The introduction of The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim put “open world” on everyone’s tongues. Suddenly, it became the next big thing to emulate in order to be successful. The Dragon Age series moved from semi-open mapped to their version of an open world in Dragon Age: Inquisition with very large maps that could be accessed via fast travel. But even before the 2011 success of Skyrim was the Assassin’s Creed series, stemming back to 2007. That’s not to say The Elder Scrolls series didn’t have open world games before 2011, but it was their most successful one, and one that had a lot of gamers turning to other companies and asking them to do the same.
Assassin’s Creed
I’ve considered Assassin’s Creed to be my guilty pleasure of games since I first got my copy of Assassin’s Creed 2, continuing my habit of starting game series with sequels (unintentionally, of course). I liked the story, and the parkour-esque puzzles were fun. Though sometimes the combat was repetitive, I liked the challenge of sneaking around without being seen instead of requiring full on fights.
As the Assassin’s Creed games have continued to come out, they’ve continued to grow in size and scope, but while having a larger map to explore can sound fun at first, it soon became tedious and boring. Assassin’s Creed: Unity, taking place in pre-revolutionary France, was so tediously large. While there were some story light side quests, they didn’t feel like they mattered, and they were certainly too far and few between to fill the digital map of Paris properly.
When Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate came out, fast travel became a necessity. The world wasn’t fun to run through, so I grinded through to get as many fast travel locations as possible just to make the game a little more bearable. (What really made the game fun was playing as Evie, but she wasn’t given nearly as many missions as her brother was.)
I thought that was going to be the last of the Assassin’s Creed series until Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey was released. That only places one major Assassin’s Creed game that I haven’t played, that being Origins, but Odyssey’s allowance of letting me play as a woman for the game – not just giving a woman part of a story like in Syndicate – was enough to hook me back in. Well, the kissing girls part was really what reeled me in, but the reason why I stayed – they reason I continue to play Odyssey is that it doesn’t feel like a grind. Without having first hand experience of Origins I can’t say what I’m about to with 100% certainty, but I’d like to give it a shot anyhow.
Fixing Open World: Breath of the Wild
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a fantastic open world game. While there is some criticism (and rightly so) that while it prioritizes exploration, there isn’t a whole lot to find out in Hyrule other than a rock to pick up and get a korok seed from, or some cool scenery. There’s not enough story to really make the exploration enticing beyond just the fun of actual exploration.
Having a blank map that I had to assemble myself was fantastic. I loved every bit of exploring I did in the game. The fast travel points felt earned and I wasn’t overwhelmed with possible quests just by unlocking them, as I often did in many Assassin’s Creed games. In Skyrim, There wasn’t any exploration for the sake of it. Everything was just something you had to get past in order to get to your objective.
Breath of the Wild offered an alternative to the monotonous bore of open worlds. It gave an open world game a reason to be open world: exploration.
Fixing Assassin’s Creed Open Worlds
Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey don’t prioritize exploration the same way Breath of the Wild did, but it certainly seems to take some ques from it. It allows for an exploration mode. While the game still does provide some information without finding it yourself first, the majority of the locations and quest markers come from viewing them through your eagle, Ikaros. Better still would be if the game allowed the player to mark the locations themselves rather than having them automatically defined, but it’s still a step in the right direction for the game.
Just like in Breath of the Wild, the game incentives you to explore even if you don’t need to through the use of orichalcum resources as trade for good equipment, which can only be gained through daily quests or by exploring and finding them on the tops of mountains or in hidden crevasses.
What Assassin’s Creed Does Right
For all it’s pitfalls, there is one thing I have to say that Ubisoft does right by it’s open worlds that not even Breath of the Wild accomplished: filling their worlds. Breath of the Wild feels utterly empty at times. While I’ve said before that it’s not hard to understand why it feels empty, that having so many unique NPCs to fill a world in order to accurately reflect an at least salvageable population would be hard, but Assassin’s Creed games never feel empty of people or places.
Perhaps it’s to be credited to the type of game that Assassin’s Creed tends to be: mainly stealth with combat options. For a good portion of the early games, you could hide in plain sight, sitting down on a bench or blending in with a crowd. While Odyssey lacks that, they’ve still managed to at least insinuate a larger population in their games.
This, however, means a lot of the NPCs are unimportant, nameless, and without any unique content, however brief, like in what Breath of the Wild does. But just like life, we don’t always interact with everyone we see. We could, but in reality we simply don’t.
As well, the game attempts to depict real places in the world, though modified for historical periods and what’s possible to render in a virtual map, so it can’t skimp on cities in favor of empty space. While it can limit the number of cities it portrays by limiting the size of their maps, again, the game doesn’t feel like there’s not enough people or places to fill the world.
And those were the main problems I found with other open world games. For all of Dragon Age: Inquisition’s beautiful maps, there was rarely any people or towns or villages to talk and interact with, nothing to root the beautiful world to the relatable. They felt vastly hallow. Mass Effect: Andromeda walks a thin line between Inquisiton and most Assassin’s Creed games, where is has some settlements to root down the maps, but not enough to justify having all the NPCs as nameless and unimportant.
Open worlds are hard to create. They’re even harder to get right. Even the heralded Skyrim is, in my opinion, not the best open world game, it was just the one that spurred this movement, and it was a bad example to go by.
Video Games Deconstructed 