Deus Ex

A different kind of open world

Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided are open-world role playing games, released in 2011 and 2016. These games have excelled in making their worlds feel alive, and dense. I believe this to be because of a different design approach from other open-world games.

An empty world vs an empty room

I believe the Deus Ex worlds to be built bottom up. Starting with a few rooms, every nook and cranny gets filled out with content before moving onto the next room. This results in a much denser world than those who are created from a large empty plains, where villages get added to the map.

A cost

Of course, bottom up design does come at a cost. In particular, the layout of certain buildings make less sense in Deus Ex games than in the more traditional open-world games, because a degree of overview was sacrificed when deciding to build bottom-up. This is a tradeoff that designers must be wary about when switching between the two design methods.

The middle ground

If I were to replicate this design method for my own game, I would like to propose a middle ground for this. I'd start designing an open world top down, putting some rudamentary rules of what goes where, and then switch to bottom-up design for each village and city.