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[AuthenticKaizen]

Here are some interesting articles about Open World Design

Open World Issues Part 1: The Rockstar Model
Open World Issues Part 2: The Bethesda Model
Open World Issues Part 3: Trust And The Player-driven Narrative


Moreover:
The History And Theory Of Sandbox Gameplay

[Will Vale]

I like games that approach this via storytelling as well as environment. There are some games which have a really strong sense of self-belief in the world they've created and it lends them an air of confidence. I think one of the keys to this is designing or documenting a big deep world but not giving the player a load of exposition. Instead, the background can be referred to in passing by characters - you don't always understand the reference, but when you've heard a couple they start to support each other and make sense of the world.

Good examples might be Alpha Centauri, Halo, Myth, and most Silicon Knights games. A bad example might be Dragon Age - too much exposition by documents.

Books do this too - I really like the wider world of Dune as revealed by the excerpts from fictional books used as chapter intros.

My 2p...

Will

[Alistair Aitcheson]

To me I'd say the use of NPCs is very important. Kuppo mentioned Legend of Zelda games on N64, and I think this is especially true in Majora's Mask.

Many NPCs in the game are in different locations depending on what day it is, and appear all over the map. I like the idea that the whole game operates without you being there to control it. All you ever see is the individual details of this system, rather than the big picture, which helps give the impression that the timetables are more vast than they actually are, because you can only ever see bits of it.

The three-day cycle enforced by the story means that it doesn't seem mechanical or on some artificial loop. When I played Harvest Moon on Gamecube I didn't get this feeling of a natural living world, because every NPC seemed to do the same activity every day, very mechanically and repetitively. If your characters are limited to only three days of activity it's a lot easier to stop them from repeating themselves like robots. When the Majora's Mask characters repeat themselves it's part of the story, so it doesn't seem artificial.

[Coz]

- Interaction of the player with the environment
It's not just killing baddies. Maybe you cut grass. Maybe you talk to that cute bartender. Maybe you set
a cottage in fire, which in turn makes the owner run in fear, call the guards on you, which you then
choose not to kill so they throw you in jail, and meet a fellow prisioner who teaches your character lock-picking skills, which is the only way to enter the King's vault.

- Interaction of the environment with other parts of the environment
Rain makes trees grow.

- Actions of the environment independent of external influences
Leaves fall from trees.

- Variety
This area is sandy. This one is muddy. This one is a jungle. This one is a road. This one is a town.
This one is surreal. This one is scary. Oh, here's a book!

- Attention atraction
Bright colors. Loud music. Graphics / sound that set the mood of the game. Fast-moving creatures.
Lighting.

- Amount of elements in the world
You have a small space with tons of things to do. A big space works too, but only if it's filled with
marvelous joy, instead of boring emptyness.

[antymattar]

I think that the game Cave Story has a rather stagnate atmosphere. But who cares.

[Tiderion]

I think this subject is difficult to tack down to one thing or another.

All the people moving about in the GTA series did not necessarily make it more alive. NPCs and sounds and triggers are all handy but they have be used in concert to make a believable background.

Portal was a game with an incredibly immersive world and it lacked NPCs and open areas completely. The soundscape was limited to something sort of industrial and the only triggered sequences were a part of the gameplay. We all love it though because the backdrop matches the story being told. The writing on the wall, the cracks in the paint, and the holes in the story being told to you by GLADoS all serve to paint a picture of what is going on that every player can believe.

The Mass Effect series is believable not because of all the embellishments themselves (and there were a lot of them) but how they all work in unison to convey a world in which you are participating.

[letsap]

When I think of an alive game, I usually think of Majora's Mask for the reasons people already mentioned, or Yoshi's Island.

In that game, it feels like you're really travelling through an island rather than progressing through sets of obstacles set up to thwart you. Bats in caves get bothered by you, you get caught off guard by birds dashing around, there's cacti playing catch with themselves, monkeys eating watermelons, monkeys getting to watermelons before you, and there's butterflies and flowers and dragonflies all over. It feels like you're in a part of that world, instead of just a stage in a game.

Even though there's clear goal posts, the stuff in between feels so organic and "already there" instead of there solely for the player character to triumph over.

That's not to say an empty sort of world can't feel alive. Mario 3 felt alive if for no other reason than there were multiple kingdoms. Rather than saying something like there's one way to make a world feel alive, the important thing is to remember what little tricks work and then making them work in whatever context the game has.

I'm kind of all over the place with this. My bad.