GreedFall: The Dying World Isn’t Open World Because Its Creative Director Is “Terrified” of Emptiness

When open-world games started rising to prominence in the early 2000s, much of their appeal came from the promise of being transported to another world and the seemingly endless possibilities those spaces offered developers when it came to content and, in turn, game length. For a while, it felt like studios everywhere were trying to build the biggest worlds ever created, each one attempting to outdo the last in scale and sheer square mileage. However, what initially felt like a breakthrough eventually started to reveal its flaws. As those worlds grew larger, many of them began to feel increasingly empty and lifeless, often resembling little more than a laundry list of activities spread across a huge, explorable map. That’s ultimately why GreedFall: The Dying World developer Spiders chose to avoid making it an open-world game, opting for a more focused, story-driven design instead.