If the cycle is actually ending for OWGs then I wonder what will replace them.
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An Overwhelming Bigness of Map
- Thread starter air_show
- Start date
We are in the End of Video Game History.
As noted before, I turned off most of the Horizon pins, just too damn many. I really love the game though. At first I thought it had cribbed from BotW but then I saw they were released just a couple months apart. A concurrency of good ideas between them.
HZD actually brought me back in to open world games. The only other one I've played to completion in the last ten years was BotW.
HZD actually brought me back in to open world games. The only other one I've played to completion in the last ten years was BotW.
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Olli
(he/him)
People have already been pushing the envelope with open-world games for quite a while now. Open world space sim? Open world zombie survival? Open world loot-based action RPG? Yeah, these have been done. Open world sports games next?
Its the methods used to push people along in contemporary open world games that ruin it for me. I can't stand the checkoff list approach Ubisoft does with their games, and others who mimic them. Horizon was an exception but lord knows I didn't finish those lists, either. Preferred the Zelda BotW approach with just leaving me alone to figure it moreso for a larger profile game. The Elite starship series and second Elder Scrolls game, Daggerfall were masterful at this.
Open worlds need a way to traverse them smoothly. Gotta be able to bypass enemies and other obstacles quickly, at least upon repeat visits. It's fine if there are more involved and time-consuming ways to deal with them, possibly giving you a reward for doing so, but it's got to be something the player can opt out of without much hassle. Getting forced into a lengthy detour while you're trying to get from A to B is fine if you haven't been to B yet, but otherwise it's a hassle.
More generally, open worlds as a genre are at their best when the driving principle is "fuck around and find out." That is, the player finds out information about the world and its systems by fucking around. If things out in the world (as opposed to closed set-pieces, which are pure destinations subject to normal linear level design concepts) are challenging, it should be because the player simply hasn't found out how to make it easy instead.
More generally, open worlds as a genre are at their best when the driving principle is "fuck around and find out." That is, the player finds out information about the world and its systems by fucking around. If things out in the world (as opposed to closed set-pieces, which are pure destinations subject to normal linear level design concepts) are challenging, it should be because the player simply hasn't found out how to make it easy instead.
And then blaming literally everyone except their management for it.
At least the first game had the benefit of releasing on a well established platform while the game it was up against released on two platforms, one of which never really got off the ground and the other being brand new. Forbidden West released on a platform that, while a year and a half old, is one a lot of people still can't get their hands on/can't afford. Meanwhile Elden Ring has released on almost everything.
Forbidden West was also released on PS4.
Ah, right! Even closer than I recalled.
I’d put HZD on par with BotW in most respects, really. It’s great. I’m after a PS5 bundle in part so I can play FW (skipped the PS4, played HZD on PC).
Ah. My bad.
I loved BotW and HZD, I think Elden Ring has a near-perfect open world design, and I'm excited to dive into HFW someday (hopefully soon). I suppose I played Fallout 3 and Skyrim back in the day, but in recent years I think the only open world games I've played have been some of the best. I'm not sure where else the genre can go, but I'm also not sure what sort of evolution or new flavor-of-the-decade will come around to replace them.
I was only referring to it in the context of the previous reference, I think they're here to stay for a good long while.
I don't know why exactly, but my brain lumps GTA in a different kind of category than just "open world game." It really isn't that different from something like Horizon though, is it? Especially now that it's all RPG-infused stuff across the board.
Well yeah, GTA 3 was big but "everything is open world now" didn't start gaining steam until at least 2009 if not a couple of years later. Just like Doom and Half-Life were big successes but it wasn't until Halo and CoD came out that FPSs really began being the dominant genre.
I think the main difference is that GTA is confined to a single city and surrounds rather than a countryside, which is what I think of more when I think of open world. It would qualify, but I think more of Morrowind, Fallout+, Skyrim, etc.
Urban sandboxes are a very specific subset of open-world design anyway. In them, it's always easy to get around; they allow effortless traversal to a degree that few other games in the genre dare approach. The wanted level system is especially interesting here; it means that whether you're going to face obstacles is not determined by where you are but by what you do. Something like it appears in Metal Gear Solid V, but that game puts a little more pressure on you to make the kind of mistakes that make the whole world more dangerous.
Phantoon
I cuss you bad
I can't speak for Ultima but Elite was an open world game in the modern sense and that was 1984. 8 galaxies of exploration.
On the other hand, Outside is the deepest PVP experience you'll ever find.
karzac
(he/him)
This isn't really true, there were tons of open world games in the mid-2000s trying to recapture GTA 3's success. True Crime, Wheelman, Driver, Getaway, Saints Row. Jak 2 went open world, so did Tony Hawk and Burnout and a bunch of other extreme sports games if I remember correctly. Assassin's Creed came out in 2007, Fallout 3 was 2008, so even the current model has deeper roots than 2009.
In my mind Assassin's Creed was the first tentpole game in the modern open-world framework, so tracing its lineage back to GTA3 makes a whole lot of sense too; that's only 6 years and 1 console generation cycle.
Violentvixen
(She/Her)
This made me think of this Boulet comic.
The only winning move is not to play.