2014-07-06, 11:34 PM
Luxeraph Wrote:Polantaris may I ask what would you not consider not open world? is the ability to revisit areas and/or go to areas that far outlevel you enough?
Any world where you are free to go wherever you want in that world with little to no limitations, at any point in your character's life (except an early game scenario, like a tutorial or something like that), is open world.
In all of the examples I have provided, the player is welcome to go to places that vastly outlevel them, they are allowed to travel all over the world. The world is open to them. They can do things in whatever order they want. They are not limited to going in a linear path.
Games like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy may have a vast world, but for the most part are not open world, because you are restricted to doing certain things in certain orders. You are, for the most part, not allowed to go somewhere before you should be there. There's little to no choices to where you can go.
In games like Guild Wars, Maplestory, and Ragnarok Online, you are free to travel around the world as you wish. If you run into a place that will slaughter you, that's just how it goes when it's open world. It was your choice to go to those areas. I can travel over to Orr in Guild Wars 2, if I really want to, at level 10. Can I survive there? Not a chance, but I can go there. How is that any different than starting Skyrim and going straight to Windhelm? The only reason I would survive there is because of Skyrim's level scaling system, which is not a part of an open world concept. In Ragnarok Online, I can go straight for Ice Cavern at Level 10, or I can go to Payon Cave L4. Or I can go to a multitude of other areas. In MapleStory I can go straight to Arant at Level 10, or to Ludibrium Tower. Or to Korean Folk Town. Or to a multitude of other areas there as well.
These games all share those common traits. They are open world because of the choice to travel the game world how you choose, not because it's some gigantic vast area that's mostly empty and pointless.
Just because people play Maplestory as if it were a linear game does not make it a linear game. It is still open world. People choose to make it not open world and that's no one's fault but the players. Hell, I'd say the MS Development team went out of their way to improve the open-worldness of Maplestory. You guys just choose not to take advantage of it because it's, "not optimal leveling." The amount of times that people get upset because new content is not max level content is crazy. They continually expand the open world, but you guys just don't want it.