In the first post in my series on “saving” open-world design, I complained that many of today’s open worlds feel like predefined lists of tasks and rewards, their geography a vaporous playground for cyclical, detailed content-gathering opportunities that runs counter to the sense of freedom and wonder they’re meant to inspire. My interviewees, Elder Scrolls veterans Matt Firor and Nate Purkeypile, argued that this reflects the cost and scale of today’s open-world productions, which limits experimental design both in terms of practicality and overall direction.
CD Projekt’s open-world designer Jakub Tomczak doesn’t have an answer to the production problem that I’m aware of, but he does have a disarmingly obvious solution to the “checklist problem,” based on his time designing missions for Cyberpunk 2077 and its Phantom Liberty expansion: Learn to hide the checklist better. Weave it into the landscape and setting in a more artistic way, with an elegant balance of randomization and player-behavior responsiveness that keeps everything fresh.
“The most important thing in an open world is that the player, when they’re traveling, isn’t looking at the next waypoint or the next objective on their minimap,” Tomczak told me during a panel discussion at the Digital Dragons conference in Poland this summer. “It’s that they’re looking all over the world, looking for something cool that’s not marked.” [for them] Already.”
Tomczak is a relative newcomer to the Cyberpunk team. He joined CD Projekt RED in 2022, a year or two after Cyberpunk 2077’s disastrous initial launch, and right in the middle of the grueling redemption march that culminated in last year’s 2.0 update and the release of Phantom Liberty. But he’s been dabbling in open worlds for nearly a decade, having worked as game director on Gothic 2’s much-loved 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 burnout with the genre. “And I think that’s the biggest problem we have right now, is that we’re focused on opt-in content and doing a lot less opt-out content. We’re focused on people who want to 100% and finish everything, and maybe think they’re getting their value back, and we’re thinking less about immersive exploration and opt-out content.”
Cyberpunk 2077’s vehicle contracts, in which you steal cars for repairers, are an example of “opt-out” content. You find them wherever you want them, rather than endlessly detailing them to get your attention. Like other “contracts” in the game, they appear spontaneously as you walk around. “You don’t see a marker at every corner of the map, even though vehicle contracts can spawn anywhere, almost anywhere,” Tomczak continued. “They have about 150 preset locations across Night City, so there’s a lot of them, and you can try to get them all, but it’s not a list. There’s only one that spawns at a time, and it spawns nearby.” Each vehicle contract is a fleeting opportunity, but the chance to complete a contract isn’t lost forever if you hurry.
Tomczak hopes that people will feel like they're interacting with a coherent set of activities, but without the need to clean everything up. “I think that's why we get burned out on open worlds, because, OK, I've done one, and you can see it's one of 60, and you're like, OK, I'm going to try to do all of them, because they're cool and I like them. And halfway through, you're like, OK, I'm burned out.”
In addition to being more organically presented, Cyberpunk’s vehicle contracts are also partially randomized, with an unpredictable secondary objective to complete along the way. “It could be enemies, maybe a time limit, maybe delivering the vehicle without any damage.” The randomized flourishes don’t have to be spectacular to create a sense of vitality, Tomczak says. “It doesn’t have to be huge. Just change the placement of the enemies. Just add some animations, maybe some very small generic dialogue. But every little change makes the world more believable.”
The game's randomization systems are also driven by your behavior, to avoid them feeling too 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 already done 20 of these missions, we can increase our difficulty.”
Night City takes less time to traverse than many open worlds, but it’s visually denser, rising out of the desert like a cluster of fulgurite decked out in Christmas lights. Again, Tomczak wasn’t involved in the world’s original 2020 incarnation, but it’s the kind of open world he favors. “Personally, as a player, I much prefer the world to be a little bit smaller, but more condensed and filled with more unique things,” he said. “And it feels like you’re exploring something new, something personalized, something handcrafted. And, yeah, I think that’s something we need to think about as players and developers: Are we trying to get the biggest playable area possible, and maybe the quality of the stuff we get there is going to be a little bit lower, or maybe we should focus on something smaller, but, you know, fully embracing how it works.”
Echoing Purkeypile and Firor’s thoughts in my previous article, Tomczak also believes that open-world designers should spend more time looking to the past – or rather, experimenting with “outdated” design philosophies that still have many adherents. Citing his work on The Chronicles Of Myrtana, he suggested that there was a “huge wave” of interest among gamers in older open-world RPGs such as the Gothic series, which emerged in the early 2000s.
“I see a huge demand for more immersive worlds, for more handcrafted worlds, and I feel like that’s what we were playing in the ’90s and early 2000s,” he said. “We see that people still want that kind of game. I think there’s a huge potential to rediscover things that we were doing 20 years ago as an industry, and to do them again with the new tools that we have, with the new technologies in new games.”
More specifically, and to go back to the point about not listing world activities, Tomczak believes that today’s open-world designers can afford to hide more things. “I think there’s a sense that players should see everything that we have in store for them,” he told me. “And I think that’s okay. We shouldn’t be afraid to make some things hidden in the world, because that’s what’s great for me as a player. I love the idea that I’ve found something that almost no one else has found. That’s a great thing. And if you see a video on YouTube that only has a few views and you think, wow, this person found that too, you can share that with other people.”
My conversation with Tomczak gave me a better understanding of how open-world designers minimize the feeling of having to check boxes while inevitably giving me more to think about. One thing this interview doesn't fully address is that many open-world landscapes are their task lists – they exist to serve their activity design, meaning there's no real distinction between the HUD and the geography. Everything from choosing flora to playing with elevations is an exercise in content delivery.
An urban open-world game like Cyberpunk 2077 makes this all the more clear, because modern Western cities are, after all, worlds designed to stimulate or accommodate the flow of people, things, and goods. Avoiding feelings of futility and exhaustion and encouraging the enthusiastic movement of bodies into corners is a central facet not only of open-world design, but also of urban planning and tourism. Read this article on how to prevent tourists from experiencing cognitive or affective fatigue, for example.
We could follow this up with a look at the quintessential urban RPG, Grand Theft Auto. Next time, I’d like to move beyond questions of execution and think about the conceptual underpinnings of the open-world genre—the notions of space, time, curiosity, exploration, and discovery that these games facilitate, and how all of that relates to the material circumstances of the game’s development. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you think of Cyberpunk 2077’s open world (Graham loved it in 2020, despite complaints about bugs and “baggy” RPG elements, and he loves it even more in 2023), and whether there are any particularly forgotten approaches to the genre that you’d like to see developers revisit.