Last year Assassin’s Creed Shadows associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois made headlines by revealing that Ubisoft’s latest open world game had a “smaller” map than its predecessor, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. He compared it instead to Assassin’s Creed Origins, which recreates roughly 80 square kilometres of ancient Egypt, next to Valhalla’s exhausting 250 square kilometre expanse of land and sea.
That story sparked a couple of thoughts for me. A surge of relief, of course, because life is short and video games are often far too long. And secondly, the realisation that I don’t really know what “bigger” and “smaller” mean in a video game, and I’m not sure anybody else does either.
In the above interview with VGC, Lemay-Comtois doesn’t give the scale of Shadows in kilometres. He defines it in terms of traversal time depending on the means of locomotion, in terms of story scope and the “footprint” of certain locations – an ambiguous term that could refer to computer memory, the developer’s resources, or how long players spend in those places. He talks about how large the world feels, about whether travelling between towns is an inconvenience or an “adventure”. All of which is a reminder that the scale of a gameworld isn’t really a question of quantity – there are no literal kilometres inside your computer screen – but a dance of perception and deception.
This is something Lovely Hellplace founder James Wragg has wrangled with throughout development of Dread Delusion – an open world RPG that takes place on lurid floating islands, and which emphasises exploration and tinkering over combat and grinding for XP. There was a time, Wragg tells me in a chat about how open worlds deal with the question of physical size, when players thought Dread Delusion’s hero was too titchy for the geography. Wragg was confused by this, because he had given the characters and buildings realistic proportions. But then he took another look at the vegetation.
“The reason that people thought that you were small was because we made the bushes too big. The bushes were like, the size of a person, or bigger than a person. So you felt like you were really small. But nobody says, the bushes are too big, because it’s kind of this subconscious thing. And then we figured it out and made the bushes smaller, and people stopped saying that.”
The size of a gameworld consists of countless little tricks like that. “It’s difficult to tell how big a game world is, because if you just reduce the player speed by 50% and make the bushes a bit smaller, you can say you’ve just doubled the game’s size,” Wragg comments. He adds that our perceptions of space in general tend to be slippery: videogames are simply the latest artform to prey upon our tendency to delude ourselves. “Do you know when you’ve walked somewhere, and you look at how far you’ve walked, and you think, I’ve only been walking for five minutes, but that looks like miles away?”
Ask game developers about a game’s map size, and in my experience, you’ll rarely get a response couched purely in terms of units of spatial measurement. You will get meditations on time and the sense of time, on detail and regional differentiation. You will get thoughts about the “density” of choices in particular places, and how to engineer and transit between states of mind.
“Something like Fallout, for example, or Far Cry, you want that breathing time between moments,” observes Ben Fisher, head of design at Atomfall developers Rebellion, when I ask him if there’s such a thing as a “minimum” open world map size. “And that means a large environment, and you can play for hundreds of hours, and it’s about that cadence of lulling you into the rhythm of the game.
“In our case, we wanted to do a more dense, concentrated experience [in Atomfall], so that you feel that sense of tension and oppression and being surrounded,” he continues. “And then we also wanted to make the total runtime something that would be kind of manageable in your head, that feels like a TV miniseries or something like that, because it is one extended story.”
Fisher shorthands all this as a question of choreography, a word borne of ancient Greek that translates directly to “dance-writing”, and which refers to the arrangement of sequences of bodily movements. By implication, the size of a game’s world depends on how you dance with it, how you’re encouraged to dance with it by the choreographer-designer. In the case of Atomfall – which I have, I must admit, misleadingly compared to Far Cry – the dance is designed to be slower, with more time set aside for improvisation. The result is a world that seems roomier than one that recreates a larger tract of geography, but encourages you to traverse it less attentively.
“If the intensity is too high all the time, you go into kind of monkey mode, you go into fight or flight, and you lose that ability to make those judgments, that observation and planning,” Fisher notes of how Atomfall manages the “cognitive bandwidth” of the player. “Rebellion Games often have that observe, plan, execute cycle as being the kind of choreography that we like all of our games to have.”
Thinking about open world map size as a question of toying with the player’s perception of size seems very healthy. Healthy because thinking about open worlds especially in brute, quantitative terms is part of how you end up with thousand-person development teams who need to sell 10 million copies in their first month to avoid layoffs. And healthy because it’s more fun this way, more surprising, more artful. After speaking to Fisher and Wragg, I’ve been thinking anew about various open worlds, trying to work out which feels bigger, and why.
It’s a tiddler in terms of raw kilometres, but I think The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will always loom largest in my mind thanks to how its peaks hem you in, promising grander valleys beyond, and thanks to how absorbingly it captures changes of latitude and climate as you follow its peripheral roads. Far Cry, by contrast, strikes me as claustrophobic, because Far Cry brings the party to you: its open worlds are always devolving to a combo traffic accident and gunfight with bonus wildlife attacks. There’s a sense in which every Far Cry map is an extrapolation from the blast radius of an exploding fuel tank.
And Assassin’s Creed? I genuinely think Origins might be the “largest” Assassin’s Creed open world of all, because it has the Nile. My memories of the game are dominated by the experience of following that enormous blue delta – huger than any ocean, because it structures the navigable plane and is thus amplified by the impression of continuity with distant towns, palaces, mausoleums. I remember keeping pace with sleepy riverboats as I strolled between cities, and scuttling up hills to enjoy the contrast between bankside greenery and the sprawling sand. A world with a river like that running through it can’t help but make you feel tiny.