. Wind Waker understood this, Colossus understood this, Brutal Legend did too (about the only point in that game's favour). Even then they're just cities and fields, you can't really interact with them. In Silent Hill the map was constantly gleefully fucking with you and trying to make you not alive, there was a constant air of menace and threat. Still, more can be done.

Minecraft is an interesting example because you're free to shape the world however you please, you could burn it all down, replace all the trees with towers of obsidian and craft a golden throne for yourself or you could round up all the dogs, bury them under the ground and build a barking town (it's been done, possibly the funniest thing I've ever seen). I have a theory that minecraft turns you into a terrible person, though. On my map I found myself uprooting trees purely so I could get a better view of my villa from the giant stone AT-AT I was building. I've killed cows and pigs simply because they were in the way of my construction project. There's a portal to hell on my roof. Still, minecraft is one of my favourite gaming worlds in spite of all that, because it has multiple plains that distinctly differ, you've got the snowy areas, the green areas, hills, waterfalls, caves, the netherworld, all interesting in their own right and given enough time you could swap them all around.

What I want to see, however, is an open world that no human could ever come close to experiencing, I mean, you could go to random bits of Norway or New Zealand, put up a few tasteless sculptures and voila, Brutal Legend. Buy a few hundred smoke machines and fill a backwater American town with clockwork mannequins and bam, Silent Hill. I've had an idea for an open world that would be properly interesting to explore for a while now, it would actually be closer to home than any before it. The idea is simple, an open world game where you play as a borrower, or similar creature. If you've read the book, seen the abysmal Hollywood adaptation or the amazing Studio Ghibli one, you'll know what I mean, for everyone else, borrowers are just tiny people, scarcely bigger than ants. Imagine an open world which was just a house and a garden but was enormous relative to your size, you'd have to find items you could re-purpose to scale cupboards, find nooks in the skirting board to escape a hungry cat (just the one AI cat, impossible to kill, coming and going from the playable map at regular intervals) and you could even construct your own home and means of regular travel within the house and outside in the garden. Don't tell me that wouldn't be amazing. You'd have to avoid preying insects, hunt the smaller ones, find human utensils to use as tools, there could even be a time frame, say the occupants have gone on holiday for a week, which plays out real time like Dead Rising and you have free roam of the house to complete whatever ultimate goal by the time they get back. There was a game that tried something like this, Chibi-Robo, but you were pretty limited in what you could do. I actually got the idea from a counter-strike level somebody made (modded levels in that game represent some of the best level design in any game). I have other ideas too, like a game that exists on multiple planes of existence, each one fully explorable or a constantly changing dreamscape that's never the same for too long. The borrower idea however I feel is the strongest, if you have a massively intuitive inventory system and properly realistic physics, books that could be pulled from shelves, gigantic viscous raindrops, twigs that break at the pressure point. It would be a huge job, but if done right I think it would be amazing, designers take note.