The open-world game market has become a bit oversaturated in the past decade as the genre has become popular enough to be a major selling point by itself. Lately, it seems that more games are becoming open-world as a way to market themselves to a wider audience or to portray themselves as the innovative next step of a franchise.
This often leads to games with vast but soulless worlds full of copied and pasted open-world gameplay events. For a good open-world experience, all the game's systems must be purposefully built around facilitating the open world, rather than treating it as an afterthought. For this reason, Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild are the modern standards for open-world games, as they commit completely to the genre's strengths.
The Joy of Discovery in Elden Ring & Breath of the Wild
Though Elden Ring and BOTW are extremely different, the games share most of their greatest strengths and perfectly demonstrate what makes a great open-world game appealing to players. One of the most important design philosophies for open-world games is emphasizing and incentivizing player discovery.
Both Elden Ring and BOTW perfect the fun of discovery. Players are consistently rewarded for exploring, and this creates a positive feedback loop. Players explore the world, which is already one of the most intrinsically fun parts of the genre, and their efforts are rewarded with useful items or interesting lore. They are then more likely to continue exploring in the future.
BOTW's Korok Seed system is essentially an excuse to push players into tackling the open world with wonder and curiosity, and it works beautifully. After a player finds their first Korok Seed, their view of the world shifts from a normal landscape to a treasure trove of miniature puzzles and opportunities to make their own fun. It's important to note that Korok Seeds give players the ability to expand their weapon inventory, which is one of the most useful upgrades in the game. Players are tangibly rewarded for their discoveries, which is important because not all players can be motivated solely by the joy of discovery.
The developers of BOTW actively push players to interact with the most fun part of their open world, something that the Elden Ring developers also accomplished. There's a reason players will swing their sword at every single wall in a dungeon -- the rush of finding an illusory wall is unrivaled. Elden Ring is great at hiding powerful talismans, smithing stones and even questlines or lore dumps in obtuse locations. This inspires players to always be on the hunt for secrets since they know rewards are plentiful and the open world is rich and full of life.
Another way both games facilitate the joy of discovery is by making traveling the world fun in itself. Elden Ring's Torrent is intrinsically enjoyable to ride with his ability to double-jump and travel at extremely high speeds. BOTW's robust climbing system, shield surfing, horse riding and paragliding work together to give it one of the most satisfying movement systems in recent memory, further incentivizing players to explore the world.
Freedom of Gameplay Creates Unique Opportunities for Fun
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Another thing Elden Ring and BOTW nail is their overall gameplay freedom, which facilitates finding creative solutions to problems and enjoying unique experiences. BOTW has an entire physics system that works seamlessly with itself, limiting players only to the extent of their creativity. So many shrine puzzles have multiple solutions, including the possibility of bomb-blasting Link over all the obstacles. Fighting a normal pack of moblins can become interesting with clever use of some boulders, attacking from above or using explosives.
Much of Elden Ring's freedom of expression comes in the form of different builds and the myriad playstyles that players can adopt, but players also have a high level of agency in the story, which lends itself perfectly to the open-world genre. Due to this freedom, it's no surprise that despite them being massive open-world games, speedrunners are able to complete Elden Ring and BOTW in under 30 minutes each. The games lend themselves to alternative styles of play and strategies.
Upcoming open-world games need to look to Elden Ring and BOTW as the gold standard because the games were completely built around open-world philosophies. Both games beautifully demonstrate the potential of the genre.