the.com/open world
a map with no leash, and no one telling you the leash was ever the point.
means a game design where you can go anywhere, do almost anything, and the plot politely waits its turn.
from grew out of 1980s sandbox games and exploded with grand theft auto iii in 2001, which proved a city could be a toybox, not a corridor.
early ancestorelite (1984) let you fly anywhere in space
gta3 effectdefined the genre's modern template overnight
downside termubisoft-style map bloat, aka icon fatigue
scale trickoften illusion via procedural generation, not handcraft