After years of soaring costs and ever-expanding maps, open world games are getting smaller, and developers are creating richer landscapes in the process

For more than 20 years the action adventure genre has been dominated by open-world games. They started in quite a constrained way, with titles such as Shenmue and Driver offering miniature cities to wander about, but during the 21st century, they grew to encompass whole kingdoms. Now we have titles such as Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring and Death Stranding that contain vast and highly varied environments; Minecraft worlds are reportedly 60,000km wide. And let’s not forget space sims such as Elite Dangerous and No Man’s Sky, which effectively contain whole galaxies.

This whole design model, however, is starting to seem a teeny bit unsustainable. Not only is it astonishingly expensive to build giant worlds (it’s rumoured that the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 will cost in the region of $2bn), but the market is also saturated with competitors all promising many hundreds of hours of exploration. Is there really an unlimited supply of players willing to buy and play more than two of these a year – especially now that we’re being incentivised to stick around through live service features, such as regularly updated costumes, missions and locations?