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Julian Togelius has an idea about where open-world games are going. Let's call it the infinite world theory. In his version of the future, titles like Skyrim and Grand Theft Auto will have no set missions or narrative arcs, and no pre-defined landscapes. Instead, the game engine will use procedural generation, artificial intelligence and creative computing techniques to dynamically build environments and experiences to suit every individual player. In the Togelius infinite world, you'll be able to drive a car in one direction for several miles and find that the game has built a city at the end of the journey, just for you. What's more, that city will be populated with characters who act like real humans rather than bizarre automatons. It will be the player's interactions with these characters that creates the stories. Although this sounds like science fiction, Julian Togelius is a university professor who has spent the last five years researching the concept of procedurally generated content in games. His infinite world theory is not a fantastical dream, it's a distinct possibility. "[Procedurally] creating new environments, including things such as mountains, vegetation, houses, etc, is pretty straightforward," he says. "There are out-of-the-box solutions available to all of these problems individually. It's just a matter of integrating them and putting in the adaptivity. This would provide a big increase in perceived freedom, but it would also enable the game to adapt to the player, to create environments that it thinks the player wants..."
It's a good time to be thinking about this sort of stuff. This week, EA announced that it is working on a big open-world action project, hiring Assassin's Creed producer Jade Raymond to oversee the studio. "We've never really operated in the largest genre of gaming," said the company's chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen. "That's the Assassin's Creed-style games; more open-world, more single-player versus multiplayer."
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