Quote Originally Posted by darkchrono View Post
Does anybody know how they go about creating open-ended worlds. I would think it would take years just to create the map let alone any of the storylines or quests that make up the actual game.
This goes into a lot of fundamentals of Computer Games Design, but I'll try to brief.

Firstly when it comes to actual interaction with the world it's relatively simple (figuratively speaking). A game world is actually remarkably simple compared to our own. Once you have the basic rules for what different objects do, how they react to the player and each other, then you've got the building blocks to add other stuff. For example, you can define behaviour for melee weapons against enemies and objects, then simply create several different, unique types of weapon (in Oblivion there's an editor to do just that).

Oblivion is kind of unique in that a lot of it's environment was procedurally generated using a series of specialised tools. I don't know the exact names, but I do know for example there were separate programs used to create the terrain of the land and another to create trees and place them on the terrain. For the most part vast game worlds are usually a mix of procedurally/randomly generated sections with specifically designed parts e.g. the general wilderness versus towns and cities. Since players won't expect every single square foot to be significant you can get away with many places being sort of bland provided they look the part.

The biggest undertaking is actually deciding what you're going to put in the game world once it's created. This includes NPC's, items, buildings, quests etc. In this sense this is probably the longest part of development. Everything that is placed will have to be tested/edited/balanced. For something like Oblivion though you can technically split the game apart into different sections that are independent from each other. Quests in one city may not have an effect to the world at large, though you may have massive quest chain linking various locations. Whatever the case, you can still approach this task in the same way as you would when creating the interactive elements; through a series of steps.

Open-ended worlds actually don't differ too much from most other games with the exception that they don't follow a linear path and generally have a lot more things for you to do. There's virtues in both and I can enjoy both equally.