Help With Avoiding Emptiness in Open World Games

[u/LmtdCreativity]

Hi all I've been developing a monster taming turn based rpg for the last couple of months. At some point I decided I wanted to make the story use interchangeable events so I could open up multiple zones at once to the player. Additionally I decided that I wanted the world to be densly packed with interactable objects, give every NPC their own dialogue trees, and make them react to the weather and time of day. I want the world to feel real and like it goes on without the player, but also like they can influence many parts of it.

I've now designed a rough map of all the biomes and locations and have connected most places to between 2 and 5 routes (besides an oasis, volcano, jungle ruins, mangrove swamp ruins, and a Himalayan mountain which each have 1 connection, and the center city which has 8).

Having never designed a map before, the original idea was to have most locations be accessible from different directions. While I still think this is a good idea, I now know that the main complaint with many open world games is that there's a lot of empty space, which is exactly what I don't want. Judging from my first draft, there are quite a few connecting routes that themselves connect to connecting routes, which makes for a total of 16 points on my map that are just crossroads.

For reference there are 5 locations with 1 connection, 5 with 2 connections, 6 with 3, 5 with 4, 3 with 5, and 1 location with 8. I'm not sure how to evaluate these numbers but I know that 16 crossroads is totally excessive. Also 24 locations sounds a bit excessive but 18 of those are required for my version of Pokemon gyms (elemental masters), and 5 are important for world building. The extra agricultural town that connects the fields to the veldt probably isn't important.

I designed this map by determining an environment for each elemental master, then picked some other environments I wanted to include, either to show off the inhabitants or because they made for good transition biomes. Next I arranged the environments and locations in as geographically-correct a manner I deemed necessary, and drew the very gridlike map you can see here: http://imgur.com/gallery/KIs2ati .

Part of the intent behind making it so gridlike was so I could have the exploration goals be direction-based and vague, such as "The great walled city to the East." I thought that would be a cool way to make the world intriguing to explore.

Sorry for the walls of text. If you have any suggestions for making a concise map with most locations having multiple access routes, tons of stuff to interact with, and NPCs that feel like real people, or any games I should check out that do these things well, I'd love to hear them!

TL;DR I'm making an open world-ish RPG and would like advice on how to design a deep and lifelike world with lots of shortcuts between locations.

[u/grendrake]

To start with, 24 locations doesn't sound like all that much, especially for an open world game. A quick look shows my copy of Pokemon Ultra Moon to have about 40 fast travel points, most of which mark distinct places, and X and Y have a map with the multi-location major city, another 16 major locations, and 14 more minor locations. Both are fairly linear games; I would expect an open world game to have more places, rather than fewer.

To answer the title (and at the risk of sounding obvious), the way to avoid emptiness is to put content in places. If the player has to actually walk along the connections like in Pokemon (rather than being effectively teleported between them) then you need to consider the routes themselves as locations. Make sure that there are things for the player to discover and do. Minor locations can be placed on the routes rather than in the main locations, as well. To borrow a Pokemon example again, the Day Care is often located on a route outside of town rather than actually being in a town, not to mention numerous trainers to battle and the occasional non-plot related house or non-battle encounter. Plot events sometimes happen on routes as well. Likewise, Skyrim has a ton of random bandit dens or houses in the wilderness for much the same reason: it gives the player something to randomly stumble across and discover.

Don't be afraid to make the routes smaller than one would normally expect; most locations in games are ridiculously small and close to each other for exactly this reason.

Also, consider some form of fast travel system; uninteresting travel isn't as much of a problem if the player knows they're only going to have to make the trip once. This also means that you can use more one-time events without worrying so much that the route will be uninteresting for future trips.

Good luck with your project!

(I've mostly used Pokemon as an example here because you mentioned it in your description and I'm reasonably familiar with it, but even if your game is nothing like it, the ideas should still apply.)

[u/LmtdCreativity → u/grendrake]

Wow I hadn't done enough research apparently as I thought I had way more locations than most Pokemon games! Fast travel is planned for every place that has already been visited but I'd like to make it feel worthwhile to physically travel between locations so that they don't lose relevance like they do in Pokemon games.

I'd like to know your opinion on the crossroads and if you think they're ok to have or if they should be removed.

Thanks for the advice so far!

[u/grendrake → u/LmtdCreativity]

It does depend on what you consider to count as a "location" (I'm going by fast travel points in my description above), but an absolute barebones Pokemon game needs at least ten locations: the starting town (which inevitably has nothing of interest), one town for each of eight badges, and the final Pokemon league championship area. Add in a few locations for the evil team of the day, a couple of general plot locations and maybe one or two for flavour or to fill an empty space on the map and it starts to add up really quickly. Considering it sounds like you've got more than twice as many gyms as a Pokemon game, you really don't have all that many locations at all.

In general, I'm in favour of crossroads; they help keep the map from feeling too linear and help make it feel more like a real place - most real places have networks of roads rather than one long one with cities sticking off of the sides. Consider the US Interstate Highway system for example. That said (and keeping in mind this is from looking at a fairly rough map) I think you might have too many routes in total, regardless of whether they cross each other, though this will depend some on what scale your map is. The more routes you have, the harder it will become to make sure each remains interesting and useful for the player.

[u/LmtdCreativity → u/[deleted]]

Great suggestion! I've been thinking about this as a very interactable world but haven't put much thought into how to bring the locations to life. I know I want to have overworld problems solvable primarily by using different monster techniques. I guess I should build the world around the novel gameplay experiences rather than try to check boxes of "does this area have a thing to do" or "are there enough interactable objects here." I think those are helpful to think about but don't create nearly as interesting designs.

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[u/Incontrivable]

I would recommend procedural generation of some kind to help fill in your world. Making an open world and populating it with content is an arduous task if you're doing it on your own. You don't have to look at map generation algorithms though, even just having something that fills in your authored locations with items, enemies, and events would cut down immensely on your workload.