Similarly, they have evolved to allow dynamic encounters with both friendly and enemy NPCs, some of whom can also lead to new quests, and many NPCs have their own schedules and behaviours that react to player actions.
Open-world games feature dynamic day/night and weather cycles, and biomes with varied flora and fauna. However, there are a host of features that open-world game designers have incorporated to help their games stand out and feel more alive and interactive. There are a handful of features shared by all games that qualify as open-world – a non-linear game design where the player can freely traverse the world to visit any of its locations at any time without being restricted to a linear path. Many games released during this period have contributed to the evolution of the open world, and we will discuss each of these titles in detail. In this blog, we will delve deeper into the evolution of open-world games, from the space-sim Elite (1984) to Death Stranding. In our previous blog we touched briefly on the history of open-world games before discussing some of the seminal games in the genre. As such, the title subverts the delightful freedom of going anywhere you please in an open world, and is a remarkable step in the evolution of open-world games. Creator Hideo Kojima decided to make traversal a real problem in Death Stranding – the challenges that the courier would face in carving out a path to his destination is at the core of this game. ĭeath Stranding is an open-world game where the player character must deliver supplies to isolated colonies of survivors in a post-apocalyptic world. One of the prominent critiques about the game was the effort it took to get from one point to another, with some reviewers calling the game a tedious slog. When Death Stranding was released in 2019, it divided critics and players, some of whom lavished praise on its story and gameplay, while others criticised it for being pretentious, among other things.