I picked up inFamous this earlier week. While the game’s enjoyable enough, it really got me thinking about open world game design again.

GTAIV was largely regarded as a failure for a variety of reasons, but the biggest, I think, was that it sort of failed as an sandbox game. Liberty City was beautifully rendered, the Euphoria-driven pedestrians would jump and run and bounce away from your car in ways you hadn’t seen in any other game, and every car, trashcan, lightpost, and dumpster had full Havok physics applied.

Unfortunately, until you’re actually in a mission or engaged in some activity, this virtual cityscape is nothing but a cumbersome GUI. The city is large and impressive, but hollow without context. Short of idiotic rampages, there simply isn’t anything to do when you boot up the game but drive to your next mission, date, or minigame.

Compare this to inFamous, where just the simple act of walking from you home to the next mission is itself an adventure. Enemies will snipe at you from rooftops - you could dodge them and keep running, or shoot them them down for experience points. There are plenty of blast shards to collect - you’re often no more than a building’s length away from one. Dead drops are more rare, but provide the game’s backstory. Citizens will run up to you, begging you to heal a fallen friend or stop some robbers. Optional side-missions will pop up on your radar only as you near them, so they’re always unplanned adventures. Televisions will occasionally update you on additional backstory as you explore the city, and you can always pause at any time to upgrade your powers. There’s all of this to do before even adding in the proper context of a mission and story mode.

Even earlier GTA games had hidden packages that netted the player the reward of a weapon at his base free of charge, weapons, health kits, and armor in totally unrealistic locations that nevertheless encouraged exploration, and rampage missions that gave the player short bursts of carnage.

In Grand Theft Auto IV if you want action you need to drive to a story mission. If you want to race you need to drive to a race start point. If you want to go on a date you need to drive to your love interest’s house. It’s all very modal. The game isn’t at all times an action, racing, social sim. It’s either an action game, a racer, or a social sim. The gameplay doesn’t ebb and flow around you, you have to initiate it; you have to give your play context by choosing what missions to accept.

But the whole point of the open world paradigm isn’t to provide players three different gameplay styles to drive to. The idea is to have a lot of intersecting mechanics that can end up letting the player sculpt his play style as he makes his way through the city. Exploration can turn into shooting, shooting into escaping, escaping into collecting, and back to exploration. Good sandbox games do this well - Bethesda’s work with the Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises, inFamous, and even Farcry 2.

If at any time while playing your open world game your player is treating the map you’ve spent so much money on as a GUI to get to a mission and not as a gamespace onto itself, something has gone awry.