Obsidian Entertainment’s Avowed is rumored to boast a game world bigger than Skyrim’s, but as the studio’s latest game, Grounded, shows, size isn’t everything. In order to make an open-world fantasy game feel truly huge, Obsidian will need to implement a few key features into the game.
The Skyrim modding community provides some great examples of simple tweaks and design philosophies which can be used while making Avowed in order to make the world feel far larger and far more atmospheric.
Fast travel is one of the most contentious topics in open-world gaming. Some players prefer the convenience, while others say it takes away from one of the core elements of the game. Bethesda came to a relatively successful compromise in Skyrim, allowing fast travel but only to major cities via cart, or to places visited already.
However, in order to make Avowed’s setting feel truly worthy of a fantasy epic, there should be incentive to travel the roads from town to town, rather than mechanics simply limiting players to the less convenient option. There are few circumstances in which longer travel sounds more exciting to most players. However, when combined with plenty of encounters on the road, it can make the pay off extremely satisfying.
The Skyrim modding community demonstrated this with plenty of add-ons which filled the roads of Skyrim with random encounters that at once incentivized and seriously enriched road travel. In Avowed, players traveling the roads should expect unique adventures along the way, unexpected characters, and inns full of fascinating NPCs when they stop for the night on the journey to their main objective. This is how Obsidian can make an adventure narrative that feels open world and naturally developed.
Survival isn’t up every RPG players’ street. Mods like Skyrim’s Frostfall are extremely popular, however. These mods factor in cold weather, wetness (which affects exposure), and a few other survival elements in the game to make Skyrim’s harsh landscape feel more threatening.
Avowed needs to incorporate some survival elements like this in order to make sure that players have genuine incentive to realistically traverse the landscape instead of simply heading to their objective in a straight line. For example, wading through a river should have negative effects like making armor slightly heavier, attacks slower, and exposure greater. Avowed players should be faced with immersive decisions, like whether the party should take a short-cut through a forest full of dangerous Wild Orlans to avoid travelling over freezing mountains.
These factors should be optional, but the success of the immersive environmental mods that do this in Skyrim demonstrates a demand for it that many gamers will want to see fulfilled in Avowed at launch, especially if the game is less accessible to modders than Skyrim‘s incredibly popular Creation Kit.
Rumor has it that Avowed will contain at least two major cities, which could put it at an advantage over the next Elder Scrolls game. Skyrim had plenty of cities, but as a result each one was relatively small and more closely resembled a fort or a hamlet than an actual town. While the size of the cities are important, Skyrim’s longevity has also demonstrated that density is key. The fact that Skyrim’s cities are contained within separate loading screens made expanding them internally extremely challenging if not impossible. Some mods added extra houses outside the gates, but most simply added far more dense detail to the cities themselves.
Mods like JK’s Skyrim All in One fill cities with extra NPCs, washing lines and flags, and busier streets with more tables, chairs, farming, smithing, and all sorts of engagements taking place. The fact that these mods were so successful indicates that Avowed should make sure that its large cities still feel densely lived in rather than prioritizing size and feeling spread thin.
Density, ultimately, is the best way to make an open world game feel huge. Players will feel like they’ve been on the road for days if they find themselves lost in a few unique quests along the way marred by weather and lurking danger, far more than players who travel a further distance but find it featureless and repetitive. If Avowed can pull off the former, it might just step out of Skyrim’s shadow and help define RPGs on the next generation of consoles.
Avowed is in development for PC and Xbox Series X.
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