In my first post for my series on “saving” open-world design, I complained that many of today’s open worlds feel like checklists of formulaic tasks and rewards, their geography a steamy staging ground for elemental, content-gathering opportunities, at odds with the freedom and wonder they’re meant to inspire. My interviewees, Elder Scrolls veterans Matt Firor and Nate Purkeypile, argued that this reflects the expense and scale of today’s open-world creations, and that it limits experimental design, both on a practical level and in terms of overall management.
CD Projekt open-world designer Jakub Tomczak doesn't, to my knowledge, have an answer to the problem of production bloat, but based on his time creating missions for Cyberpunk 2077 and the Phantom Liberty expansion, he has a disarmingly obvious solution to the 'checklist problem': get better at hiding the checklist. Lay it out more artistically in the landscape and environment, striking a graceful balance between randomness and responsiveness to player behaviour, which keeps things fresh.
“The most important thing in an open world is that the player isn't looking at the next waypoint or the next objective on their minimap when they're traveling,” Tomczak said during a chat at the Digital Dragons conference in Poland this summer. “They're looking around the world, thinking they might find something cool that's not marked. [for them] already.”
Tomczak is a relatively new addition to the Cyberpunk team, joining CD Projekt RED in 2022, a year or two after Cyberpunk 2077’s disastrous initial launch and in the midst of the arduous march to redemption that culminated in last year’s 2.0 update and the release of Phantom Liberty. But he’s been tinkering with open worlds for the best part of a decade, working as game director on the critically acclaimed Gothic 2 total conversion mod The Chronicles Of Myrtana.
“I personally don't like the idea of to-do lists in open-world games,” he began, when I shared my feelings of exhaustion with the genre. “And I think that's the biggest problem we see right now, is that we're focusing solely on 'participatory' content and doing a lot less 'non-participatory' content. We're focusing on people who want to do 100% and complete everything, and maybe we think they're holding back their value and thinking less about immersive exploration and 'non-participatory' content.”
Cyberpunk 2077’s vehicle contracts—where you steal cars for mechanics—are an example of ‘abandon’ content. Rather than being constantly itemized for your attention, they’re left for you to stumble upon. Similar to other “jobs” in the game, they spawn spontaneously as you drive around. “You don’t see a sign in every corner of the map, and while vehicle contracts can spawn anywhere, pretty much anywhere,” Tomczak continued. “There’s 150 predefined spots in Night City, so there’s a lot of them, and you can try to get them all, but this isn’t a list. They only spawn one at a time, and they’ll spawn soon.” Each vehicle contract is a fleeting opportunity, but the chance to fulfill a contract isn’t lost forever if you rush through it.
Tomczak's hope is for a sense of engaging with a coherent set of activities, but without the oppressive feeling of having to clear them all. “I think that's why we feel exhausted in open worlds, because you say, OK, I did one of these and you see it's one of 60, and you say, OK, I'll try to do them all, because they're great and I love them. And halfway through, you say, OK, I'm exhausted.”
Cyberpunk’s vehicle engagements are more organically presented, but also somewhat random, with an unpredictable secondary objective to fulfill as you go. “There might be enemies, there might be a time limit, there might be delivering the vehicle without causing any damage.” Random flourishes don’t have to be dramatic to create a sense of life, Tomczak explained. “They don’t have to be huge things. Just changing the placement of enemies. Just adding some animations, maybe some very small, generic dialogue. But every little thing that changes makes the world more believable.”
The game's randomization systems are also driven by your actions, so they don't feel too, well, random. “For example, in vehicle contracts, we base a lot of what happens on the player's previous actions – if the player failed the previous mission, maybe we should spawn fewer enemies, or maybe if the player has completed 20 of those missions, we might increase our difficulty.”
Night City is less time-consuming than many open worlds, but it’s visually denser, jutting out of the desert like a cluster of fulgurites festooned with Christmas tree lights. Again, Tomczak wasn’t involved in the world’s original incarnation in 2020, but it’s his preferred type of open world. “Personally, as a player, I would much rather the world be a little bit smaller, but denser and filled with more unique things,” he commented. “And I get the feeling that I’m discovering something new, something special, something hand-crafted. And yeah, I think that’s something that we need to think about as players and as developers — are we trying to get the biggest possible playable area, and maybe the quality of what we have there is going to be a little bit lower, or maybe we should focus on something smaller, but, you know, we should fully embrace how it works.”
Echoing Purkeypile and Firor’s sentiments in my previous article , Tomczak thinks open-world designers should spend more time looking to the past — or, more accurately, experimenting with “outdated” design philosophies that still have a following. Referencing his work on The Chronicles of Myrtana, he suggested that there’s been a “big surge” of interest among gamers in older open-world RPGs, like the Gothic series, which began life in the early 2000s.
“I see a huge push for more immersive worlds, more hand-crafted worlds, and I think those are the things we played in the '90s and early 2000s,” he said. “We're still seeing people wanting those types of games again. I think there's a huge potential to reinvent the things that we did as an industry 20 years ago and re-do them with the new tools that we have, with new technology in new games.”
Specifically, and to expand on the theme of leaving the world's activities unlisted, Tomczak thinks today's open-world designers can get away with hiding more. “I think there's a sense that players need to see everything we've got for them,” he told me. “And I don't think that needs to be the case. We shouldn't be afraid to make things hidden in the world, because that's a great thing for me as a gamer — I love the idea that I found something that almost no one else has found. It's a great thing. And if you see a video on YouTube that's only been viewed a few times and you say, wow, that person found that — you can share that with other people.”
My conversation with Tomczak left me a little more informed about how open-world designers minimize the feeling of checking boxes, which inevitably gave me more time to think. One thing this interview doesn't fully address is that many open-world landscapes There is to-do lists – they exist to serve activity design, meaning there's really no distinction between the HUD and the geography. Everything from the choice of vegetation to the play of heights is an exercise in content presentation.
An urban open-world game like Cyberpunk 2077 makes this even more apparent, because modern Western cities are, after all, designed worlds intended to encourage or accommodate the flow of people, things, and goods. Avoiding feelings of futility and exhaustion, and encouraging the exuberant movement of bodies through the cracks, is a fundamental aspect not only of open-world design, but also of urban planning and tourism. Consider, for example, this article on how to stop tourists from experiencing cognitive or emotional fatigue.
We can move this into an analysis of Grand Theft Auto, an urban open-world game at its core. Next time, I want to move beyond questions of implementation and consider the conceptual foundations of the open-world genre—the concepts of space, time, wonder, discovery, and exploration that these games facilitate, and how all of this is tied to the material conditions of game development. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you thought of Cyberpunk 2077’s open world (Graham liked it in 2020, despite complaints about bugs and “bundled” RPG fixtures, and even more so in 2023), and if there are any forgotten approaches to the genre that you’d like to see developers revisit.