GDC 2025 Session Viewer

Anyone who has worked on an open world game knows that one of the biggest challenges is getting players to care about your open world. Despite all the proper planning, playtesting and general iteration, player engagement with anything but the story missions are not quite at expectations.

This talk by Cameron offers tools to increase player engagement with your open world and turn your 15% activity engagement to 50%. These methods help designers increase content overlap, provide additional structure, and create more applications for varying player types. Attendees will hear real-world examples, review case studies, and dig into a variety of considerations to better communicate progression goals and exploration pillars with their team. Each method will provide problem spaces with examples of solutions. There are strong differences between golden, silver and bronze path content and attendees will dive into getting player's eyes unglued from the gold!

Takeaway

This talk provides a set of tools, boundaries and modular ideas to help ensure your players get the most out of the open world experience. These tools can provide structure to missions/quests in your game, which further contextualize the open world experience and provides development boundaries to maximize content engagement.

Intended Audience

Game designers, level designers and mission/quest designers of all experience levels, especially those developing content for open world games. Additionally, any game developers working on progression for live games, as this talk may help inspire methods for connecting progression systems into open world content.