The Dying World Isn’t Open World Because Its Creative Director Is “Terrified” of Emptiness

When open-world games started rising to prominence in the early 2000s, much of their appeal came from the promise of being transported to another world and the seemingly endless possibilities those spaces offered developers when it came to content and, in turn, game length. For a while, it felt like studios everywhere were trying to build the biggest worlds ever created, each one attempting to outdo the last in scale and sheer square mileage. However, what initially felt like a breakthrough eventually started to reveal its flaws. As those worlds grew larger, many of them began to feel increasingly empty and lifeless, often resembling little more than a laundry list of activities spread across a huge, explorable map. That’s ultimately why GreedFall: The Dying World developer Spiders chose to avoid making it an open-world game, opting for a more focused, story-driven design instead.

Creative director Jehanne Rousseau told GameRant that much in a recent interview, after being asked about the studio’s reasoning behind steering clear of the open world trend. During the interview, Rousseau indicated she had maintained a healthy fear of the idea, not because open worlds are inherently bad, but because of how easy they are to miss the mark on. In the end, that fear encouraged Spiders to design GreedFall: The Dying World in such a way that it offers players something far more substantial than more content, taking them to what feels like an actual world rather than a game map filled with icons and activities.

GreedFall: The Dying World Avoids That Empty Feeling Often Associated With Open Worlds

One of the most perplexing things about open-world games is how they can be filled to the brim with content and yet still feel empty. A map might be covered in quests, landmarks, and activities, but if those elements aren’t a part of something more meaningful, they can start to blur together. Instead of making the world feel alive, the scale can sometimes work against it, leaving players wandering through spaces that feel large for the sake of size rather than purposeful. That’s exactly the concern GreedFall: The Dying World creative director Jehanne Rousseau addressed when discussing the studio’s approach to the game’s world design:

“Something that I’m terrified of when I’m thinking about developing an open world is that maybe it will feel too empty, or we will have these places where players will get stuck, not able to move and having to reload something because their character is stuck in the background. This is something that, for me, is very complicated to think about—except if you’ve got a very huge team with a lot of people that can handle all the details. But we’re not that big, and it made more sense for us to have something where every place could have a name, a story, and some interesting elements to be part of the story and experience in exploration, and not just random forests or random mountains.”

Rousseau’s concern wasn’t just a theoretical one for the team, either. As development of GreedFall: The Dying World went on, the studio began to see firsthand how difficult it can be to balance the desire for increased scale with the need to make the game’s exploration mean something to its story. Early versions of the game’s world apparently pushed that balance too far in one direction, creating spaces that looked impressive on the map but ultimately didn’t offer much reason for players to venture into them. According to Rousseau, recognizing that issue forced the team to rethink parts of the world during development:

“The main thing, when you want to do things bigger, is that you make sure that they’re not feeling empty and that players still like to explore because there are things to discover there—like maybe you need to do things in a different place first or there is this environmental storytelling that gives you clues about what is happening in the world. Doing things too big can lead to places that are too empty, and we had this problem at the beginning. Some were really too big and in the end, we realized that some parts of the map were absolutely never explored because there was nearly nothing interesting to do there. So, we cut some parts of woods or mountains because they were completely empty places. It didn’t make sense.”

Whether she intended to or not, Rousseau is pointing at a broader issue that has largely defined the open-world genre over the past two decades. As maps grew larger, developers often found themselves wrestling with the tradeoff between size and density. An open world that looks impressive when laid out on a map can quickly lose its impact if players are spending significant stretches traveling through spaces that serve as little more than what seem to be excuses to make the world bigger.

For smaller teams, especially, that presents an even greater challenge. Without a team large enough to “handle all the details,” as Rousseau mentioned before, the risk of creating large but underutilized, unnecessary spaces can grow tremendously. That reality seems to have pushed Spiders toward a different design philosophy for GreedFall: The Dying World, one that ensures every square mile is packed with intention rather than negative space. As Rousseau explained:

“In designing these huge areas, because some of them are really, really big, the first thing was really to make sure that every place or point of view was really bringing things to the story, environmental storytelling, an encounter, or an event there. It’s really a mix of plenty of tools, but to make sure that the world was really feeling alive and not just an empty place, super big, but with nothing to do. I would say that this was really something that was really important when we designed this world. We really tried to make sure that every place was bringing things to the player.”

So, with GreedFall: The Dying World taking that approach, it’s far different from, and arguably more deliberate than, what players often see in some of the biggest open-world games. When every location is designed with a specific purpose in mind, players aren’t merely moving through the world just to get from one place to another. Instead, every location is baked into the game’s storytelling, giving players more opportunities to encounter moments that reveal something about the world, its history, or the people who inhabit it. In the end, that aim makes GreedFall: The Dying World potentially feel more like an actual in-game universe than a massive open-world game that claims to immerse its players through size alone.

With GreedFall: The Dying World preparing to leave Steam Early Access and launch in its full 1.0 version on March 12, 2026 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, players will soon see how well that philosophy holds up in practice. After months of iteration during early access, the full release will represent the clearest version yet of Spiders’ approach to world design, one that prioritizes purpose and storytelling over scale. If the studio’s efforts pay off, the result could be a world that feels more engaging to explore than maps that simply try to be bigger.