There should be a sense that, within the rules of the game world, you can do anything at any time while freely moving about the space. But to really classify a game as open world, it's got to be about freedom. Many titles have aspects of it, like Chrono Trigger with its eon-hopping adventure or the Tomb Raider reboot and its capacity for backtracking and exploring unlocked areas of the map. It's a wide-reaching archetype that somehow encompasses everything from the lo-fi openness of Adventure and Elite to the extreme detail of games like Grand Theft Auto V and Elite Dangerous.īefore we get started, a quick note on definitions: open-world game design exists on a spectrum. We're not talking about just the earlier Grand Theft Autos-even the first GTA built on the foundations set by more than a decade of prior open-world games.įurther Reading Headshot: A visual history of first-person shootersIn the spirit of genre histories past-on graphic adventures, simulations, first-person shooters, city builders, and kart racers-today we're setting out into the wide ( wide) open world of the open-world genre. The oddities of modern open-world games have origins in the games that came before. Those quirks, by the way, are not merely a consequence of current technology. We delight in their unspoken possibility and shrug at their quirks. Today, nearly every big release is set in an open world. In spite of their many obvious failings or limitations, we've been losing ourselves within open worlds for some 30-odd years. These games provide a list of (predominantly violent) verbs that's minuscule in comparison to the options you would face in identical real-life situations. Open-world video games bear the impossible promise-offering compelling, enjoyable open-endedness and freedom within the constraints of what is, by necessity of the medium, an extremely limited set of possible actions.
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