The other extreme, where you can go inside everywhere, turns out to be boring. Second Life has that in some well-built areas. If you visit New Babbage, the steampunk city, there's almost a square kilometer of city. Almost every building has a functional interior. There are hundreds of shops, and dozens of bars. You can buy things in the shops, and maybe have a simulated beer in a pub. If anyone was around, you could talk to them. You can open doors and walk up stairs. You might find a furnished apartment, an office, or just empty rooms.

Other parts of Second Life have roadside motels. Each room has a bed, TV, bathroom, and maybe a coffee maker, all of which do something. One, with a 1950s theme, has a vibrating bed, which will make a buzzing sound if you pay it a tiny fee. Nobody uses those much.

No plot goes with all this. Unlike a game, the density of interesting events is low, closer to real life. This is the fundamental problem of virtual worlds. Realistic ones are boring.

Amusingly, Linden Lab has found a way to capitalize on this. They built a suburban housing subdivision, and people who buy a paid membership get an unfurnished house. This was so successful that there are now over 60,000 houses. There are themed areas and about a dozen house designs in each area. It's kind of banal, but seems to appeal to people for whom American suburbia is an unreachable aspiration. The American Dream, for about $10 a month.

People furnish their houses, have BBQs, and even mow their lawn. (You can buy simulated grass that needs regular mowing.)

So we have a good idea of the appeal of this.

This comment kind of reminded me of a YouTube channel I completely adore. AnyAustin (https://www.youtube.com/@any_austin) has quite a few videos exploring and celebrating open world video games.

> when every path leads to something interesting, there's no "exploration"

While this sentence makes sense from current game design perspective, I have to say it strikes me as very unrealistic. Facing dead ends has always ruined the immersion for me.

Sounds like the AI accidentally implemented NIMBY style zoning.

Thanks! That’s some nuance I absolutely missed

I would think the argument for this is that it would enable and facilitate more advanced environments.

There's also plenty of games with fully explorable environments, I think it's more of a scale and utility consideration. I can't think of what use I'd have for exploring an office complex in GTA other than to hear Rockstar's parodical office banter. But Morrowind had reason for it to exist in most contexts.

Other games have intrinsically explorable interiors like NMS, and Enshrouded. Elden Ring was pretty open in this regard as well. And Zelda. I'm sure there are many others. TES doesn't fall into this due to the way interiors are structured which is a door teleports you to an interior level, ostensibly to save on poly budget, which again, concerning scale is an important consideration in both terms of meaning and effort in-context.

This doesn't seem to be doing much to build upon that, I think we could procedurally scatter empty shell buildings with low-mid assets already with a pretty decent degree of efficiency?

There are a bunch of different approaches. Many are very expensive to run. You can play with the World Labs one, their approach is cheap to explore once generated (vs an approach that generates frame by frame).

The quality is currently not great and they are very hard to steer / work with in any meaningful way. You will see companies using the same demo scenes repeatedly because that's the one that looked cool and worked well.