Regarding the definition of “Open World”

The term “open world gameplay” can be surprisingly tricky to define sometimes. “Open world”, as a category, seems like a very straightforward classification at first sight, but still it has become slightly more difficult to define over the years. Open world games have evolved and now this particular genre includes various dominant, but different gameplay styles, and there are people who link the term “open world” to only one of these variations.

The most popular interpretation of the “open world games” currently seems to cover that type of worldbuilding that you see in most TPS RPGs, where you get a large setting to explore and where you can go anywhere you want. But there is also a huge percentage of players who are interpreting “open world games” as games where you can do or build anything you like, in the vein of “Minecraft” or similar games, for example.

 And don’t forget that these are just quick examples we picked out at random and surely there are people who would go for a different interpretation even in these cases. As we said, it has become a tricky topic over the years.

As you can imagine, we had long and furious debates here at the company on the topic of open worlds (which led to some lively clashes between the development team and the PR team…)

Originally the term “open world structure” simply meant the opposite of the linear gameplay structure in many regards, and it meant a game where you (the player) are free to choose where you’d like to go, how difficult challenges you’d like to undertake, which part of the gameplay and the world you’d like to focus on and how you’d like to shape the story.

We deliberately decided to stick with this interpretation, even if we knew that we might probably face criticism that could arise from the differences between the various interpretations. We reasoned that the technical definition of the “open world gameplay” suits the idea behind the structure of “WH40K: Inquisitor – Martyr” the best. And yes, to be completely honest, we couldn’t find a better category that could really cover all those very different things we wanted to use in “Inquisitor – Martyr”. The other choice would have been to create a brand new definition for this part of the game, but we didn’t feel very comfortable about that.

In a nutshell, we’d like to ask you to bear with us for a little longer and keep in mind that lots of the open world elements haven’t been implemented into the game yet.

We have lots of open world-related features that will all be part of the final game, such as the plot lines that make up the single player campaign (which will be a traditional investigation where you can also hunt down clues and puzzle together the central mystery) or the story elements of the upcoming Seasons, not to mention the Global Evens or the Factions. These are all components of the game that will appear either during the Early Access phase or in the final release, and we are certain that they will fundamentally change and improve the gameplay and also highlight the basic open world features – all in all, these features will grant you enormous freedom of choice in a huge word that you are free to wander during the hundreds of hours you can spend in “Inquisitor – Martyr”.