“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
TS Eliot, The Hollow Men

From this craggy ledge above the Harad Basin, I can see for miles across the rugged countryside. I see Uruk guards menacing human slaves while others gather in small groups, bitching about their captains; I see caragors stalking through the wavering grasses. This is Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor and I have completed 98% of the game. The story is over, I won’t see the scarred wraith of Celebrimbor again, I won’t have to face Sauron’s murderous henchman, Black Hand, or his talons. Now it is just me against an infinite army of regenerating grunts and the last few hunting quests. I can slaughter foot-soldiers or I can chase bats around the dank cavern systems. All the game has left is endless skirmishes and to do lists.

Although the design of open-world games has significantly evolved since the genre emerged at the close of the 1990s, there is still a strange disconnect between narrative and freedom. In a vast majority of titles, we’re shown a vast explorable landscape, which we can roam at will – but laid on top of that is the authored story, with its dramatic choreographed missions and cinematic sequences. Once these are over, it often feels like the author has withdrawn; suddenly, the developer, and by extension the world they have created, no longer cares about the player. Suddenly, you’re on your own.

Some players revel in this. In his article on open-worlds and loneliness for KillScreen last year, David Wolinsky, talked about how games like Shenmue only ever create the illusion of a functioning environment – what they are, in fact, are vast neutral spaces for the participant to invent their own fun. The solitude is the experience – it’s where you discover the game you always wanted to play but didn’t realise it. This is the world so beloved of YouTube circus performers who take titles like Crackdown and Grand Theft Auto and turn them into vast and astonishing stunt shows. To them, the world is just a backdrop to their own creative genius. Which is wonderful.

But what if you’re so engaged with the fiction of the world, you feel bereft when the narrative is over and the author has signed off? Red Dead Redemption made such a huge impact on a lot of players with its elegiac tale of revenge and remorse – and so being cast back into the world after the story ending is a weird jolt to the senses. Like many other open-world games, Rockstar loads its landscapes with dynamic quests and fetch tasks to provide the player with things to do while they explore, and little accomplishments to tick off. But it is while carrying out these shopping trips that you realise how disconnected you are from the world. The richly evocative scenes painted by the Assassin’s Creed artists, begin to seem pale and lifeless when you realise you’re just hunting for objects amid crowds of people you can never interact with.

Open-world games are systems of course, and every component has its limited role. But are there ways to make it feel like there is still someone watching? Watch Dogs lets you snoop on the lives of passing strangers, picking up quests from their troubled back stories. Skyrim’s Radiant system creates slightly more complex dynamic quests which react to specific player inventories and abilities, which at least gives the illusion of presence and agency in the world. But the outcome is a lot of very similar object retrieval tasks. Non-player characters assume their roles as information automatons, points are awarded. Then you’re alone again.

And suddenly you realise the conjuring trick of the open-world universe: you’re not really a part of it. You’re outside of the system. You’re an interloper. The fish out of water. It’s such a familiar building block of narrative fiction and cinema – the character who finds themselves in a bizarre alien society, and by the end the journey has changed both the protagonist and the world itself. But in sandbox games, the world hasn’t changed and the protagonist is still there. It’s like being caught forever at the end of the second act.

The problem with freedom is that it can be awfully lonely. All influences in our real lives attempt to act on us, for good or bad. When authorial intent is removed from the game world, we lose the one thing that bothered to check what we were doing. Of course, this is a fascinating prospect in a lot of ways – which is why we love post-apocalyptic fiction: it is about the ultimate form of freedom – but when there is not enough true, tactile interaction with the world, the appeal quickly fades.

I guess the answer will be better AI and new emergent forms of story-telling. Non-player characters will need to become improvisers rather than robots. We’ll need very intelligent, very creative systems that can build stories out of the components of the world. We’re seeing amazing work in this direction, namely the Versu interactive story platform from Richard Evans and Emily Short, which creates intelligent characters with their own motives and emotional systems; there’s Mark Riedl’s work at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which is looking into automated story generation, specifically with its Scheherazade system; there is Michael Cook working on the game-creating AI, Angelina.

Maybe one day we will have open-world games that can combine intelligent non-player characters with their own dark plans and ambitions, with a procedurally generated story-system. Perhaps this world will watch how every player completes the authored missions, and will use this practical information to devise new plotlines that feel human and dramatic.

For now, here is Mordor, stretching out before me, vast and soulless like a dead planet. The urok will never offer anything new or surprising, just as the pedestrians wandering the streets of Los Santos cannot suddenly get the idea to rob a bank or kidnap a rich, spoiled actor. A plague will never sweep the streets of Assassin’s Creed: Unity, allowing sinister new clans to emerge from the festering alleyways. It is asking a lot for this to change, maybe too much. Perhaps it’s just part of open-world games – perhaps we need that switch from being looked after by a story to being left alone to realise our own motivations.

Philip Larkin wrote: “Life is first boredom, then fear”. Sandbox games are the other way around. Unless, that is, you reassess the place and learn how to interrogate and subvert its endless systems. Either that or you just accept your lot and wander the landscape; you haunt the places where story missions once took place, amid the ghosts of long-fnished shoot-outs and vanquished boss encounters. Maybe this is what winning feels like.