Summary
Open-world games let players play the game in their own way. Without levels or barriers, they are free to explore anywhere their eyes can see. However, exploring a world dotted by traces of civilization and seeing life flourish in all kinds of interesting places offers a comforting contrast betweenexcursions into the wilderness.
While sculpting mountains and painting down trees might be the stuff of science fiction, for now, it’s relatively easier to do in a game engine than hand-placed villagers or cities with their own populations. However, a few studios have seen fit to populate their worlds with a staggering number of settlements in their open-world games.
InHorizon: Forbidden West, 30 vibrant towns dot the landscape in the main game, each representing different tribal factions that grew out ofa beautiful apocalypse. From the bustling industrial town of Chainscrape to the peaceful, nature-infused Plainsong, each town brings its own unique culture and character to the nature-reclaimed post-apocalyptic landscape.
These settlements aren’t just nice to visit and look at, as they contain vendors and weapon merchants and are hotspots to pick up a quest of two. The 31st settlement, Fleet’s End, was added in the “Burning Shores” DLC and is far out of the way and not technically in the Forbidden West area itself but is found in the confines of the same game.
The fantasy of being able to pick up an edged weapon and jump on a stead to conquer the landscape wouldn’t quite be the same without places to house peasants and admiring onlookers, each with their own fealties and cultures.Mount & Blade II: Bannerlordtakes a fairlyrealistic approach to medieval life, with 53 towns and hundreds of villages across its expansive map.
These settlements are central to the game’s combat, diplomacy, and economic systems and have plenty of interactivity and utility throughout the game. Conversely, if the player feels like it, they can even give up their life of amassing power and arms and live out their lives as beggars or traveling merchants among the people.
Assassin’s CreedOdysseyboasts a massive number of settlements, with 49 major cities and an additional 36 smaller towns scattered across its sprawling recreation of Ancient Greece. These settlements range from the iconic, bustling streets of Athens to the militarized simplicity of Sparta, with countless coastal ports and villages in between, a delight forfans of Ancient Greek history and mythology.
These locations aren’t mere background decorations. They’re alive with marketplaces, arenas, temples, and bustling NPCs going about their lives, even if most of them are non-interactable and the simulation is played out through ambient animations.
There are an astonishing 40 capital cities and somewhere around 5,000 smaller cities and towns to explore inDaggerfall, which means that sight-seeing completionists will have their work cut out for them.Daggerfall’smap is roughly the size of real-life Great Britain, and each village feels about as far away from one another as they would be in real life.
Admittedly, given the limited amount of data storage available in the late 90s, there’s only so much content to spread around this humongous,early, semi-procedurally generated map, and after the fourth or fifth, each town and village begins to feel a little samey. Fans of this concept may be excited to hear that the same developers behind the game are working on an equally ambitious spiritual sequel toDaggerfall, but this time with a little more content to spread around.
So long as the “spawn structures” tickbox is checked during world generation,any given world inMinecraftcan potentially have a near-infinite amount of villages to explore. The procedural generation sometimes leaves interesting results as roads and buildings clash with local geography, and given theendless possible combinations in the code, there’s always a chance of finding something unique.
That also goes for villagers, too. While they may not have names (unless the player finds a way to name them using a nametag) or dialogue, villagers of each profession have items available to sell. These interactions (and the resulting product of each trade) make each village that much more memorable.
There isn’t exactly a way to top an open world with literally a galaxy of planets and spaceworthy structures, each with a chance to harbor life and settlements, and that’s exactly what happens inNo Man’s Sky, thanks to themind-melting number of explorable planetsin its universe, many containing one or more hubs of life. These hubs are a place to trade, find upgrades, and learn some alien lore.
Past a point, the variations in settlements do begin to break down under the stress of infinity, with many outposts and structures following familiar layouts and templates, but regardless, the sheer scale ofNo Man’s Sky’suniverse makes running out of new towns to ride into literally impossible in a single human lifetime.
