Open world
There is no consensus on what the earliest open world game is, due to differing definitions of how large or open a world needs to be. Ars Technica traces the concept back to the free-roaming exploration of 1976 text adventure game "Colossal Cave Adventure", which inspired the free-roaming exploration of "Adventure" (1980), but notes that it wasn't until 1984 that what "we now know as open-world gaming" took on a "definite shape" with 1984 space simulator "Elite", considered a pioneer of the open world; Gamasutra argues that its open-ended sandbox style is rooted in flight simulators, such as SubLOGIC's "Flight Simulator" (1979/1980), noting most flight sims "offer a 'free flight' mode that allows players to simply pilot the aircraft and explore the virtual world". Others trace the concept back to 1981 CRPG "", which had a free-roaming overworld map inspired by tabletop RPG "Dungeons & Dragons". The overworld maps of the first five "Ultima" games, released up to 1988, lacked a single, unified scale, with towns and other places represented as icons; this style was adopted by the first three "Dragon Quest" games, released from 1986 to 1988 in Japan.
Tabletop role-playing game
Another early game was "Traveller", designed by Marc Miller and first published in 1977 by Game Designer's Workshop. This was originally intended to be a system for playing generic space-opera-themed science-fiction adventures (in the same sense that "Dungeons & Dragons" was a system for generic fantasy adventures), but an optional setting called "the Third Imperium" that was detailed in subsequent supplements became strongly identified with the game. The changes in this setting over time, especially those involving "the Fifth Frontier War" as depicted in the "Journal of the Travellers Aid Society", arguably constitute the first use of metaplot in a role-playing game. 
Meanwhile, "Call of Cthulhu" and "Paranoia" offered different role-playing experiences, in which the story arc of a group's investigation would lead to death and/or madness, or where comical infighting within a group would be expected and reinforced within the genre conventions of "a darkly humorous future". At the same time, games using the fictional worlds of "Star Trek", DC Heroes, the Marvel Universe or "The Lord of the Rings" expanded the range of possibilities for Table-top gaming. Games such as "GURPS" and "Champions" introduced game balance between player characters; later, "" and similar games emphasized storytelling, plot and character development over rules and combat. More recently, rules innovations have combined with literary techniques to develop games such as "Dogs in the Vineyard" and "Polaris" that rely on the contributions of players to enhance moral agency in a process of emergent storytelling.