Elden Ring’s biggest shock was its elevators. One second you thought you were walking around the Lands Between, and the next you were suddenly on a seemingly endless ride to the center of the earth. When the lift finally stopped moving, you realized that there was an entire area, roughly as big as the one on the surface, contained below the main map. It was a startling realization, a “wait, how big is this game?” moment for the ages.

Tears of the Kingdom has something similar going on and tips its hand early. You begin the game in the tunnels beneath Hyrule Castle, then are sent soaring into the sky where you play through a tutorial on a series of floating islands. Once you complete it, you skydive down to earth and, en route to your first map marker, can easily come across a hole in the ground that is impossibly deep. You can't go down there yet, but come back, and you'll find a big world down there in the chasms. The game is spread across the earth’s surface, its depth, and its upper atmosphere.

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The next hotly anticipated open-world game to hit store shelves will be Starfield, Bethesda’s massive spacefaring RPG. Like Tears of the Kingdom and Elden Ring, that game is adding a huge amount of explorable space onto a formula the studio has previously explored. But, Starfield is more in line with existing space exploration games like No Man’s Sky and Eve Online, than it is with the new trend that seems to be emerging with Elden Ring and Tears of the Kingdom.

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After Starfield, the biggest open-world game on the horizon is Grand Theft Auto 6. With every GTA so far, the explorable space has gotten significantly bigger. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to suspect that Rockstar would be exploring a parallel approach to the designs FromSoftware and Nintendo have implemented, opening up the earth beneath its next expansive playground.

Grand Theft Auto 5 already did this to an extent. Though it offered far fewer possibilities than Elden Ring or Tears of the Kingdom, there was a large sewer network under Los Santos. I remember pulling into it from the game’s L.A. River equivalent while trying to evade the cops, and getting stuck in the underground space for an inordinate amount of time as I searched for a staircase out.

But, that was a small area of the total game. Rockstar is certainly watching as FromSoft and Nintendo put out the most acclaimed open-world games of the new console generation, and won’t want to be outdone. For all its cartoonish characters and satirical writing, though, Grand Theft Auto is still grounded in a version of the real world. Rockstar probably won’t add a hidden world underneath the map, or floating islands in the sky.

GTA5 (1)

But, it isn’t difficult to imagine the developer figuring out a grounded(ish) way to work in added subterranean play space. I’m thinking of Jordan Peele’s Us, which began with a text screen explaining that, “There are thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the continental United States… Abandoned subway systems, unused service routes, and deserted mine shafts… Many have no known purpose at all.”

Peele used that idea as the foundation for a horror story and, while that likely isn’t the direction Rockstar is planning to head with the next Grand Theft Auto, the concept does set up a way for it to find new places for the player to explore, without leaving the realm of reality. Previous GTAs have added new cities and new states, ever expanding outward. I hope the next expands downward, showing us the depths lurking below.

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