Lead Open World Designer

Summary

As the Lead Open World Designer, you will be the primary vision holder for the open world, its systems, and content. You will lead a multi-disciplinary team to deliver a best-in-class open-world experience rich with characters, encounters, side missions, puzzles, secrets, discoverables, collectables, and more.

Responsibilities

• Drive the design and implementation of engaging, immersive, interactive open-world content that encourages exploration and emphasizes a mix of fun, varied gameplay, worldbuilding, and storytelling.
• Work closely with the narrative team to develop ideas for new content.
• Develop and execute the design vision and strategy, ensuring that open-world content aligns with the game's overall narrative, thematic, and player experience goals.
• Leverage the game's core systems and mechanics to create dynamic and unpredictable open-world experiences that adapt to player choices and actions.
• Continuously seek opportunities to innovate, challenge conventions, and push the boundaries of open-world design.
• Rally designers, engineers, animators, artists, and external co-dev partners to deliver playable progress at regular intervals as part of a rapid iterative process.
• Incorporate feedback from peers, playtests, and senior leadership to refine and pivot as the game demands.
• Go beyond documentation and management to lead from the trenches, with hands-on contributions to the playable experience.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and iteration.

Qualifications

• 5 or more years of experience in open-world design.
• Prior experience as a Senior or Lead Designer.
• Knack and passion for blurring the lines between AI, systems, mechanics, and scripted content to create deep, layered worlds in which stories can unfold organically through exploration and gameplay.
• Strong understanding of population and encounter design and open-world content balancing.
• Excellent communication, interpersonal, and leadership skills.
• Innovative thinker with creative problem-solving skills who thrives in a collaborative team environment.
• Multiplayer design experience is a plus.
• Experience leading multidisciplinary teams is a plus.
• Experience in UE4 or UE5 is a plus.
• Experience working with co-development partners is a plus.

About Absurd Ventures

Absurd Ventures is a media company creating new IP across all platforms and for all formats. Absurd Ventures is building narrative worlds, creating characters, and writing stories for a variety of genres, without regard to medium, to be produced for live-action and animation; video games and other interactive content; books, graphic novels, and scripted podcasts.