In open-world games, traveling should be a core part of the design, instead of treating the map just as a background setpiece
Note: this was originally posted on cohost in a thread about open-world games and in-game traveling, and edited before being posted here.
Like many people, I consider Morrowind to be Bethesda’s pinnacle, and it’s all due to its open-world design. It has its failings, as expected, but it’s also a world that has so much presence that I find it atypical and uncommon even today. But, to this day, people (and even Todd Howard himself) say “Morrowind got famous because of its weird world”, and to be frank, that’s a disservice to the game they built: what got Morrowind famous was its story and how your character lived through it while interacting with the world itself. Unsurprisingly, I would guess that’s why Bethesda’s games post-Morrowind have such bad open-world design – not that they are bad in themselves, but if they leaned in on the exploration and interaction instead of “rail guiding” the player through an underwhelming main campaign, it could be way better.
The world of Morrowind was as detailed as it could be at the time, but it’s full of stuff you can only find out when walking/jumping/sprinting around: plantations in the middle of nowhere, caves with slaves hidden within mountains, Dwemer ruins littered with scraps of things you don’t understand, and so on. And the player could just go around and explore it, the story be damned. And then you would return to Caius Cosades, do a few quests, and go “oooh, I’ve been here before, these people love/hate me because I did this and that in this area”. It helped with a sense of the world existing “beyond the player”, despite it being way more static than modern games. It created some sort of connection between actions, like choice and consequences. Things lying around weren’t a checklist to check and move on to the next item, they were things lying around that you could interact with and could (or not) affect you or the story in the future in some way.
“The world is your oyster”, or something like that, could really be applied here. The fact you didn’t have quest markers (those who never got lost following directions in Morrowind, raise your hand) and that fast travel was limited only to some places (and sometimes you would have to fast travel to A, and then to B, to get to C, as there was no route linking A to C directly) was the main driving force that turned the world into a more “real” place. Or, I guess, it made the world more “present”, if that makes sense.
I’ve seen the same idea in Piranha Bytes’ games, and even though their stories never hit as hard or as well-written as Morrowind’s (in my opinion), their games (especially the classic Gothics and, more recently, Elex) have wonderful worlds to explore, to interact with and see what happens. And I’m not a game designer or anything, but I believe that’s because those people know how to build the illusion of a fully-fledged world. What we commonly see in the Western RPG development nowadays, I guess, is a more literal approach to this idea, where the world literally has to have “infinite activities” and things to do at every corner to “feel alive”, which ends up creating the opposite effect.
The first time my character got out of the boat in Morrowind and I saw Seyda Neen, and then a siltstrider, it was incredible. I always took the long route to Balmora, by foot, because I thought the graphics were amazing (haha, silly me, later I would figure out it was the “mood”, with the art direction and sound design, that lured me in), and that the night skybox with changing constellations was crazy and beautiful (something I think even to this day). The road to Balmora also had many smaller quests or events in hiding that you could only find out if you didn’t take the siltstrider for fast travel. And even so, turning at the wrong fork on the path could mean finding something you have never seen before. I, for example, would only find out what the “wizard falling from the sky” meant months after I started playing the game, all because I never turned left at that specific fork, right outside Seyda Neen, in the starting area. It wasn’t hidden, it wasn’t behind a skill check, it wasn’t part of a larger quest that I missed, it was just a path I never thought of exploring.
Anyway, I don’t want to write an ode to Morrowind (but maybe I should?), it’s just that open-world games could’ve been so much better than they currently are if some people dug their heels a bit and management wasn’t overbearing. As someone who loves to explore virtual worlds, that frustrates me a bit, especially when I look at games like Gothic 1, Elex, and Outward, and see the potential. Don’t even get me started on Sacred 2, which I sincerely believe is the best “open-world ARPG” there is, despite its jankyness.
At least now we also have Caves of Qud, which yes, has procedurally generated content, but it’s procedurally generated and heavily curated content. I love that game.