Games with empty worlds.

5560 square miles. That is the size of the map in the 2009 video game Fuel. 5560 square miles.

That is roughly the size of Connecticut, and much like Connecticut, the map of Fuel is basically nothing but empty space. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic world similar to Mad Max, and this expansive, unnecessarily large map is really the only special part of the game. The driving is mediocre, the races against CPUs are completely rigged in your favor, and the graphics have that classic beige puke color palette of the late 2000s.

Just like the map, the entire game is a large, bloated, barren wasteland. When it comes to game maps, there is almost always a wasteland, the spaces in between the action. The roads and wilderness, stuff that has to be there to look like a convincing world, but places where you don’t really have anything to do.

Hallways between the action. The issue with these is that they’re kinda really really boring. While games are art, the majority are also made for entertainment.

So each and every game with a consistent world has a big, large, gigantic wasteland problem. One of the simplest solutions has been around for a very long time. Pokemon is a game that almost entirely consists of connecting points, routes between the cities and towns populating whatever region you’re in.

These games are really two slightly different games stitched together. The routes serve as obstacle courses, throwing trainer battles and random encounters in your way to strengthen and build your pokemon team. Still, though, despite the life given into these routes, the real content of the game is in the cities and towns.

The most iconic part of pokemon games are the events and gym battles. Each and every city is full of people and quests and story, even beauty contests that serve as entirely standalone minigames. Each and every location is a hotspot not just of life, but of game content.

But to make all of this possible, to give tension and challenge to the gyms and rival battles and story events, the routes are necessary. Not just to connect these places, but to serve as the other transitionary part of an RPG game, grinding for levels. These two mechanics are almost always combined, because it makes some intuitive sense.

You don’t get stronger at the boss, you get stronger for the boss, and both the journey and grinding make the payoff of beating a strong enemy feel more worth it, like you had to put real effort towards your goal. However, not every RPG has levels. Shadow of the Colossus is a deeply empty game.

The appeal of the game is, at first, the boss fights against these hulking, monstrous creatures, but you don’t spend most of your time fighting. Most of the time is spent doing this. Riding through a desolate world.

For a roleplaying game, Shadow of the Colossus focuses heavily on the roleplay. The world is silent, as Wander and his horse Agro hunt down the colossi to try and revive a girl named Mono. Between the battles, you need to ride to every location with nothing but a guiding light, having you travel through long stretches of silent meadows and meandering cliffsides.

It’s painfully barren. Any tiny bit of content feels like an oasis, with the rest of the journey being nothing but you and your own thoughts. The game itself feels self-reflective, asking why you’re killing these massive creatures.

At the start of the game they feel terrifying, but as it goes on, it becomes almost tragic. They weren’t really harming anything, and were the last signs of life left in this sweeping land, and you’re the one exterminating them. The empty space in the journey between these monsters makes you think about all of this.

There’s almost nothing to distract or entertain you, using the world as a way to really put you in the position of Wander, the main character. You think the things he might be thinking, understand his desperation, his questioning, and even his decision to keep going, all to save this one girl. Most games, however, adopt the exact opposite philosophy.

As much as Shadow of the Colossus’s decision was interesting, it’s hardly fun. In fact, for all games revolving around adventure, there’s one whole leg of the journey that’s just as unfun: the trip back. For the first playthrough of a game, the biggest appeal is that you don’t know what’s gonna happen, what you’ll see, what you’ll do, but the trip back is a guarantee.

You know these places now, that won’t change. So a lot of games focused squarely around fun have gone to great lengths to minimize the lengths you need to travel. The most classic examples are vehicles.

Whether its a car or a horse or a motorcycle with blades on the side of it, vehicles are the most natural way to travel some boring part of the map faster. It can even turn the landscape into a bit of a minigame. With higher speed comes higher risk, so the rocks and bumps and hills that would normally serve no danger become a new form of obstacle.

My favorite example of this is Just Cause 3. Just Cause 2’s map was filled with tiny villages between the larger areas, holding collectibles and secrets to hold the player over on the way to the bigger events. Just Cause 3 made the decision to abandon those tiny villages, instead having mid-size towns being the smallest areas available, still giving a lot of things to do compared to the paltry villages of the last game, but it meant that the distance between these places were longer.

Just Cause 3 solved this issue with the introduction of the wingsuit. While the previous game had the grappling hook and a parachute, the combination of the two was pretty… slow. The normally high action gameplay was interrupted by a fun but leisurely way to travel, making cars most often the best way to get around.

The wingsuit changes the entire chemistry of the Just Cause series. While the entire fun of the game before was blowing up everything in sight, sometimes I found the wingsuit more fun than the destruction itself. Suddenly, the landscape of Just Cause 3, this beautiful island, becomes an obstacle course that you get to define.

While you can soar peacefully in the open air, I felt a draw towards getting as close to the ground as possible. Weaving between trees and cars and buildings, risking everything for every little bit of adrenaline I could get. There were times where I’d just fly around with a grappling hook and wingsuit, ignoring any objectives and taking in this new dimension of travel laid out before me, it felt so freeing and dangerous and rewarding.

I wanna play Just Cause 3 while writing this, I like it way more than I should, anyways. Unfortunately, not every game can have a wingsuit, and some are so vast or so focused on constant entertainment that not even vehicles cut the time spent traveling well enough. So, eventually, game developers went: let’s just have them teleport.

Though to be honest, saying “eventually” is a little misleading. The first game to have fast travel was Drgon Quest, a game released in 1986. Being one of the earliest and most barebone RPGs, it had the same issues of leveling and empty space that the Pokemon games would later have.

Understanding this even back then, Drgon Quest gave the players a spell, return, which sent you directly back to the castle, no backtracking required. Pokemon would also give you this ability in the later parts of the games with the HM fly, letting you travel to any city or town you’ve already visited. As time went on, though, games integrated fast travel further and further into their very level design.

The Borderlands 2 level, A Dam Fine Rescue, has you chasing desperately after a robot that kidnapped the leader of the Crimson Raiders, Roland. The design of Borderlands 2 is a lot like a spider web, with almost every major area connected to at least 2 others, forming one solid cohesive world to travel though. However, in the mission to save Roland, this game design is thrown straight out the window.

After fighting your way through a camp and killing Blood Maw, you find your way into the Bloodshot Stronghold, diving headfirst into the heart of the enemy. This mission might be the longest action sequence in all of Borderlands 2, with waves of enemies meeting you in every single room and hallway of the stronghold. You face turrets and nomads and psychos and badasses, bruisers and marauders and mini-bosses, in close quarters and long quarters and both at the same time.

It’s kind of difficult to actually die in the stronghold, because every single time you’re downed, there’s an enemy right next to you to revive yourself with, it’s excessive in a fantastic way. After fighting through the hordes of enemies, you finally meet up with Roland, locked in a prison cell. But before you can free him, he’s captured by a robot named Warden out of nowhere.

Being the enemy to a number of forces, Hyperion decides to double kidnap him, and suddenly this already excessive mission becomes a full out war between the bloodshots and hyperion robots, with you stuck in the middle of it. Fitting to the mission extending, you go out even further to a brand new area, the Bloodshot Ramparts, an open warzone with Roland being pulled to the very very back. The second entire half of this mission is somehow even more chaotic and action packed than the first.

The war seems brutal and equal at first, taking some of the fire off you, but the further you plunge into the ramparts, the clearer it is that Hyperion is winning the battle. By the end, it’s only you against the entire army of robots, all culminating in the final boss of the mission, the Warden bot itself. Out of the normal bosses in the game, you know, ones that don’t fly through the sky around you or something psychotic like that, Warden is among the more fun ones.

It has a classic video game big obvious weak spot, but it’s not always possible to shoot. You’re forced to deal with waves of Hyperion bots crashing into the ground around you, including badass loaders, as well as rockets and other crazy shit happening to serve as a fun little cap to the already chaotic level. After managing to free Roland and kill Warden, he actually uses the ability you had in the first game if you played as him, a turret that can also heal you, and it’s one of the only times you get to actually fight with an NPC in the game.

All that’s left is to clear out a final wave of robots, and the mission comes to a peaceful end. Now, Borderlands has always had fast travel, and occasionally does make you or encourage you to use it, but the end of A Dam Fine Rescue doesn’t even bother to offer you another option. To head back through both entire regions would be psychotic.

Even Roland just teleports. Unlike the rest of the areas in the game, the Bloodshot Stronghold and Ramparts don’t really serve another purpose, not even as connecting points. The only reason it was here was to throw enemies at you from dawn to dusk, so now that the enemies are gone, outside of some side missions, these areas are absolutely useless.

Just teleport out, the game designers say. And honestly, I can’t really argue with them. There are even games that don’t just remove the trip back, but the trip there too.

The Super Mario Galaxy games are a wonderful mix of 3D, 2D, and gravity based platforming with some of the most atmospheric and interesting level design that the Mario series has ever had to offer. That being said, I’ve never been able to get the idea out of my head that most of the time, we’re not really playing one level. You play this mini-level then shoot to the next and once you’re done with that, boom, next little level.

Sometimes the only thing connecting these worlds is a loose idea or mechanic, or just saying it’s the same level, deal with it. The level design in Super Mario Galaxy is a series of small challenges one after another, with a fancy fast travel between every level. Truthfully, this isn’t an open world game at all, not that the video was only about that, but its a regular, linear mario game with launch stars instead of pipes and scattering around the position of the planets around you.

Empty space is taken rather literally, with every level surrounded by the cold void of space, but even the spaces between planets are nothing more than decorative. You don’t spend time traveling it, you’re shot directly where you need to be, and catch a nice view in the process. In comparison to all of these varied approaches, Fuel made an interesting decision.

Let’s make all of it empty space. To describe Fuel as a video game is a little challenging. The game makes the hilarious decision to add a map in the bottom left corner, as if you’ll ever actually use the roads.

Drving through the wilderness is just plain easy, and is still the only sort of challenge the game can ever offer you. I watched the entire 2 hour long video “A Nerd Cubed Road Trip”, and between responding to chatters or random tangents, the only thing he could ever really mention about the game is, “wow, this game has a big map. This map is so big.

This game map is massive. ” The only other times he even mentioned the game were talking about the very obvious, lazy glitches and re-used assets. Some areas put the exact same model right next to each other, shuffling around the incredibly small asset pool a thousand times over so we at least have things in the distance to look at.

Nonsensical stone ruins and formations, broken windmills and destroyed, half buried homes to use as ramps. The game can hardly render the vast landscape that is literally the only reason the game is still known, with foliage disappearing just in front of you, the distance being some vague blur of green or brown or black. As said before, the universe of Fuel is a post-apocalypse, and it’s one of the most realistic ones I’ve ever seen.

While Fallout calls its worlds wastelands, they’re filled with quirky characters and technological remnants, laser beams and communities and factions and life. The stories are huge in stakes and scale, deeply political in its commentary and varied in every corner of the map. If the bombs didn’t drop in the fallout universe, we wouldn’t have fallout games.

For Fuel, though, it might have been a more interesting and fun experience if society was still around. It’s the true definition of a wasteland, it’s just nothing for miles and miles and miles. There is no special bits of content you get to, no fanfare or rewards or anything to make the journey worth it.

It is just nothing. And this isn’t some clever turnaround like, “ooh, its secretly brilliant”, no, this game sucks. It’s so bad, but I still kinda love it, because my brain is a pile of mush.

It’s not a game I’d ever subject myself to, but I’m happy that it at least exists, that the idea was thought of and tried and executed as it was. And, while I don’t think Fuel was anything close to a masterpiece, it isn’t the only game fascinated with empty worlds. The Long Drve released in 2019, to surprising critical acclaim.

The goal of the game is to drive, and I truly mean just to drive. You’ve given a massive set of controls, as well detailed access to nearly every part of your car, making you balance each of the intricate details on your journey to… well… there isn’t actually a destination in The Long Drve. The best words to describe the game are survival and exploration, but it doesn’t really feel like that.

Your goal is truly just to drive, with no actual endpoint in mind. The landscape around you is procedurally generated. Most times when a game uses procedural generation, it comes with the idea of having content around you at all times.

Survival games love it, since the environment isn’t just a set piece, it’s the materials that you use to succeed and build in the game. Minecraft is the most famous example, but games like Astroneer and No Man’s Sky and Terraria all use it to turn their expansive worlds into reality. The whole genre of roguelites depend entirely on procedural generation to make every single run unique, promising that you will never play the same game of Spelunky or Hades or Enter the Gungeon.

All of these games use this tool to give the player endless, infinite content, but The Long Drve uses it for another purpose. To give the player endless, infinite nothing. There are things to be found, structures that have tools and gas and oil, but not always.

You can find places with no use, nothing given to you, even enemies waiting to ambush you. You can drive on a stretch of nothing for a deeply uncomfortable amount of time, there’s no guarantee you’ll be provided with what you need. The only guarantee is a near endless desert.

There’s a youtube channel named “How Big is the Map? ”, a channel that both calculates and travels through as many video game maps as they can. The time spent can vary anywhere from minutes to hours, but the standout content are the ones that need to be split into parts.

That’s to say, hours long parts. 5, 6, 7, 8 hours, traveling through one single game world in real time. The series that I’m most fascinated with, however, is about a game you might not expect: Kerbal Space Program.

What Kerbal Space Program is known for is its extremely difficult rocket building system, requiring a deep knowledge of the game’s mechanics and y’know, rockets, otherwise all of your work falls apart the instant you launch. However, for whatever reason, you can ignore the entire point of the game and just kinda… walk around. This is the quest that “How Big is the Map?

” started; to walk across just half of the game’s starting planet. Part 1 of the series is entirely on a plane of ice. Across the video, the only difference visible at any point is what position the sun is in.

In fact, part 2 is the exact same way, and so is most of part 3. However, 22 and a half hours into the journey, we finally get something new: a mountain peak in the distance. Now things are getting interesting.

Over the last 4 hours in part 3, the mountain grows from a couple pixels in the distance to… a few more pixels. After about 4 more hours, we finally see how all of the peaks connect. And slowly, but surely, by part 7 of the series, we finally reach the foot of the hills… 25 hours later.

The total length of the series so far, from the start to reaching this hill, is 57 and a half hours long. And the fun thing is, the series is unfinished. In fact, it’s not even close.

With the speed of the Kerbal and the size of the planet, the estimated time to travel just half of it is somewhere around 873 hours. A new part sadly hasn’t been uploaded for 10 months, and yet, one day, I’m sure someone will travel the entire thing. Because, for some reason, we feel a need to explore even these empty worlds.

People have gotten to the edge of The Long Drve, the point where the roads just stop generating entirely. Multiple videos traverse the entire map of Fuel, getting to the edge of Minecraft, of Daggerfall, these painfully long journeys, knowing there’s nothing at the end to make it all worth it. It can’t just be curiosity, we know there’s nothing waiting for us, yet we’re pulled along by something to see every inch of these empty worlds.

In most games, these roads are small. As short as they can be, letting the player get to what they really want, where they need to go. But for some games, whether on accident or on purpose, they become the roads.

Things you travel for the sake of traveling. But, to me, the thing that draws people to the size of Fuel’s map is the same one as every other game, every other connecting point inside it. For some people, the only thing it takes is the knowledge that somehow, somewhere, this is an end to find.

And so, they will. No matter what it takes. Thank you, and have a nice day.