Deus Ex: Mankind Divided's Amazing Open World

It's time to give credit where credit is due. In a previous episode of Game Maker's Toolkit, I said that maybe Rocksteady's Batman games were better suited to the tight, claustrophobic hallways of Arkham Asylum, than the wide-open streets of Gotham City. Essentially, I was asking: when it comes to open worlds, does bigger always mean better? And that question was taken to the extreme last month with No Man's Sky: a sci-fi game rendered at galactic scale. With 18 quintillion planets - all dreamt up by an algorithm that randomly dictated their size, topology, colour, and so on - No Man's Sky offers a bigger play space than, well, pretty much every game ever made. Combined. But, if you ask me, it's kind of dull.

The same structures show up on every planet, and are separated by miles of sparse terrain. Caves have interesting structures but nothing inside them. And look online and you'll discover that your crazy unique planet will have been discovered already, just somewhere else in the universe. It seems like there's only so much that one developer can make. The question then becomes how far apart do you space it, and how often do you repeat it.

But, in the same month, we got a game that answered both of those questions with "hardly at all". That game being Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and the city of Prague.

Prague is so small, you can't really call it an open world. In fact, we often call places like this "hub worlds", because they splinter off into other areas for certain missions. But calling it a city would be stretching it, too. This 2029 version of the Czech capital has just four train stations, a few hundred buildings, and a couple districts. You can run from left to right in a few minutes and from top to bottom in, well, it depends on your platform and if you've got an SSD hard drive and...

well, never mind, it's small. But this tiny scale ends up being a strength, not a weakness. Here's Edios Montreal's environmental designer - and I apologise for this pronunciation in advance - Hubert Corriveau. HUBERT CORRIVEAU: Because of game design requires us to be of a certain pace, we do a smallish city environment that is very dense. We have a lot of interior next to the other. We don't want the player to walk for eight blocks of vanilla buildings that have nothing interesting to them, and then get to their mission. We just wanted people to walk into the city and always have something to find. So there's always something around you.

He's right: the game is packed, for one, with world building detail. Every square metre has been carefully designed with graffiti, movie posters, and signs that tell you more about the world. And because you don't blow past them at 50 miles per hour, and because you explore the same streets dozens of times, you actually take it all in. The storytelling is even more rich inside the abandoned shops and apartments. These use environmental storytelling, which is when the level design, and maybe some small scraps of text, are used to hint at a story, and make you ask questions.

Like, why is this corpse here, and why is there a bullet casing linked to a handgun from the Prague police? Who owns this telescope, and why is it trained on Adam Jenson's front door? What's with this suicide in the sewers, these surveillance photos of Jenson, this bathtub full of blood, and this corpse under a tarp. Some of these will be answered in side quests but others will be revealed - to an extent - by just looking around and putting together the pieces.

So, this apartment is filled with paints and paintings, but it has been trashed and there's blood on the floor. There's a clue on the computer, and another on a pocket secretary stashed in a vent... and what's this handgun doing under the bin? Hm! These aren't just Easter eggs or secrets. They actively flesh out the world of Prague and speak to the game's themes. In fact, while the main storyline of Mankind Divided is pretty hamfisted with its allusions to real-world racism, these tiny stories provide more subtle commentary on what it's like to live in a world filled with prejudice.

I don't want to spoil all the best ones but I have to show you this campaign office for a bigoted politician who runs on a fiercely anti-augmented position - and the seedy secret life he hides in the basement. Delicious. Similarly, the side quests let Mankind Divided further explore its themes, and paint a picture of a deeply divided world. In one quest, Jenson plays detective and tracks down a serial killer who preys exclusively on the augmented.

JENSON: I never said I was going to work your case for you. MONTAG: Sure you did. In another, he shuts down a fake police stop that's exploiting the oppressed. And in this one, he breaks up an illegal drug operation because the drugs are killing augs. Other side quests fill in some of Jenson's back story, and clear up events that transpired between Mankind Divided and its predecessor, Human Revolution. The game simply doesn't have room for pointless, time-wasting side quests about killing a bunch of enemies, or going on a big fetch quest, or having a street race. Almost like a bottle episode on a TV show, Mankind Divided's tiny set forces these side missions to focus on character, dialogue, and story.

In another episode of GMTK - that's what the cool kids call it, get on board - I talked about how many open world games rely on GPS-style lines and floating waypoints to direct you towards your goal. And Deus Ex does that too. But, more than most games, it holds up when you turn those helpers off. Characters are forthcoming with actual directions and street addresses. This guy, he says CHANG: I traced our hacker's snoop to an unrented apartment, top floor, 33 hlavni. Just down the street. This guy walks by us every single day.

And, lo and behold, you can go down the street, look at the building numbers, and find number 33. In a different side quest, when I need to find a guy called Johnny Gunn to interview him, his name's on the buzzer. Elsewhere, you might find an email about Apartment 202 on 33 Hlavni, a pocket secretary about a complex by Pilgrim Station, another about a drug lab under the Zelen apartment complex - wait, isn't that where I live? - and a map scribbled on the back of a receipt. I love it.

It's not perfect. Sometimes you have to open up the in-game map to fill in some of the gaps. But it's close. And it does exactly what I talked about in that episode on the little dotted line: it's more immersive, it makes you look closer at the world and see all those world-building details, and it's gameplay. Like, navigating a virtual space is a challenge with a win and a fail state. And most developers just throw that away.

The director of the original Deus Ex, Warren Spector, has often talked about his dream game being an RPG set inside a single city block. He said "I’d rather do something that’s an inch wide and a mile deep than something that’s a mile wide and an inch deep". Now I don't think Mankind Divided is quite what he meant, simply because Prague doesn't hold up as a simulation. Time is effectively stood still until you finish certain missions, characters stand around forever, and they don't react if you aim at a gun at them, or put a bucket on their head.

But this new Deus Ex is validation that small worlds can be just as valuable and interesting as ultra massive ones. If not, more so. I'm also playing Yakuza 2 at the moment, which offers just tiny fragments of Tokyo and Osaka. But they're densely packed with details, giving you an incredibly vivid and intimate depiction of Japan. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is centred around Clock Town which may be small but it allows the game to focus on the game's cast of characters, who all move about in real time. Same goes for the game Bully, where characters go to class and go home at curfew.

The small world makes those changes readily apparent. I also asked my Patrons for ideas, and they suggested the small hub world of Hillys in Beyond Good & Evil, the smaller fantasy kingdoms of the Gothic games, the city of Kirkwall in Dragon Age II, and the hubs present in Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines. You'll have to trust them on these, Beyond Good & Evil is the only one here I've actually played. But this is a pretty small list, right? And it would be much, much easier to make a list of games with enormous worlds. Entire kingdoms and countries and cities. Only, with thousands of buildings you can't enter, or miles of empty landscape.

And that works for some games. The lonely expanse of the capital wasteland. The goofy playground of Los Santos. But now that the industry's crazy arms race to build bigger and bigger open worlds has well and truly run it's course, let's go smaller. Let's praise games that make full use of their space, no matter how small it ends up being.

Thanks for watching. My name's Mark Brown, and this has been Game Maker's Toolkit. Let's talk about tiny open worlds in the comments below, or just discuss how good the Yakuza games are. Either's fine. Here are the people who make this show happen.