Open-world games promise the opportunity to immerse oneself in an entirely new reality, replete with characters to meet, adventures to undertake, and mysteries to solve. With a pitch like that, it’s not hard to understand why so much recent design effort has gone into applying open-world design concepts to so many different genres of games. Now that open worlds are big business though, there’s a very important question afoot: what’s next? How can the genre build on its past successes, while still remaining fresh and relevant in the next era of game design? On Episode 41 of Vertical Slice, we’re stepping into the wild terrain of open-world design to see what answers we can uncover. Join us!