How Open World Design Can Suppress a Game's Focus (featuring Batman: Arkham Knight)
Batman: Arkham Knight is in many ways an evolution of the two main Arkham games that came before. There are more things to do and the world feels bigger and more ambitious. This unfortunately comes at the cost of weaker gameplay cohesion, making for a game that has more to do, sure, but struggles to meaningfully unify its various gameplay ideas. // Image: WB Games, Rocksteady
“Open world” is a term I’ve learned to resent. This identifier is something that has infected a lot of discourse around certain types of games. While some games adopt more open-ended approaches to their design, that doesn’t inherently make them “open world” in the sense that they create an entirely open, non-linear level for players to explore. Even if a game doesn’t fully adopt an open world approach to its game design, the label of “open world” often gets slapped onto games either in the games media landscape or by various people talking about games on social media or interpersonally. This has resulted in the term becoming a buzz word more than anything else; a term that gets thrown around but seldom accurately describes a game’s design.
With that said, it’s essential to differentiate the term from the actual description. “Open world” may be a term I despise, but it’s a description of a type of game that I, like many people, find immense promise in. But what exactly is an open world video game? And why does the term often get thrown around and put on games that don’t even fit the definition of an open world video game?
All game design is merely a presentation of ideas, problems, and solutions. Like with any art form, ideas can be presented in an infinite number of ways, but what makes video games a medium unlike any other is how players engage and interact with those ideas. A game like Tetris presents a relatively basic idea: blocks descend and fill a screen and can only be destroyed by creating horizontal lines of blocks. Problems and solutions born out of this idea naturally reveal themselves. If the player doesn’t clear lines on the screen, they will eventually lose space to place blocks and lose the game. Moreover, they don’t receive as many points of they only clear one horizontal line of blocks at a time. In order to solve these problems, the player needs to engage with the ideas and possibilities presented by the different types of blocks available and strategize how to place them together to clear multiple lines from the screen to clear up more space and get as many points as possible.
Puzzle games are often the most visually candid about their ideas and how they present problems and their respective possibilities of solutions. When broadening to other types of games and genres, other types of ideas are explored, other types of problems and challenges are presented to the player, and the way in which players go about interacting with these ideas and issues create distinct experiences. Whether it’s an RPG, a top-down shooter, a fighting game, or any other style of video game, players are constantly engaging with different ideas in different ways with every single video game they play. Different genres and design approaches are merely different methods of presenting such ideas - whether they’re narrative, mechanical, logical, or philosophical ideas.
The open world video game is but a particular presentation of ideas. Instead of providing challenges in a focused level, puzzle, or combat encounter, an open world aims to blur the line between instances of ideas and create the illusion of a giant, unified idea that, in actuality, is a collection of various smaller ideas that come together to create a greater whole. In an RPG, for example, a world map with random encounters is one presentation of ideas to consider, while a town with no encounters, NPCs to talk to, and quests to take is a presentation of a completely different set of ideas. An open world video game may opt to blur the line between these two instances, where a player is empowered to seamlessly travel from the open plains of a field into a neighboring town, with no load screens of segmentation separating the two instances. What were once two distinct presentations of ideas in the context have now become a larger interconnected network of ideas.
An open world is a presentation of ideas just like any other style of game design, but the unique way in which it creates non-linear possibilities to solve problems and engage with ideas captures the imaginations of players. Many players find this style of game design to be inherently immersive - potentially leading to game worlds that players can get endlessly lost in thanks to open world games’ tendency to offer little or no load screens with downtime. This means that there is more time for players to be in the game and rarely get taken out of the experience and plethora of content these types of games often host.
This promise that open world games provide often brings an excitement from players. That excitement, I feel, is precisely what has caused the label “open world” to effectively become a buzz word in the video game landscape. It’s not uncommon to see reactions from brand-new game reveals and hear the phrase, “is this open world?” without regard for what such a design approach would entail for the game. In many instances where this question gets asked, the game ends up being level-based or feature open zones. They merely provide a glimpse of openness - and yet that glimpse is enough to blindly excite some players into thinking these games that deliver some openness are entirely open world. The mainstream video game consumer has become somewhat obsessed with the idea of open world games, even though it’s arguably one of the most difficult types of games for developers to get right.
People love the idea, the promise of open world games, but the reality is that open world games bring with them a lot of unique challenges that can result in incredibly shallow experiences. When in the right hands, though, open world video games can be incredible and offer gameplay experiences that stick with players for their entire lives. And so, people cling on to those few instances of incredible open world games and naturally look for other open world games that will scratch a similar itch.
This is where a cycle begins to develop. In an excitement to find the next big game, developers and consumers alike slap on the “open world” label to games in a hope that such a thing will boost a game’s appeal. Sometimes, these open world games blow people away, and other times they lead incredibly empty, shallow, and unfocused experiences as a result of trying to offer a grand scope.
The previous paragraph may have come off as cynical, but truthfully, my intention is to illustrate that open world games bring with them certain appeal and expectations. It’s easy to point fingers at the checklist-ridden, “Ubisoft-style” open world games and generalize that as being all that the open world style of game design has to offer, but in truth, doing such a thing would dismiss the great triumphs that many developers have accomplished with this style of game. Some developers truly nail realizing a collection of ideas in an open world context. In fact, open world video games account for some of my favorite games of all time, such as Xenoblade Chronicles X and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. These games and others like them embrace fully open environments that can see players seamlessly travel from one end of the game’s map to the other with no loading zones or segmentation to dissolve the illusion of a fully-realized, cohesive digital world.
However, a part of what I feel makes games like Xenoblade X and Tears of the Kingdom special is their restraint and wisdom. They feature worlds that are large yet dense with meaningful activities to do. More than anything, these games capture an otherworldliness to their settings that naturally beget curiosity and a drive to explore and conquer the unknown. The openness of these games’ worlds invite player curiosity, which naturally leads to players engaging with various game systems peppered throughout the game’s world. Xenoblade X invites players to complete “Segments” on its map, which requires interacting with the different gameplay systems, be they combat, exploration, or questing. Tears of the Kingdom rewards player curiosity with the likes of Shrines that often feature combat or puzzle-focused challenges, among other rewards that keep the player-driven exploration consistently satisfying to partake in. The gameplay loops in these two examples both succeed in creating focused experiences in spite of their size. The shower their open worlds with as much attention to detail that a linear game would put into its environments. This attention to detail and vivacity to the game’s worlds make completing content within them feel warranted and exciting.
In truth, a large game world can come at the great costs of gameplay cohesion and focus. When making a large world, the immediate attempt at justification is to populate a game’s world with content to engage with. But how much content is too much? How much is too little? It’s an incredibly difficult balance, and such a balance will be different for every game, depending on the world’s size, the depth, complexity, and diversity of its gameplay systems, the game’s intended difficulty curve, the game’s narrative, and so much more. There is no “one size fits all” solution to making an open world work, which, in many ways, is what makes the genre so challenging for developers yet so alluring to players. Every open world is inherently different and tries to strike a different balance, making every game in the genre capable of having a different feel to it.
When this elusive balance is successfully achieved and a game’s developers thoughtfully strike a balance to make an open world feel justified, deliver a wide range of content, and meaningfully present a game’s mechanics in a fun way to players, the results are often incredible. By remaining focused on what it wants to achieve with its open world presentation, a game can fully realize its large-scale vision without losing sight of what kind of game it wants to be and what kind of experience it wants to give to players. The few games that pull this balance off often go on to become some of the most celebrated and beloved games to date.
So what happens when a game fails to strike that balance? What causes a game to fail to strike that balance?
These are the questions I’ve found myself asking as someone that’s entertained the possibility of writing and developing a game with open world elements. To find answers to these questions, I’ve made an effort to play through various open world titles. I want to understand what causes an open world to make a game better and best represent its ideas, problems, and solutions. Likewise, I want to understand what causes an open world to get in the way of representing a game’s ideas, problems, and solutions.
Earlier this year, I talked about Xenoblade Chronicles X and how its open world design helps pioneer one of the greatest RPG experiences ever crafted. Mira is precisely the kind of open world I think makes a game realize its full potential. A few months after playing through Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition, I’ve managed to find an open world that represents the opposite end of the spectrum. Having played through the Batman: Arkham games throughout this year for the first time, I’ve seen how each game introducing more open-ended environments has gradually made each game feel less focused than the last. This issue leads to a crescendo in Arkham Knight - a game that, while in many ways maintains what makes the series of games solid, ultimately crumbles under the weight of its own open world. Arkham Knight is an tragically unfocused game, and I strongly feel that the game’s open world is the cause of such a thing being the case.
So let’s unpack why Batman: Arkham Knight’s open world manages to be a poor presentation of its mechanical ideas and understand what exactly happens when a game like this fails to strike the balance of content density, cohesion, and fun. Moreover, let’s understand why Arkham Knight fails to strike this balance and how future instances of open world design can learn from the game’s shortcomings.
Batman: Arkham Asylum is unanimously considered to be the weakest of the three Rocksteady-developed Arkham games. While the execution of its gameplay ideas are certainly flawed, I find Arkham Asylum to be far-and-away the most focused of the Arkham series thanks to its commitment to having a tighter, more-focused scope. This greater focus in the game’s design makes for a more well-paced and cohesive experience. // Image: WB Games, Rocksteady
This is the part of the blog post where I describe what this piece was originally going to be. As I’ve mentioned in other posts throughout the year including my Collection of Mana review, I’m making an active effort to play more games and get through a significant chunk of my backlog this year. On top of just wanting to play a wider variety of games and finally completing games I’ve meant to get around to for years, this quest of mine has made me finally try games I’ve heard praise for over the years and make an informed opinion on such games for myself. Enter the Batman: Arkham series - a collection of games that I grew up constantly hearing praise from friends, critics, and content creators alike. Even a decade after Arkham Knight’s 2015 release, I still hear chatter about the Arkham series being making for some of the greatest games of the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Of course, a game being popular among the people surrounding you isn’t inherently indicative of a game’s quality, so I wanted to play these games for myself and inform my own opinion on whether these games deserve as much praise as I’ve seen them be given among the years - with Arkham City specifically being one of the highest rated games of the entire 2010s. Throughout this year, I played through the three Rocksteady-developed Arkham games, and walked away thinking that they’re generally good. Asylum has rough stealth sections and Knight relies a bit too heavily on Batmobile sections, but I generally had a fun time playing through these games. Do I think they were as good as the praise I’ve heard put onto these games over the last fifteen years? No, I don’t think they lived up to that expectation, but perhaps that’s an unfair framing to judge these games upon. As games, themselves, I enjoyed them, but didn’t find them to be the “masterpiece" titles that I’ve seen others place upon them.
My original intention was to make a review of all three Rocksteady-developed Arkham games, but when finishing up my playthrough of Arkham Knight, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to write a review that added anything new to the conversation beyond the fact that I liked the games didn’t quite like the games as much as some other people do. I figured that wouldn’t make for a particularly compelling review, so I instead started reflecting on what I felt was the weakest part of Batman: Arkham Knight, especially as I began doing clean-up on many of the game’s optional objectives that end up not becoming so optional when trying to see the game’s ending. As I was forced to partake in many of the game’s side-activities - some of which were more interesting than others -, I fully became fatigued by the game’s greatest weakness: the fact that an underwhelming, often empty-feeling open world connected the game’s numerous activities that I needed to jump between.
I found myself missing the smaller, more focused premise of Arkham Asylum - a game that has a completely different feel because of its smaller scale. In exchange for a larger scale and offering more stuff to do, Arkham Knight becomes a less interesting game in many ways. This isn’t to say that Arkham Asylum isn’t without its flaws - I find it to actually be the weakest game in the series, but that assessment is largely a reflection of the game’s lack of polish, poor encounter design, weak boss fights, and unrefined stealth sections. With that said, I find Arkham Asylum to actually be the most mechanically cohesive experience among the Arkham series, and a large part of that comes down to the fact that the game is smaller and accordingly does more with less. Asylum takes its smaller environments and constructs them in an intelligent way that frequently and consistently challenges and tests players’ knowledge of the game’s mechanics.
Each of the Arkham games feature a general progression system where Batman gradually acquires new tools that he can use to access new areas, defeat certain enemies, and navigate environments and combat situations in ways that he couldn’t otherwise. However, it’s only in Arkham Asylum where this unveiling of new abilities feels evocative of a Metroidvania-like structure. Conceptually, I think the idea of a Batman game having the progression of a Metroidvania game makes perfect sense - Batman acquires new gadgets that he can use to gradually investigate more areas, become stronger, . It’s a design approach that naturally fits well with the detective work Batman does while also creating a believable way for the caped crusader to gradually become stronger throughout an adventure. Batman himself doesn’t become that much stronger, but having access to more tools and abilities makes him more capable to navigate various situations. This method of having new abilities unlock new sections of the game’s map is something that is used to great effect in Asylum, and could have made for a strong framework for the rest of the Arkham series.
Though, there’s a reason why 3D Metroidvanias are as rare as they are - the lock-and-key design approach of Metroidvanias is a lot more challenging to pull off in a 3D setting. There has to be a lot more attention put in place regarding what abilities and tools can allow the player to do and how they can impact how players navigate and explore more of a game’s world. Metroid Prime, for example, reworks some of the upgrades from previous Metroid games and has to effectively nerf them to work in a 3D context. The Space Jump, once a jump that could be performed infinitely with the correct rhythm in 2D games, was turned into a simple double jump for a 3D space. The Spider Ball, once an ability that allowed players to cling to any surface, needed to be limited to only work on certain railings to prevent players from bypassing entire sections of level design. The reason for the nerfs to these abilities wasn’t for the sake of it - rather, 3D level design inherently brings a lot more possibilities for movement options that can and will be exploited by players if given the chance. Abilities in 3D Metroid games are theoretically more limited than their 2D counterparts, but using these more limited options to successfully navigate through complex navigational puzzles to acquire Missile Upgrades and Energy Tanks still creates a satisfying feeling of progression.
The gadgets in Arkham Asylum very much function the same way. Gadgets like the Line Launcher that can create horizontal pathways for Batman to use to cross over chasms and the Cryptographic Sequencer to unlock certain doors are perhaps limited in their potential applications. However, these gadgets do enough to allow the setting of Arkham Asylum to gradually open up and become more easy to navigate and explore. There are certainly less places to go to than later Arkham games, but it genuinely feels like the player has to earn the right to reach new areas through judicious use of the gadgets given to them throughout the journey. This means of progression is a satisfying one, and it’s enough to make the rougher parts of the game, such as the aforementioned stealth sections, become a bit more bearable, since the feeling of meaningful progression is enough to make the entire experience feel worth pursuing.
While I wouldn’t consider Arkham Asylum to be nearly as in-depth with its upgrades as other games that more proudly wear the moniker of being a Metroidvania, I think Asylum absolutely succeeds in taking advantage of the design approach of the genre. The lock-and-key style of progression helps keep the game’s admittedly small setting feel meaningful to get around. More than anything, this design approach gives Asylum a remarkable sense of focus - an awareness of what the game wants to accomplish with its design. The smaller setting and scale creates a snappier feeling game with not nearly as much filler as later entries, giving the game more room to put players into hand-crafted encounter and stealth sections. The execution of these encounters are imperfect as I’ve previously mentioned, but the Metroidvania groundwork serves as a good connective tissue that strings the various parts of the game together. If built upon and further refined with more abilities and more polish to various mechanics, this approach could lead to larger and even more tightly designed games that create an even greater feeling to satisfying progression.
Unfortunately, though, that wasn’t quite the direction that the Arkham series would take. Arkham City opted to create a far larger setting with a lot more side-activities that the player could complete between main mission objectives. With regard to the Metroidvania bones of Asylum, there are certainly still traces of those here. The player begins the adventure with a few of the gadgets acquired in the first game, with additional upgrades being given to the player throughout the roughly 10-hour campaign. With more abilities given to the player like the Remote Electrical Charge, the Disruptor, and the Freeze Blast, there is certainly a more diverse array of instances of the player needing to use different abilities given to them to navigate certain challenges. The tradeoff for this, however, is the game’s significant increase in scale. The Arkham series graduated from a collection of smaller, mostly linear buildings to a full city to glide around and navigate, meaning that the player has a lot more ground to cover. Instead of relying on gadgets and abilities given to the player throughout the journey, players instead need to rely on Batman’s gliding and use of the Batclaw to quickly get around the city. This change isn’t inherently a bad thing (and it arguably helps the game a lot at making you feel like Batman, something I’m sure no one has ever said before), but it certainly puts less of an emphasis on the Metroidvania approach of game design.
This isn’t to say that it’s entirely been eroded from the game, though. A lot of the game’s more focused sections, while certainly more segmented off from one another, are still intact and often require smart use of Batman’s gadgets. Though, it’s hard to not notice that the instances where the player needs to use tools to access new areas of the game’s map are fewer and farther between. The game has put more focus on utilizing tools for designated missions where the game’s design becomes briefly more linear. When out in the game’s main overworld, though, it’s quite rare to have to use many of the tools Batman has available to him outside of collecting the mostly negligible and dissatisfying-to-collect Riddler Trophies. Out of these three games, Arkham City is what I would consider to be the best at deciphering a compromise between openness and focused game design. When the game has its more linear sections, it feels like a strong continuation of the Metroidvania aspirations of Arkham Asylum, but between those sections, there’s a willingness to make a larger world that perhaps more accurately sells the overall vibe and spirit of Batman as a franchise. Rocksteady clearly weren’t interested in making the Arkham games into dedicated Metroidvanias, but they have just enough Metroidvania elements still intact in Arkham City to at least retain some tight instances of game design that ask the player to solve problems with the tools provided to them throughout the adventure.
I don’t find the more non-linear sections of Arkham City to be the best use of a larger environment, though. Aside from some navigational challenges that test the players’ gliding capabilities and the onslaught of Riddler Trophies to collect (more on that later), there isn’t too much in the game’s larger world that begets curiosity or exploration. The larger world is merely a means of presenting the game’s larger scale and larger assortment of side content. However, presenting a larger world only makes it more apparent that the more focused, linear sections of the game are more separated from each other because, well, they are physically farther apart from each other on the game’s larger map. This goes on to make the game feel just as, if not more segmented than its predecessor despite the clear intent to make the game more open. In turn, this feeling of segmentation exacerbates the feeling of the game not coming off as focused as Asylum was, even with that game’s flaws. While City improves upon a lot of the mechanics introduced in Asylum, its presentation of ideas, problems, and solutions isn’t as refined as what came before, and it would only get worse with the next Arkham entry.
Batman: Arkham Knight is the crescendo of the Arkham series’ gradual amplification of scale. While Arkham Asylum was a smaller-scale adventure mainly composed of linear rooms, corridors, and sewers, Arkham Knight depicts a fully explorable Gotham. While this openness appeals to the fantasy and immersion of becoming Batman, it ultimately forces many of the game’s activities to be spread thin. Very little in this open environment draws intrigue, making world navigation simply feel like a means of going from one activity to another without ever feeling like a cohesive, immersive experience. // Image: WB Games, Rocksteady
The judicious if imperfect blend of a non-linear overworld and designated linear sections that make heavy use of Batman’s gadgets and upgrades would be almost entirely eroded with Arkham Knight and its biggest, most heavily-marketed feature: its open world. The AAA side of the games industry had steadily become more obsessed with the potential of open worlds throughout the 2010s. The success stories of massive worlds in mainstream AAA successes such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Assassin’s Creed titles made a lot more games steadily become interested in exploring this presentation of ideas for players. The reason for the explosion of this style of game-making is the immersion that it inherently invites to players. Open worlds fulfill a fantasy of getting lost in a digital world for many players - presenting a game in an open world context could naturally invite a larger wave of players.
I want to refrain from coming off as cynical as to whether open world games have become a trend. To reduce open world games as little more than trend-chasers does a disservice to the work that often goes into making these open world presentations of ideas work. However, I think the greatest open world games are the ones that make that naturally beget curiosity and discovery. The reality of this, though, is that very few games have the mission of creating an experience that incentivizes curiosity and discovery. Many games that choose to go down the route of open world game design don’t feature worlds that are meant to be meaningfully explored. Batman: Arkham Knight is one such game.
The continuing tradeoff throughout the Arkham series meets its extreme here. Arkham Knight creates a large world that Batman can glide around in and drive the Batmobile around in to fully realize the fantasy of being the Caped Crusader in a run-down, dystopic Gotham. While this fantasy is effectively realized, it’s also a remarkably fleeting one. Once the novelty of the game’s power fantasy wears off and the player needs to put their attention towards completing the game’s objectives, it becomes apparent how much Arkham Knight’s open world brings the game down.
A lot of this is partially due to the newly introduced Batmobile segments. In addition to the combat, puzzle-solving, and stealth sections of previous games, Arkham Knight adds in tank gameplay via the Batmobile. A common complaint with Arkham Knight is that these Batmobile sections are so long and plentiful throughout the game’s main story and side content that the tank begins to overstay its welcome quite quickly and overshadows other parts of the game. And such a criticism is a well-founded one - there definitely is too much tank combat in Arkham Knight. However, the gameplay systems required by the driving and tank combat of the Batmobile necessitate large spaces for the Batmobile to move around in, which goes on to create a larger issue. In order to create compelling gameplay sequences with the Batmobile while also making driving through Gotham feel believable and well-structured, the open world is effectively a byproduct of Rocksteady implementing features that require more physical space for the player to occupy.
In this sense, Rocksteady’s decision to feature an open world in Arkham Knight feels well justified. However, I take issue with the means through which this open world presents its ideas - mainly with how other gameplay systems have to effectively take a backseat for the open world to exist. While the various gadgets Batman can acquire throughout the main story make their return, the Metroidvania style of progression of using these acquired gadgets has almost been entirely discarded. Arkham Knight features various gadgets like the Disrupter, Voice Synthesizer, and Remote Hacking Device that have designated sections where each respective gadget needs to be used to proceed. After these sections, though, the gadgets are hardly if ever used again for progression. Many of Arkham Knight’s gadgets are intended to be used in the game’s various combat and stealth sections - most of which are improved by the sheer fact of more options being given to the player. However, the navigational challenges that test players’ ability to combine the use of various gadgets suffer because of the lack of linear, tightly designed sections where players need to take the utility of gadgets into account when exploring environments. In an open world context, there simply isn’t much reason given to justify using many of Batman’s gadgets aside from maybe the occasional combat application. I mostly found many of Batman’s gadgets getting ignored throughout my Arkham Knight playthrough, and a lot of that is because Arkham Knight’s open world is designed in a way that rewards getting across large spaces by either gliding or driving the Batmobile. Gadgets don’t really fit into that equation throughout most of the game’s runtime.
There are exceptions to this, of course. The Riddler’s side story serves as the best example, since many of the challenges presented in this optional storyline presents puzzles and challenges to the player, many of which involve the use of gadgets and pattern recognition from the player. The issue with this, however, is that the sections where the Riddler storyline makes progress are the very antithesis to the rest of Arkham Knight’s design. While the majority of Arkham Knight’s main and side content take place in certain sections of the game’s open world, the Riddler storyline takes the player to designated, linear locations where challenges get completed in a linear fashion. The Riddler side story feels both mechanically and physically detached from the rest of the game because it almost literally is (complete with long elevator sections disguised as loading screens separating these more confined locations from the rest of the game’s world). This side story is a genuine highlight of the entire game because it is the primary instance in which Arkham Knight fully realizes the mechanical potential of many of the ideas first introduced in Arkham Asylum and City. The fact that the rest of Arkham Knight isn’t like this only highlights just how different Arkham Knight’s priorities are in relation to the first two titles.
Having different priorities and a different mission with regard to what a game wants to accomplish isn’t inherently a bad thing. I would have no problem if Arkham Knight was completely different from what came before if it fully committed to its own unique ideas. But the fact that the Riddler storyline and the few designated linear sections where gadgets need to be used shortly after they are acquired infers that Rocksteady didn’t quite make up their mind over what kind of game they wanted to commit to making. On one hand, Arkham Knight features linear sections that require the player to slow down and thoroughly utilize the tools available to them to complete navigational challenges, perform detective work, and solve the various problems the game presents. On the other hand, Arkham Knight delivers a non-linear experience that doesn’t require the player to use tools given to them throughout the experience and instead simply go from one objective to the next, with most open world activities asking the player to engage in combat, stealth, or tank sections. The game mostly opts to partake in the latter, but it engages just enough with the former to create something of a schism between the two design approaches. This inconsistency of Arkham Knight’s design approach makes for an overall unfocused experience - one that compounds with Arkham Knight’s already-unfocused and mostly uninteresting open world.
Many open-world titles garner industry attention and accolades for realizing worlds that feel larger than life. But that shouldn’t mean that all games should aspire to create open worlds. There is just as much, if not more value in taking advantage of smaller, more focused settings. The only way to truly win the game against creating unfocused and unnecessary open worlds is to deny the urge to make an open world at all. // Image: Nintendo
As far as open worlds go, Gotham’s style-over-substance approach makes for a remarkably shallow game world. While, yes, Gotham is impressively drenched in atmosphere and feels like a great depiction of the legendary comic book setting, it’s one that ultimately looks better at a glance than under a microscope. The city looks cool when gliding over it or even driving through it, but when going from one open world objective to another, it becomes remarkably apparent just how uninteresting Gotham is to navigate. Put simply, this open world isn’t one that begets curiosity nor intrigue. It could be argued that a setting like Gotham while under an evacuation order shouldn’t beget players to partake in their curiosity. However, I think if an open world is designed to be uninteresting to explore, investigate, and uncover, then maybe it shouldn’t be an open world to begin with. Some games are simply better by having less openness and by having a more focused presentation of ideas. By opening the door of presenting ideas to such a vast scale, an open world needs to present ideas in a consistently interesting way, and Arkham Knight just doesn’t do that. Instead, it simply asks players to go from one objective to the next and either glide or drive their way there.
Many of the game’s open world activities devolve around the aforementioned combat, stealth, or tank gameplay. The open world is merely a means of stringing these different mechanical sections together. However, the difference between Arkham Asylum’s means of stringing different gameplay sections together and Arkham Knight’s means is that the size of Arkham Knight’s world means that there’s simply more time between interesting things that happen. Especially during the postgame when the player is forced to complete a lot of the game’s supposed optional content to see the game’s ending, it becomes apparent just how much down time there truly is in Arkham Knight. The player will inevitably have to glide or drive around the city to figure out how to progress through many of the game’s side stories. While some questlines give basic objective markers that point the player to precisely where they need to go to progress, other questlines simply require the player to explore the city and stumble upon the event that will allow them to make progress in a questline.
This is where Gotham’s failure to create a player-driven motivation to explore becomes an issue. Because Gotham doesn’t have many interesting things to accomplish outside of the optional storylines and the checklist-style completion of destroying enemy searchlights, drones, and encampments, there’s really no reason for the player to meaningfully engage with the open world. This creates an inevitable instance where the player will either have to aimlessly wander through the game’s world before they stumble upon whatever they need to make progress in the side stories, or they have to refer to an external guide. In either instance, the immersion teased by the open world of Gotham has been shattered. While the open world of Gotham was created to build the fantasy of being Batman in this vast, hopeless city, that fantasy has devolved into the player either aimlessly gliding around the city until something happens or exiting the game to access a website or another device for help. And there’s nothing more immersion-breaking than literally leaving the game’s world just to figure out what to do.
On top of this is the overwhelming abundance of the lackluster Riddler Trophies. While not new to Arkham Knight, the Riddler Trophies rear their ugly head most egregiously here. There are hundreds of trophies littered throughout Gotham that incentivize the player to complete micro-challenges in exchange for trophies that often reward the player with concept art and the like. The issue that the Riddler Trophies have had throughout the Arkham series is that they simply aren’t inherently rewarding to collect. There isn’t a ceremonious jingle that plays upon pickup. And because there are so many trophies to collect and they populate the map so much, collecting just one trophy feels like a drop in the bucket and not like a step towards completing a greater goal. To put it simply, the Riddler Trophies are more trouble than they’re worth.
Riddler Trophies aim to solve the very thing that I’m critiquing, though - they season the world of Gotham with smaller challenges that often require the player to think more critically about the environment and the tools made available to the player. However, Riddler Trophies are a far cry from Mario’s Power Stars or Banjo’s Jiggies or even Spider-Man’s Backpacks - they require so much from the player and offer so underwhelming of a reward that they make for a lousy collectable. The fact that these micro-challenges populating the game’s large world don’t give anything substantial make the whole process of looking for them feel unrewarding and purposeless. And the fact that they’re the only collectable of note throughout Arkham Knight only exacerbates just how poorly the game makes use of its open world. What could have been the antidote for making Arkham Knight’s open world feel worth fully investigating instead goes on to make the game’s size feel all the more unnecessary.
My point with this is that Arkham Knight’s open world, while functional in the sense that it provides a varied plethora of content to complete, lacks the mechanical consistency and cohesion to feel meaningful to explore and engage with. This doesn’t inherently go on to mean that Arkham Knight is a bad game - but it does mean that Arkham Knight is an ostensibly less focused game. Arkham Knight is great in the ways that it builds upon the foundations of the previous two games. Combat was once infrequent and stealth was once aggravatingly slow-paced and limited in Asylum, but both of these mechanics became more polished in City and became practically perfected in Arkham Knight. The activities that players get to do in Arkham Knight are fun, but I feel that these activities would have been more fun to do in more focused environments. If there wasn’t so much downtime between meaningful gameplay events and if there was some better balancing of the types of gameplay (read: not as much Batmobile content) and if there wasn’t an inconsistent blend of linear and non-linear segments that feel like they have opposed design philosophies, then I think Arkham Knight would be an all-timer, gameplay-wise. However, because of these issues, Arkham Knight delivers an unfocused experience that feels like an overall step back from Arkham City despite further refining many of the gameplay aspects of City.
The boon of writing this piece in 2025 is that I have the additional hindsight of Insomniac’s Spider-Man titles being additional frames of reference for this conversation. While they are also open world titles, I think the Spider-Man titles ultimately deliver incredibly focused experiences because of their ability to intelligently craft linear, focused challenges and present them seamlessly in an open world context. The Spider-Man games serve as the best-case scenario for presenting gameplay ideas through an open world, since the entire game is designed with the intention of using the game’s open world as an interconnected network of focused gameplay sections centered around combat, stealth, or navigation that are seamlessly integrated throughout the game’s depiction of New York City. Moreover, there is little downtime between doing interesting things in Spider-Man’s open world because of how snappy movement is and how relatively densely concentrated activities are. This makes doing the various activities placed in the game’s world inherently have a good flow to it. Players will get to engage with the different gameplay systems and scenarios integrated throughout its open world at a snappy pace that connects each gameplay instance. On top of all this, Spider-Man also features collectables that give tangible gameplay benefits like new costumes and skill points to use for upgrades, giving an intrinsic purpose to paying attention to the world, exploring, and making general progression.
My point in mentioning Insomniac’s Spider-Man titles is that an open world presentation of ideas for a game of this style isn’t an inherently bad idea. If done correctly and delivering a well-paced and well-balanced blend of non-linear movement with linear scenarios that feature little downtime between one another, an open world can be a fantastic method to present the various problems and solutions that a superhero action-adventure game naturally proposes. But the open world in Spider-Man works as well as it does because of a strong, focused direction unifying the whole experience. This direction is something that Arkham Knight fails to achieve, in that its open world feels at odds with some of the very storylines and content that the player is meant to engage with. If the open world is so integral to the Arkham Knight experience, why does the longest and most in-depth storyline so consistently take the player away from the open world?
The truth is that an open world isn’t the best way to present certain gameplay ideas, problems, and solutions. Making a game work in an open world context isn’t something that can be done by just taking a game and having it take place in a larger, non-linear environment. It takes strong direction to make open worlds work, and even then, there are many instances where an open world is simply incongruous with realizing a game’s greatest potential. Sometimes, for a game to present its ideas in the best way possible, it has to do so in a more linear or limited format - not for lack of ambition or scale, but for the sake of creating a more thoughtful and focused experience. Arkham Asylum and City are more unpolished than Arkham Knight in many ways, but they’re ultimately games with more well-defined focus and they’re better for it. I genuinely feel that Arkham Knight is a worse game than it could be because it presents its ideas in an open world context. Had the game opted to present its ideas on a smaller scale, I feel that the result would have been a game that would have stood as one of the most celebrated of all time.
…I mean, these games are already quite celebrated, but it could have been even more so.
I share this critique not out of disdain for my experience with Arkham Knight as a whole but out of a desire to allow games with being okay by having smaller, more focused scales. Over a decade after Arkham Knight’s release, the open world approach of game design is still very much something that many games try to chase and build upon. There has been a lot of innovations in this type of game design with the likes of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Ghost of Tsushima, and more - and there will likely continue to be games that fully realize and further push what open world games are capable of. There will inevitably come games that further prove what open world presentations of ideas are uniquely capable of. However, there will inevitably come games that prove what more focused, linear presentations of ideas are capable. Perhaps those games and success stories won’t get as much attention, but they should. And with more conversations like this, perhaps they will.
At the end of the day, open worlds are just another means of presenting ideas to players. “Open world” may be a term I resent, but it’s a gameplay presentation I admire considering how difficult it is to pull off. But I think some developers and players confuse the unique capabilities of open worlds as being superior capabilities compared to other presentations of ideas. When presenting ideas to players, you don’t need impressive size. You don’t need a certain amount of content to ensure a longer playtime. You don’t need to capitalize on what’s popular or what you see other game developers present. You just need to understand what ideas you want to communicate to players and the focus needed to bring those ideas forward. Sometimes, an open world helps at making those ideas stand front and center and other times they don’t. And that’s okay. All that matters is that we give our ideas the focus they deserve so that the very ideas we explore in our games can be entertained by players. That’s the mission of any game, open world or not, and there’s nothing to resent about that.
Thank you very much for reading! What are your thoughts on open world design? How do you think an open world affects a game’s design? What separates a well-designed open world and a poorly designed one? As always, join the conversation and let me know what you think in the comments or on Bluesky @DerekExMachina.com.
