About ten years ago I got up one morning, got into my car and drove into the downtown area. Just for the fun of it, when I spotted a police cruiser up a head of me, I floored it and rear ended him. He quickly gave chase as I blew down the road toward the lakefront. As he chased me, two other police vehicles joined him in the pursuit. As soon as I reached the lakefront, I headed directly to a cliff that overlooked the mass body of water. As the police cars tailed me, I swerved my car just in time to miss flying off of the cliff. The police cars were not that lucky. All three of them flew off of the cliff and into the lake below.
I then drove to a seedy little alley where I waited in my car for the heat to blow over. Once it did I drove to the same side of town where I started the whole original fiasco. And guess what I did then? I slammed into the back end of another police cruiser and started the whole chase all over again.
That was ten years ago. Now, guess what I did just this morning? I found myself on the planet Mars in the not too distant future where we earthlings have been colonizing the planet. I have joined a resistance group who are currently fighting against the militaristic monopoly who have taken over the planet in the name of corporatization. I planted a number of explosive charges onto one of their tanks that was assaulting a colonized suburb of Mars. While being shot at by soldiers, I ducked behind a home and set off the charges then watched as the tank blew into many different pieces. The cool thing was I could have also used a rocket launcher to do the dirty work. Or I could have used a special laser gun that disintegrates it's victims rather than zaps them. Or, I could have blown up a building and had it collapse on top of the tank. So may options.
Am I a nut-case who's already wild imagination has run amok with destructive glee?
No. Of course not. I am speaking of open world / sandbox game-play video games!
Video games were never the same as soon as they started to cater to those of us that enjoy the freedom to do whatever we want to do, when we want to do it, as we explore a vast world with tons of options and the non-linear adventures within it. My first venture into this type of game-play was Grand Theft Auto III. Though it wasn't the first of its kind, it certainly put free roaming and do anything at any time type game-play into the forefront of video games.
The crime simulation game allowed players to get in and out of cars, walk or run up streets, cary and use a variety of different weapons and create general havoc all over the fictional town of the fully realized, three dimensional Liberty City, a city that had three different huge islands where you could speed around in many different cars creating multiple methods of destruction.
The game had a whole series of main missions that you were assigned by your crime-lord bosses. You could choose to go from mission to mission to mission to come to the end of the game, or you could do a mission, then go exploring, do a mission, get yourself into a high speed chase with the police or a rival gang, do a mission, then steal a number of cars for your own private use, do a mission, shoot helicopters out of the sky with your bazooka, etc. You could go hours or even days without doing even one game mission and still feel that you were accomplishing tons of personal objectives.
I played that game for a good six months straight before I even looked at another game. That was the beginning of my obsession with games that had open world capabilities.
The GTA series begat three more games of that caliber, Vice City, San Andreas and the more recently, updated Grand Theft Auto 4.
After the popularity of these open world crime simulations, many game companies and game publishers decided to get in on the action. Within the last decade we've gotten a ton of open world / crime sim games that have included, True Crime: Street of LA, Saints Row, Saints Row 2, The Godfather, Bully , Mercenary and Scarface.
They've also tapped heavily into the fantasy role playing game genre. The Elder Scrolls series of games that originated before GTA on the home PC and then started to hit game counsels are some of my favorite games of all time! The two games that have hit the high marks are Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind and Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion (the reason I bought a '360!)
Both these games put players in vastly huge and lavish fantasy worlds that seem to never end. Players take on a first person perspective of a character they can custom generate however they wish. Players can take on the main quest of the game or take on thousands of mini-quests or just roam around the worlds and dungeons grabbing loot and fighting creatures. You can easily play for hours upon hours without touching any of the main quests. Both games took me about six months each to play through. And I'm sure I still haven't discovered quite everything in each of the games.
That's not all. A lot of Sci-Fi games have taken on the open world theme. One of the top such games is Fallout 3, a post apocalyptic tale brought to us from the great minds at Bethesda Softworks, the wonder minds that brought us the Elder Scrolls games! It is another action role playing game that allows players to traverse across the wastelands that were once Washing DC and its suburbs. Again, features such as totally customizable characters and a huge world to discover are in play. It is every bit as good as it's Elder Scroll game predecessors!
That's not the only Sci-Fi open world game out there. There's also one of my personal favorite addictions called Crackdown. The futuristic super cop action game may not be as long and epic as most open world games should be, but it's certainly a time sucker. There's also the recently released Red Faction: Guerrilla, a very addictive game that takes place on the surface of the planet Mars. I've even temporarily put down Dragon Age: Origins to play this puppy for the last few weeks!
One pretty cool feature that is a part of open world gaming is that your character's actions help decide the outcome of the games. You can choose to play it as the good guy hero or play as a murderous villain. How you play may result in how the game ends or how other characters within the game react to you. These features really make you feel like you are a part of the world and story being told in it! That's a great attribute compared to anything a first person shooter or platformer has to offer!
Now, as wonderful as I find most of these open world games, I do find that there are a few hitches in plying them. Sometimes they can get repetitive. When designers try and create a huge vast world, they end up relying on a lot of the same scenery, just put in different patterns in different areas. This can become visually tiresome at times. Sometimes quests can be pretty repetitive also. You can only retrieve the same treasure or rescue the same prisoner so many times before you get so used to it and any surprises are thrown out the window after a while. Sometimes the areas of the huge world are separated by long and tedious load times.
But, admittedly that's nit-picking. I'm hardly tiring of open world games. I used to be heavily into first person shooters and action games. But, those games were quite linear and I found myself playing though them within 8 to 12 hours. If I'm going to be plunking down $60 per game, I'm going to want to get as much bang for my buck as possible. Economically, these are not the times to waste a chunk of change on only 12 hours of gameplay! If I find a totally immersive game where I can do anything I want in the huge world that the publishers have created and can play it beyond 6 months, I find myself quite fortunate!
Exploration is another big plus for these games. What new and exciting area, dungeon, swamp, forest, castle, ruins, city or planet can I traverse and find interesting objectives and possibly treasure in? It could be quite limitless.
What is the next big open world game I'm looking forward to? It's a western theme game brought to us from Rockstar Games, the people who brought us the Grand Theft Auto series. It is a game called Red Dead Redemption. It's release is just under two months away. If you just watched the trailer I linked to, you'll understand the excitement.
I'm hoping that open world video games don't start to get old and wear out their welcome. I'm hoping they find ways to expand and enhance the already immersive experience that they provide. How creators are going to do that, I have no clue since I'm already finding myself in five hour stints of playing and 6 months worth of playing just one game in games that are already released. It can only get better from here!
That's it for me today. I'm hoping to get more blogging done in the future. We'll see how that goes.
Until next time, stay vertical!
Zangz.
