![]() The variety and imagination you encounter in Outer Wilds’ spectacular spaces ties in beautifully with the clues you discover as you explore the solar system that provide hints about about locations and the rules that determine how you can access and navigate them. They play by different rules: you encounter anti-grav walls, collapsing planets, teleportation devices, and even quantum spaces that require you to jettison your commitment to basic laws of physics and rethink your assumptions about how to explore physical space. They require different strategies that must be learned through active experimentation, accident, and the acquisition of knowledge to navigate. Outer Wilds’ planets may not be big, but they are intricate. We can apply this lens to Outer Wilds and No Man’s Sky. This use of intricacy in architecture, a complex interaction of systems, and an awareness of the power of contingency, increases the sense of what is possible in those games’ spaces in a way that makes them feel far more open than other titles 100 times their size. ![]() Pay attention to the details – a document, a line of dialogue – and new potentials are yielded which, significantly, also hints at the existence of undiscovered secrets they may, or may not, exist elsewhere. Multiple routes dovetail with an interlocking web of systems and strategies to create a latticework of potentialities in a small space. Think, for example, of the way you navigate the Dishonored series’ semi-open world levels. Detail and intricacy are just as effective a means of offering us more to explore as increasing the volume of the space we can play in. As well as broadening out, we can zero in. Our starting point should be to remember that scale works in two directions. Our thinking around how open worlds work requires some tweaking. A large scale and the invocation of a sense of possibility are not intrinsically linked, it would seem. Within the logic of a genre that has an uneven focus on the frontier of scale as //the// means through which to evoke an ever greater sense of possibility, Outer Wilds bounded nature should mean it cannot compete with No Man’s Sky when it comes to the core of what makes open worlds compelling. That still sounds like a lot, but the game is tiny in comparison to many of its open world contemporaries. In Outer Wilds, however, you are confined to a handful of planets in one solar system. The game shares some superficial similarities with No Man’s Sky – both give you a spaceship, let you launch yourself into the great void, and encourage you to explore the planets you find there. ![]() ![]() It turned out that what video games could be was really, really big - and a bit boring. This was, for some, the realisation of the dream of what video games could be. This was a de facto infinite universe, the logical endpoint of an industry bragging about how sequels had maps five times the size of their predecessors, or offered however many hundreds of hours of gameplay. It’s “you can go there” promise beat every other pitch that came before it, blowing our collective minds with its unfathomable scale. No Man’s Sky was supposed to be the ultimate expression of possibility. ![]() The innate appeal of being uncertain about what lies beyond the horizon is what these games are predicated on. Hence the familiar refrain of “you can go there” that accompanies open world preview trailers or screenshots showing us distant mountain ranges - the promise that you, and perhaps even the developers themselves, never know exactly what you might find when you venture out. What is it that makes the open world genre appealing? ![]()
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