[thaumasiotes]

> My sims can't walk or explore in seemingly endless directions.

That isn't what open world means either. There isn't a game on the market where you can do that, though it is most of the concept of No Man's Sky. All game worlds are tightly bounded so that they can fit on your computer. The edges of the world are always obvious.

Open world is generally used to refer to a game where you are allowed to walk from any part of it to any other part. Compare Doom, where level 1 and level 2 are completely separated from each other. The only way to get from level 1 to level 2 is to beat level 1. There is no way to get from level 2 to level 1.

(Granted that Sims would never be called an open world game. The player isn't even present in the game world.)

[Retric]

The endless direction bit doesn't imply an endless map just more options than you can reasonably explore. You can easily spend thousands of hours in Skyrim without seeing every NPC with unique dialog and many games are much larger than that. Procedurally generated worlds like Factorio can take hours traveling in one direction just to see the border.

[Morgawr]

> There isn't a game on the market where you can do that

Minecraft? There's plenty of procgen games on the market that lets you do something like that.

[KSPAtlas]

Technically, you have a limit, but it would realistically take years to get there

[RodgerTheGreat]

Games with procedurally-generated worlds larger than the player could ever explore are rather common: Minecraft, one of the best-selling games in history, comes immediately to mind. Massive procgen galaxies far predate No Man's Sky as well- see the original Elite and Noctis IV.

[droidist2]

Under that definition though wouldn't the original Legend of Zelda games be open world?

[RosanaAnaDana]

Definitely. I would put the original Pokemon games in that as well. The key word here is 'seemingly'. How something 'seems' depends on context, which is related to the period, the technology (hardware and software), and the culture of how one thinks about games. I would put the comparison like this, in Zelda: A link to the past (snes), there isn't a 'right' way to proceed through the game. In fact you could proceed through the game in any number of ways, and there may be an infinite or at least intractably large number of these. In fact, you could just ignore the story component of the game and fight sprites. Same with a game like Pokemon. You don't have to fight gym bosses. You can just wander around and fight wild Pokemon and raise your Pokemon's stats.

Lets juxtapose that with another period game, Super Mario World. Super Mario World is fundamentally on rails. While there is a range of unique ways you can proceed through the world, there is a very calculable and finite number of these. The individual levels are always the same. You can't proceed freely in any direction (internal to the dimensional structure of the game). There is no 'sense of expanse' where you have to explore the game in a somewhat random way to find out whats beyond the horizon.

Open world games aren't necessarily about the size and scale of the game, but how you proceed through the game and what your 'sense' of the world is. The Sim's is fundamentally not an open world game. There is no 'sense' of openness in that, the gameplay is fundamentally on rails. There is a discrete set of ways your sim can interact with the world. Sure there is plenty of customization and uniqueness within that railed environment, but that doesn't make it an open world game.

Some older games that are open world might be Realmz on PC (early 90's DnD clone), MacSyndicate (think cyber punk meets GTA), or even Trucking USA on the Apple IIs. I think characteristic to an open world game is a sense of expanse, the ability to play it in a way that is seemingly ignorant of whatever the developers intended, and that it is 'unrailed' and you should be able to travel freely along whatever dimensional axes define the gameplay.

[thaumasiotes]

> I would put the original Pokemon games in that as well.

> Super Mario World is fundamentally on rails. While there is a range of unique ways you can proceed through the world, there is a very calculable and finite number of these.

The Pokemon games are also fundamentally on rails. It's true that you can walk backward from wherever you are to wherever you've been in the past, which is very common in RPGs. But at almost all times, there's only one option if you want to go forward.

Then again, as the series progresses, more and more gameplay gets hidden behind "winning" the game by beating the elite 4 and rolling the credits, and things are pretty open at that point.

[smegsicle]

they predate the term, and the scale of interaction is different, but being able to explore and complete dungeons and sidequests in arbitrary orders is certainly open-world-y