Homie, I'm sorry but open world really just means its one map and it implies you might be able to go anywhere on the horizon. Rain World has an open world, Elder Scrolls definitely does except for Arena, pretty much any MMO, Astroneer, your OLD GAME No Man's Sky is open world. Seriously take a step back from your own project and breath for 4 hours before making announcements. That being said, Light No Fire looks ridiculously good and I can't wait for it.
I think they're just talking about the game being open world in a full planet that you can clearly see is a planet and is large and diverse enough to actually feel like a full planet.
Still not the first at that either. Valheim for example is a round planet and open world and has several biomes. But there the world isn't really impressive, so maybe that's what they are trying to be the first of?
Based on the trailer they are clearly trying to be the first game to actually achieve something but it's hard to define what that something really is.
Yup. I remember messing around with some mod once that let you find gear with a bunch of cool, random enchantments on them. I ended up finding some pants that let you walk on water… was pretty silly just running across oceans, but it actually led me to explore more of the world then I would have bothered to do otherwise.
Oh yes! Funny, I was going to comment somewhere else on this chain about Ultima's ecosystem that was present at launch and quickly removed. The players just killed everything with no regard, which was not taken into account when designing the system.
So I'm left wondering, first real what? Ultima had an open world and ecosystem, rain world has an open world and ecosystem, Spore even has an open world and its ecosystem is not really an ecosystem. This game looks great, I've wishlisted it. But they clearly need help with the marketing so it doesn't just sound like Randomly Generated Survival Game 3498.
Arena is one of the most open world of TES games. You can go anywhere in Tamriel. That said, it's fairly limited with what it can do, but it's so much more open than later games. Daggerfall is similar, except it got limited to one region.