A Dying World is not an open world because its creative director is "scared" of the void

When open-world games took off in the early 2000s, much of their appeal came from the promise of being transported to another world and the seemingly endless possibilities these spaces offered developers in terms of content and thus game length. For a while, it felt like studios everywhere were trying to build the biggest worlds ever created, each trying to outdo the last in scale and mere square kilometers. What initially seemed like a breakthrough, however, eventually began to reveal its flaws. As these worlds grew in size, 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 the reason after all GreedFall: The Dying World developer Spiders chose to avoid making it an open-world game, opting instead for a more focused, story-driven design.

Creative director Jehanne Rousseau told GameRant as much in a recent interview after being asked about the studio's reasoning behind eschewing the open-world trend. During the interview, Rousseau indicated that she maintained a healthy fear of the idea, not because open worlds are inherently bad, but because they are easy to overlook. Ultimately, this fear drove the Spiders to propose GreedFall: The Dying World in such a way that it offers players something much more substantial than more content and takes them into what feels like a real world rather than a game map full of icons and activities.

GreedFall: A Dying World avoids the sense of emptiness often associated with open worlds

One of the most confusing things about open world games is how they can be filled to the brim with content and still feel empty. A map can be covered with quests, landmarks, and activities, but if these elements aren't part of something more meaningful, they can start to blur. Instead of making the world feel alive, the scale can sometimes work against it, leaving the player wandering through spaces that seem large for size rather than purpose. That's exactly the concern GreedFall: The Dying World creative director Jehanne Rousseau addressed the studio's approach to game world design when discussing:

“Something I'm afraid of when I think about open-world development is that maybe it will feel too empty, or we'll have places where players get stuck, can't move, and have to charge something because their character is stuck in the background. That's something that's very complicated for me to think about—except when you have a very huge team with a lot of people who didn't make it for all of us.” something where each location could have a name, a story, and some interesting elements to make it part of the story and experience of exploration, rather than just random forests or random mountains.”

Rousseau's concern wasn't just theoretical for the team, either. Like development GreedFall: The Dying World As it continued, the studio began to see firsthand how difficult it could be to balance the desire for greater scale with the need for the game's exploration to mean something to its story. Early versions of the game world clearly pushed this balance too far in one direction, creating spaces that looked impressive on the map but ultimately didn't offer players much of a reason to venture into them. According to Rousseau, recognizing this problem caused the team to rethink parts of the world during development:

“The main thing when you want to make things bigger is that you make sure that it doesn't feel empty and that players still like to explore because there are things to discover – like maybe you have to do things first in a different place or there's this kind of environmental narrative that gives you clues about what's going on in the world. Making things too big can lead to places that are too empty, and some parts we really had at the end, at the beginning we realized we had that problem really big.” it was never explored because there was almost nothing of interest, so we cut down some parts of the forests or mountains because they were completely empty places.”

Whether she meant to or not, Rousseau points to a larger problem that has largely defined the open-world genre for the past two decades. As maps got bigger, developers often struggled with the trade-off between size and density. An open world that looks impressive when laid out on a map can quickly lose its impact if players spend significant stretches of time traveling through spaces that serve as little more than what appears to be an excuse to make the world bigger.

Especially for smaller teams, this presents an even greater challenge. Without a large enough team to “handle all the details,” as Rousseau mentioned, the risk of creating large but underutilized unnecessary spaces can increase tremendously. This reality seems to have driven Spiders to a different design philosophy GreedFall: The Dying Worldwhich ensures that every square mile is filled with intention rather than negative space. As Rousseau explained:

“When designing these huge areas, because some of them are really, really big, the first thing was to really make sure that every location or point of view really brings things to the story, the narrative of the environment, the encounter or the event there. It's really a mixture of a lot of tools, but to make sure that the world is really alive and it's not just an empty place, really big, when we tried to make this world really important, but that this world is not something for the players to do. brought.”

So with GreedFall: The Dying World taking this approach is far different from what players often see in some of the biggest open-world games, and arguably more thoughtful. With each location designed with a specific purpose, players aren't just moving around the world just to get from one location to another. Instead, each location is baked into the game's narrative, giving players more opportunities to encounter moments that reveal something about the world, its history, or the people who inhabit it. Ultimately, this goal is accomplished GreedFall: The Dying World potentially feeling more like an actual game universe than a massive open-world game that claims to immerse its players just by sheer size.

WITH GreedFall: The Dying World As it prepares to leave Steam Early Access and launch in full version 1.0 on March 12, 2026 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, players will soon see how well this philosophy holds up in practice. After months of iteration during Early Access, the full release will represent the clearest version yet of Spiders' approach to world design, which prioritizes purpose and narrative over scope. If the studio's efforts pay off, the result could be a world that's more engaging to explore than maps that simply try to be bigger.