So I've been playing a lot of "Fallout 3" lately, or rather replaying. It was a game I played a ton of in high school and had a lot of fond memories of. And now that I've returned to it I've found that it's very much how I remembered it--save for maybe I don't like the characters as much as I used to. But there is one major aspect of the game that I noticed while playing it with a friend...and that is the size of the map.
For those not in the know on these sorts of things, many modern video games follow a style of level design called "open world" in which the player is allowed free exploration in a large "overworld" in which everything in the game takes place. There are towns and individual buildings where you can enter and explore, but beyond that there are no level-to-level transitions seen in older games. This gives the player a sense that they are part of a living world that they shape through their actions rather than just a hero completing a linear series of tasks.
In this case, "Fallout 3" is a role playing game about a survivor of a nuclear apocalypse in an alternate history version of the world where America never left the mindset it held in the fifties. It is retro futuristic and places a high importance on exploration to find supplies you can use to help the people you meet along the way. The open world here is populated by towns and abandoned buildings, the latter of which serve as dungeon type areas where you can find powerful equipment if you look deep enough into each one.
For many open world games the phrase "the bigger the better" takes a front seat on everyone's mind. Each year developers create larger worlds to show off new technology and rendering techniques. However, larger worlds run the risk of being emptier than the core of an atom as large distances pad out the areas where something interesting couldn't.
This made me think, amidst all the new games coming out claiming to be putting out maps roughly the size of the observable universe, that open world games don't need to and possibly even shouldn't, be that size. "Fallout 3" manages to create a game world that gives the impression of large distances without actual large distances giving the player a sense of consistent exploration. "The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker" also accomplishes this same effect as the world manages to feel like a huge ocean, it's closer to a large lake than anything else. Yet, in "Wind Waker," traveling the ocean feels like a journey--you feel as though you've crossed an ocean when you travel from Windfall Island to Outset Island.
But after this past E3 I'm a bit frustrated that the trend of larger and larger worlds is here to stay. And with that comes wide empty spaces in between actual things to see in the game. It's fun to hear about all of these massive worlds but there will, without a doubt, be miles of nothing in between patches of something. And why exactly would I want to play something where most of the game is hiking without seeing anything interesting for twenty minutes?
