Rockstar Games has not only created some of the greatest and most memorable open world titles to have ever come out of the industry, but they are also the pioneers of open world gaming which means they basically wrote the rulebook on how to build engaging, living worlds that stay with the players long after they’ve finished the main plot of those games.
And at the Tribeca Festival in New York City on Saturday, Rockstar co-founder and Grand Theft Auto/Red Dead Redemption writer Dan Houser had shared insights on the nature of an open world video game experience including why there’s absolutely no right way to play such games.
“The whole point of an open world game is we provide guides,” Houser stated. “We want you to experience the story. Our goal was always — from GTA 3 onwards — to try and get more and more people to finish the story. And the numbers went up and up; they used to be pretty level. But ultimately, that’s up to the player. The players enjoy being in the world, mucking around, doing whatever they want to do, messing with the systems. The most fun thing about the game isn’t any rubbish we write, it’s the systems that we make.
“[What’s] always gonna be the most fun is being in this world, seeing what happens when you jump off this building, when you punch that person, you drive that car, when you interact with this thing, or that thing, whatever way,” Houser continued. “That’s always gonna have a sort of magical quality to it, and we are on some level on the story side, just the icing on the cake. We can’t be precious about what they do. We can encourage them to play it the way we want them to play it. But we have to give them agency.”
It’s the organic nature of the open ended world and all of it’s subsystems that together provide a genuine feeling of freedom to players which is the centerpiece of experience in all great titles of the genre. The Rockstar veteran also went on to discuss some of the other aspects of the GTA series like the satire-based media contents in the games and more, so make sure to read the whole interview.
