By Jim Rossignol on July 15th, 2009 at 6:32 pm.
The notion of open game worlds has always appealed to me, ever since Elite. When there’s even the faintest whiff on a free roaming environment, or virtuality that I can go off an explore, I’m interested. It’s an impulse that leads me to spend endless hours in Stalker, or to expend an entire day driving around Fuel. But whatever game I play, I end up feeling somewhat dissatisfied. It’s kind of dissatisfaction that does not seem to be so common with linear or arena games. I think it’s to do with a specific tension that open world games create: between what the game is about, and what the environment – and its openness – implies.
The most obvious example of this tension that I can think of exists in Far Cry 2. The game’s environment is a brilliant Africa-in-miniature, and everything from the flies buzzing in the air to the gleam of the swampy jungle has been conjured spectacularly. The combat too is entertaining: fire propagation, over-wrought grenade physics, ludicrous close-combat battle-horror at the end of a semi-automatic shotgun. But the two systems do not mesh comfortably.
Far Cry 2 tries to push your experience as close to that of a traditional shooter as it can manage in this open environment. Once you’re outside of the key “safe” towns, anything and everything is an enemy, or a target. It is, like any traditional shooter, a rolling battle. This surprised and exasperated many gamers, because while they were happy to suspend disbelief for a game like, say, Crysis, which could be seen as a very wide corridor, they could not make the same leap for a game that did not really funnel you continuously in a single direction. The verisimilitude of Far Cry’s world – with its network of roads, villages, rivers and army encampments – seemed at odds with our experience of it. Where everyone was an enemy, and everything would chase, shoot, and attack you, the world seemed at odds with itself.
The very notion of it being an open world seemed to suggest that the game would support more life: civilians, passive enemies, the illusion of a wider world. I think about this, and I think about Outcast, the voxel sci-fi adventure. Right there, back in 1999, was a game brave enough to say: “here’s a world, it’s full of life, politics, danger, go deal with it and save your own world in the process.” You traipsed out into its pixellated valleys and did precisely that. Thanks to the freedom of movement and general neutrality of much of the world of Outcast, when combat occurred it was an moment of high drama. Combat in Far Cry 2, meanwhile, is often reduced to a kind of road-clearance. The Outcast player’s experience of being in a particular, although virtual, place was therefore (despite its incredibly lack of visual fidelity by modern standards) incredibly potent.
The illusionism required for an open world game is different to that of a linear game. For Half-Life 2 the illusion is all about momentum. As Gillen regularly points out, such games are all about forward motion, and they break down the moment we don’t see where to go, or who to shoot. Open world games go for quite a different illusion. They might simple be a big arena for stuff to happen in, or they might try to be a little more indulgent of our imagination, and to try to create the illusion that there’s really something going on, that there’s life.
Perhaps the best illusion of a living environment is the one generated by GTA4. The city of Rockstar’s most recent game is a masterwork on its own, without any of the game elements considered. I find myself lost in it, staring out of the window of a taxi with a similar reverie to that of visiting a real foreign city. Except here I can be much braver, and explore more fearlessly into dangerous terrain. It’s the potency of GTA4′s illusion of cityness that really gets me: the chatter on the sidewalks, the slow chug of the traffic around town, the general ambient goings on that pay little attention to you unless you specifically interfere with them. The failure of Far Cry 2 (and also in a related sense Fallout 3 and Assassin’s Creed) was that the design never really made a bid for that kind of suspension of disbelief. You were the centre of what was going on in those worlds, and you always knew it.
The illusion of life outside of your own in-game activities is, perhaps, one thing open worlds need pursue and exploit, beyond even the essential mechanics of their game. Stalker, for example, was fundamentally a shooter, just like Far Cry 2, but the existence of neutral or indifferent entities, the very-slightly wider range of interactions (an inventory, non-combat items) seemed to expand the illusion into something we wanted to poke, prod, and understand the limits of. This spooky Ukrainian countryside-dungeon really could be The Zone, and I could be the rogue, hooded individual charged with exploring it. While not precisely open-world in the same way GTA4 is, the game provided a sense of life and non-linearity that allowed you to get lost in it, and invest in it, because you were always given reasons to value the idea of exploring it.
Exploring. That seems to be to be the other aspect of open worlds that developers need to make the most of if they want to have their world mean something to players. Aside from the randomly distributed nonsense-money of Far Cry 2′s diamonds, it had little reason for you to poke about in particular points on the map. You could not expect to find many secrets – perhaps a hang-glider here and there. Instead, you followed the missions and did the violence where it was directed, and therefore most fruitful. I’d argue that where the open world model prospers is often when it gives you reason to explore and investigate its limits: finding the very highest jumps or the most obscure billboards in Burnout Paradise, for an example that is neither a shooter, nor trying to create the illusion of a living world.
I often feel as though open world games create fantastic places, but then fail to create a game that is appropriate to the environment we find ourselves in. Fallout 3′s mechanics, voices, and character design left me struggling to enjoy what is, clearly, an astonishing feat of world creation. I know that many people felt similarly aggrieved with Oblivion, although I actually got on with that a whole lot better. Similarly, when I played Assassin’s Creed my continuing reaction (aside from my indignation at the cutscenes) was a disbelief that the design team had done so little to exploit their astonishing medieval city. It felt, at times, that the assassination game was going on in spite of their bustling city around me – as if the team had created this beautiful world and then didn’t really know what to do with it, because they had this assassin game to be getting on with too…
So to come full circle with the sense of dissatisfaction with open world games: I think the way we experience them, by comparison with linear games, says something about how our gaming imagination functions. We seem to understand that when linear games point us in a certain direction, that’s the way to go. When an open world game appears, its very structure suggests something about how we should behave, or want to behave, and predisposes us to judge on the basis of how it entices us to go somewhere that the game itself hasn’t suggested, and on how it then deals with that action.
Further, there seems to be a need for us to feel more embedded, as if our actions matter more where we can come back to the scene of our actions. In Far Cry 2 I didn’t expect the enemies I’d killed at a checkpoint to reappear: the open world had led me to expect some level of persistence. In Fallout 3 I didn’t expect to be constrained by the ropes of the story, or the level structure, because that moment stepping outside the vault said: the horizon is the limit to this. Perhaps my own suspension of disbelief simply becomes less easy to manage, because the illusion of “worldiness” isn’t strong enough, or the game is really a linear experience in a very wide corridor, with no real reason for us to stray off the path.
One day I should like to see a game perform the incredible genre-splicing process required to marry up the elements that make various successful open worlds so strong. I should like that game to give me a direction, a purpose, without telling me exactly what I need to be doing. I should like it to ignore me, but nevertheless carry my mark when I choose make it. This imaginary game will, I hope, dump me on the midst of a strange place, perhaps with with a pyre of smoke on the horizon, and instruct me: “survive”.
I’d like that.
(Also, it would have an absolutely incredible map, but that’s another blog post.)
15/07/2009 at 18:41 sigma83 says:
Well articulated. Encapsulated my thoughts on open world gaming quite neatly, even the ones I didn’t know I had.
15/07/2009 at 18:44 Dan says:
Bang on, Jim.
My dream game which no-one will ever make is called ‘Life’ and has the player start as a homeless, penniless vagrant in a massive, sprawling city where no-one cares about him. Then you have to survive, get a job, make some money, find somewhere to live, etc. Then find love, have kids, get divorced, have a midlife crisis. Or become a criminal mastermind. Or run for office.
That’d be ace.
Ooh, or be a commercial pilot.
15/07/2009 at 18:45 wheres_my_gun says:
I remember twinsen’s odyssey (while not really an open world game) doing something neat in this regard, by starting you off in your own home which was placed logically in a small town full of other people who all clearly had their own domestic lives just like your character. started things out on the right foot in terms of your relationship to the world, as opposed to the disjointed am-i-the-only-real-person-in-this-universe strangeness of the fallout 3 intro
15/07/2009 at 18:51 JimmyJames says:
I feel the same way about most of the open world games I’ve played recently. I think they fail for me when they’re not quite sandbox games, so you still can’t really do what you want, even if you can move to any spot you can see.
I’ve been getting a lot of pleasure out of ArmA II lately, because of some of the truly excellent multiplayer coop user missions like Domination. You get objectives, like secure a town or city, and some side missions, but how you go about it is largely up to you. When the plans you make get fouled up and you have to change things on the fly – with very few limitations imposed on you – it makes for some great gaming experiences.
I had fun with Prototype but it got old quickly.
15/07/2009 at 18:53 phil says:
Nice piece, though have you played Hunter? It essentially plonked you in the middle of war zone and told you to blow up the one of the biggest things in the game world.
Though incredibly sparse, finding things like destoryed churchs, a political prison, a hidden room in the ocean and and a family of ducks, whilst getting chased for kilometres over rolling hills by jeeps on a push bike, made the seeing what’s over the next hill complusive. Fallout 3 did the same thing for me, but Far Cry 2 not so much, I knew the developers were taking things too seriously to include anything freaky.
15/07/2009 at 18:53 Hmm-Hmm. says:
Hmm. In that sense some MMOs may be more open world games than some of the games mentioned. I think.
Then again, the whole massively multiplayer aspect curtails further reaching forays into open world territory, I suspect.
15/07/2009 at 18:53 OoohShinyGraffix says:
Space Rangers 2 felt like a cohesive living, breathing universe through simple things like the news updates of going-ons on other planets, fluctuating supply and demand for items, seeing other pilots and starships carryinga about their own agendas, etc.
15/07/2009 at 18:53 dumas says:
great words
I too dream of a better world of open world games.
Here’s hoping Call of Pipyrat can finally focus on what Stalker does well (atmosphere and exploration), instead of traditional shooterism.
Hopefully the persistent “a-life” system will finally start to come alive, and hopefully some greater non scripted interaction with other citizens of “the zone”.
15/07/2009 at 18:54 Jim Rossignol says:
“the whole massively multiplayer aspect curtails further reaching forays into open world territory”
Straight up and down level structures stop them being genuinely open worlds.
EDIT: exceptions might be Eve, or WoW endgame.
15/07/2009 at 18:56 Arrrmo says:
Ahh, Outcast. Now that’s a game I haven’t thought about in quite a while. I remember pouring HOURS into just wandering around and enjoying the world.
15/07/2009 at 18:57 Neut says:
I’ve always wanted to see a remake of the original Unreal done in an open world fashion, with you crash landing on an alien planet and the only objective being “Survive” and maybe “Find a way off the planet”.
15/07/2009 at 19:05 Richard Clayton says:
I think that one of Far Cry 2′s major problems is that it failed to live up to it’s first few minutes. That ride through the checkpoints was tense and fantastic – I thought this was how some checkpoint interactions might be (or at least those where you had the right papers).
I knew it was all theatre when I returned back from my first mission back to the Slaughter House where I had started and got pulverised by bullets. Hey, I thought you guys were on my side!
15/07/2009 at 19:07 Michel says:
The problem with Far Cry 2′s world can be described as an uncanny valley effect. The uncanny valley in animation or robotics is the idea that as something approaches visual realism, its behavioural imperfections become more noticeable and unsettling/uncanny. FC2′s Africa is gorgeous, but the underlying systems are not up to par. The interesting thing is the systems would be perfectly suitable for a game with a less realized world such as Crysis. It was like the designers and artists were working on completely different wavelengths towards different goals.
Anyway, this is just to say that the uncanny valley should not only concern animators and artists, but game designers and creative directors.
15/07/2009 at 19:07 mister k says:
I think you’ve pinned down what stopped me playing Farcry 2. I hated that everyone attacked me, and felt utterly disconnected. The missions seemed pointless to me (I had no real idea why I was hanging around in the country formenting rebellion), and the world wasn’t fun to explore: everywhere I went I’d have a samey fight against a handful of reasonably intelligent AI goons.
15/07/2009 at 19:11 Dr. Nerfball says:
@Neut: It would be like the origional Pikmin with more shooting stuff and less befriending of the midget plant life wouldn’t it?
Siiiigh, I wish I was old enough to have experienced these times when games were good and movie tie-ins were just a far off nightmare. Oh well! I’m going to throw myself into another game of Deus Ex now.
22/11/2012 at 05:36 JackShandy says:
You mustn’t have been around long if you think shoddy movie tie-in’s didn’t exist before pikmin.
15/07/2009 at 19:12 autogunner says:
the tutorial of far cry 2 was pretty much the most excitement that could be gleaned from the game. a shame really.
15/07/2009 at 19:14 tim says:
I think there weren’t any civilians in Far Cry 2 because they had all left. The point of the game was that there was a civil war going on without any civilians – it was a civil war consisting only of foreign mercenaries.
15/07/2009 at 19:18 Motherpuncher says:
This gives me a lot to thank about. Makes me think about how good Fuel could be, if there was more purpose to the game. I think Neut’s idea is pretty cool. It would be fun if you had no human contact at all, just start exploring and hope you survive.
15/07/2009 at 19:20 JKjoker says:
the problem with farcry2 was that the missions were all the same (kill a camp, kill a person or destroy a car, rinse and repeat)with a long drive between objectives and mission givers made even more annoying by the infuriating, respawning “guard posts”.
one thing i liked about Prototype was that the world changed as you finish story missions, watching the masses go from walking in the park to run screaming from a zombie apocalypse made the city feel more alive (well, as long as you look at the world from a distance and ignore the crappy AI), i wish i could see these changes in “open worlds” more often, bonus points if the change is slightly random and related to choices and actions performed by the main character (if i destroy a building i want it to stay down!)
15/07/2009 at 19:22 Pstonie says:
As someone who spent years of late nights absorbing GTA3, then Vice City then San Andreas I have to say that I was excited about the new features in GTAIV, but it left me ultimately disappointed. Below these features, such as updated graphics and the wonderful Euphoria engine, it was the same old world full of people and cars that exist to go nowhere.
It gives you the illusion of a city full of life and stories, then puts a gun in your hand as the only way to interact with this world.
GTAIV also has a good example of what will be happening to open world games in the future, I think. You can’t put car modding in GTA because then you can’t sell Midnight Club, so you leave it out.
15/07/2009 at 19:23 Stilgar says:
I found the savage empire game to be a compelling world, i remember spending hours as a kid figuring out all the stuff you could play with, there was a wealth of interesting characters, and to my young mind an overwhelming amount of items to carry around (I was a hoarder), many of which had no use, other than to populate the world with realistic flavor.
15/07/2009 at 19:26 Moot says:
Indeed Jim – A second thanks for capturing and expanding on certain nagging feelings of discomfort and dissatisfaction I too often experience yet have struggled to identify.
I know that my approach to both Oblivion and Fallout 3 was one followed by many gamers:
slowly and deliberately walk in the opposite direction from the main quest-line towards which I am pushed and try to pursue a life befitting of my character…until such time as I eventually run out of side-quests, or am unable to unlock more that the world has to offer without grudgingly spending an hour or two breaking character to appease some particularly persistent NPCs.
On my first play through Oblivion and it’s add-ons, I must have clocked up nearly 60-70 hours of play before finally catching up with Sean Bean and begrudgingly flailing about in a series of tedious Oblivion gates at his whim.
I avoided Liam Neeson almost as diligently.
At least this was something that I could do (to a point) yet I was still – perhaps churlishly – annoyed by the games insistence that I spent time chasing these main quest lines as I had spent a considerable amount of time building and creating characters to whom such things didn’t really matter – I hated my dad for abandoning me and never wanted to see him again. I was happy to let the authorities deal with these irksome Oblivion gates as long as neither interfered with my ability to turn a profit as a master thief and assassin…
I gave up on FarCry 2 quite early on as I found the game mechanics insurmountably and unforgivably at odds with the beautifully crafted and immersive environment. I am still eagerly awaiting a mod which rectifies this…
Is it likely that a developer/publisher will have the confidence to ever release a game with such a richly realised open world that they will deliberately omit a specific narrative conclusion to chase if all you want to do is live the life of a member of the Fighters Guild or a mercenary outfit or indeed, become the most powerful Wizard in the world and then use that power to achieve dominion over all it’s inhabitants?
15/07/2009 at 19:29 kikito says:
… ump me on the midst of a strange place, perhaps with with a pyre of smoke on the horizon, and instruct me: “survive”.
That is what dwarf fortress is about.
15/07/2009 at 19:30 Kommissar Nicko says:
I think that’s one of the biggest obstacles to open-worldliness: guys with guns. I mean, really, Stalker, Far Cry, AND Fallout 3 all had these random guys with guns that REALLY hate you the MOMENT they see you for NO REASON and will pursue you to their deaths. Not only that, but you have to clear them from the bush like roaches in a tenement. Bothersome. At least in Assassin’s Creed, the guards left you alone if you didn’t fuck with them, but then again, the novelty of Assassin’s Creed’s architecture wore off after a while.
I’d say another thing that makes GTA4 fascinating is the resolution of the city itself: not only is it vast in scope, it is minute in its detail, with a lot of little buildings that you can pop into to shoot the occupants. Most open world games particularly prohibit you from poking around the micro stuff, in favor of jogging you across vast distances.
15/07/2009 at 19:31 Kommissar Nicko says:
@kikito:
OH NO YOU DIDN’T! I was going to mention Dwarf Fortress, but I didn’t want to be That Guy.
15/07/2009 at 19:33 Duckmeister says:
I also hate not having persistence in open world games.
I hated in Prototype how you could destroy a military base, or destroy an infection nest, and then you’d come back and they’d be right there like you hadn’t just been there 5 minutes ago. There was no incentive to do anything as it had no impact on anything.
I was thinking of getting Far Cry 2, only because I’m a sucker for upgrade systems and open worlds and tactical battles with preparation. Now that I see that there’s no persistence, I’m having second thoughts. Now, I can see checkpoints respawning, I’m okay with that, but some things look like they would be infuriating to see filled with enemies even though you just took them all out a second ago.
I remember seeing one of the first youtube videos of Far Cry 2 being a guy shooting a bush, walking past it, turning around immediately and finding the bush completely restored. Whatever.
15/07/2009 at 19:33 Jim Rossignol says:
That is what dwarf fortress is about.
No, it’s not, at least not in the same personal-narrative adventure way. Dwarf Fortress is an open world management game, I suppose, but its quite different from what I’m talking about here.
15/07/2009 at 19:35 Sam says:
Outcast is still shockingly playable to this day. Even the ease and “snappiness” of the UI and menu system does things PC games today haven’t nailed down.
I have to agree with Jim, the way they kept as many elements as they could diegetic (guess what the GamSaav Crystal did) really struck me, even when it was goofy. I tend to appreciate the attempt at that sort of lampshade hanging rather than pretending a strange “game-y” part of the experience doesn’t exist at all.
15/07/2009 at 19:35 suibhne says:
Gothic 3 also deserves some mention as an open-world game, since many of the quests led to you actually changing the face of the gameworld – altering ownership of temples, cities, camps, etc. Never mind all of its bugs – Gothic 3 was one of the better open-world designs that I’ve played, despite its many problems, and I’m hoping that Risen exhibits a similar design direction.
Great piece, Jim. This may have resonated with me more than anything else I’ve read here about game design, because these are the games that most excite me and I’m happy to see that they push the same buttons in some other folks as well.
15/07/2009 at 19:37 Heliocentric says:
Could someone mod farcry 2 so if you stay in a factions good books only half the spawn soldiers want you dead?
15/07/2009 at 19:38 Pace says:
One of my favorite parts of Civ IV is after several hours of play when you finally research the tech required to build your first ocean-going vessel, and then send him out to discover new continents and civilizations, to see the world. Exciting!
15/07/2009 at 19:40 MrMud says:
Outcast was so ahead of its time.
I also have to agree 100% with everything you said about FarCry 2, it was just a bizarre experience playing that game.
15/07/2009 at 19:41 Smurfy says:
ALAN WAKE PC IS OFFICIALLY CANCELLED GUYS
FFFFFFFFFF-
15/07/2009 at 19:41 Smurfy says:
The “entire day in Fuel” link is dead.
15/07/2009 at 19:46 Citizen Parker says:
I can definitely agree that being “the most important person in the universe” in an open-world ruins any suspension of disbelief in the “world.” However, I don’t neccessarily understand what expectations an open-world game creates about how we should behave in it.
Perhaps we’re not defining open world too well. Is merely the lack of corridors open world? Does that mean that a game with set levels and rigid constraints on behavior like, say, Syndicate is open world? Or does open world mean a game that is specifically designed to let you inhabit someone fully, rather than just those moments of their life when they are shooting people?
I may be mistaken but the latter seems a more rational approach. If that’s the case, then Far Cry 2 totally fails against that definition. It is a game designed to let you interact with someone solely via the barrel of a gun. As such, I don’t have a problem with guards respawning and civilians staying the heck out of the country, because it isn’t trying to model what it’s like to live in Africa. It’s just trying to model what it’s like to kill people in Africa.
Would the former be more interesting? Probably, but that would be a different game with different expectations too.
15/07/2009 at 19:48 Player2 says:
This article hits the nail right on the head. I’d been trying to figure out -why- I couldn’t enjoy these games, and then you go and point it out so very eloquently.
I think the other part of my dislike for most open world games is that the game sets you as some amazing demigod whose prowness in battle is unmatched. Take Red Faction 2 for example. You, a miner who just picked up a gun, can go and rain death down on trained soldiers in armor, taking down swathes of them before you’re finally overwhelmed/ run off into the sunset. And of course, the fact that as soon as you join Red Faction, suddenly the movement shifts from first to fifth gear and goes hauling through the EDF.
Even in other games, enemies seem like they’re made of papermache whilst your composed of some indestructible foreign space metal. In my opinion, until you are finally geared for taking on your aggressors, you should be afraid of them attacking, running for your life whenever a gunfight starts. You should have to slowly and steadily build your character up while trying desperately to survive in a world which refuses to acknowledge you until you finally pull yourself up to the top of the mountain of life.
15/07/2009 at 19:48 Skyfort says:
As far as being dumped in the middle of a strange world with absolutely no guidance, and limitless possibilities — Asheron’s Call before all the expansions managed this quite well. =) I know an MMORPG is a bit of a different thing because you don’t have NPC’s to worry about. But in terms of feeling utterly lost (in a good way), it was the very best. It has a huge world, and you can probably still find obscure places to hunt that nobody knows about, and if you run into another person there you become best friends just so you can be sure to keep the location a secret. ;)
15/07/2009 at 19:56 Sam C. says:
I think you hit one of the main problems with Far Cry 2 right on the head: the lack of persistence in the game world. There was really no point to clearing out the checkpoints. Supplies were common enough that I never seeked out a checkpoint, since I’d probably use up more resources than I’d gain clearing it out. Since there’s no reason to return, it’s the equivalent of making the player retrace their steps in a linear game – it’s a chore, and even the brilliant, substantial combat didn’t save it from being tedious at times.
Besides just making it a corridor shooter, they could have saved it by adding a more dynamic mission system – instead of forcing you to go back to the city for missions, have one of the groups call you when you near one of their objectives . They lay out the plan for you right there, and now you have a reason to wander the map. The main points could still be obvious (the marked areas where you got a zoomed in detailed area map, like the airport or slaughterhouse), with hidden side missions to make exploring more worthwhile. This would save the other annoyance – finding awesome villages and combat areas, and seeing that they’re completley empty and pointless.
Then if they added faction relationships that mattered, checkpoints that you could capture and hand over to friendly factions, neutral civilians going about their daily lives, and maybe even hunting mini-games, and they could have had something truly compelling.
I would be very curious why the developers didn’t go that route.
15/07/2009 at 19:58 OoohShinyGraffix says:
q[I can definitely agree that being “the most important person in the universe” in an open-world ruins any suspension of disbelief in the “world.” ]q
The flipside is that having no tangible consequences of your actions (going back to areas where you killed everyone only to see that they’ve respawned and going about their business as if nothing happened) breaks that immersion as well.
15/07/2009 at 19:59 OoohShinyGraffix says:
Damn I used some other forum’s quoting code instead of propah HTML. Blarrrgh.
15/07/2009 at 20:01 cyrenic says:
I’ve always though Shadow of the Colossus had a great “open world” mechanic. The world wasn’t huge, but I really enjoyed exploring the world.
The guidance mechanic with the sword was also very well done, just a vague direction you should head if you want to continue the story. And there were little rewards for exploring, such as fruit or lizards that would increase your health or stamina if you found them.
I was a bit disappointed that Team Ico’s next game doesn’t look like it’ll have another big world like in SotC. Oh sorry, I’m yammering on about consoles :P.
15/07/2009 at 20:01 Mr Wonderstuff says:
“staring out of the window of a taxi with a similar reverie to that of visiting a real foreign city.”
One of the most memorable gaming moments…I don’t have many…but once in a while a game comes along and you just say wow.
15/07/2009 at 20:03 moo says:
I have to say that I had no idea where Megaton was for the first 5-6 hours I spent in Fallout 3, and I ended up gawd-knows-where, and I had a blast scouring the skeletons of houses for loot, or dealing with pesky raiders. The people at Rivet City had their own lives, and I really couldn’t care less about them. I only really started pursuing the quest lines because I wanted, at some point, to finish the game. Barring that, however, I was happy picking up side quests or raiding robot factories.
15/07/2009 at 20:04 Jordan says:
The tangible concept of real progression is what’s absolutely necessary for me in order to make an open-world game interesting. It’s exactly what I loved so much about both STALKER games (and why I can’t wait for Call of Prypiat), and why I loathed Far Cry 2 so much.
In Far Cry 2, there’s this completely false sense of progression. You’re given the illusion of discovering new areas, only to realize that they look exactly like the old areas. Copy-pastes of the same look with slightly different layouts or pathing. When it opened up to the completely unnecessary second map, that was the last straw.
Even the weapons you unlock in Far Cry 2 – they do gradually open up the gameplay, allowing you to tackle encounters in various ways, but the problem is that the enemies you’re encountering never change things up at all. The location of the encounters doesn’t change at all either – it’s just the same checkpoints, over and over again. The prison building in the second map was the only truly *different* (and thus memorable) area throughout the entire game. It also doesn’t help that you can easily unlock all the coolest weapons of note in less than half the playtime it takes to actually finish the game.
In STALKER, on the other hand, the enemies, environments, tactics, and even the atmospheric effects change things constantly throughout the entire game. New types of monsters, more intelligent, more powerful enemies. The underground lairs are some of the most engrossing levels I’ve ever played. Entering The Sarcophagus and the Brain Scorcher were some of the most memorable events I’ve had in gaming. All the way up to the final battles in Pripyat, it just kept progressing. Better weapons and equipment went along with it to keep you from getting bored.
Ubisoft Montreal’s open-world games – Far Cry 2, Assassin’s Creed, Prince of Persia, and more – all exhibit the same problems. They brag about quantity without improving quality. They brag about open-endedness without giving the gamer a reason to care about all that open territory. They lack any sort of tangible progression, and that is hopefully what they address going forward.
15/07/2009 at 20:06 ilves says:
Freedom and exploration is pointless when there is no point to it. Yea its great that I can walk three hundred miles in that direction, but if everything I see on the way is repetitive and similar to the thing I saw a mile ago, what the hell is the point? If I can go through an area, blow it to hell, and come back and have it be there again, what’s the point? Or if everyone respawns again? It gets boring to have to fight EVERYONE. Exploration and freedom has to have some type of reward or point to it… being able to change the game world is good, that way you can actually see your impact, giving you purpose in just being meaningful. If you’re not really meaningful in the game world, you’re just basically playing a real life simulator, which is just boring. Yes, in the main ‘plot’ you’ll have influence, but that’s besides the point.
15/07/2009 at 20:13 OoohShinyGraffix says:
Freedom and exploration is pointless when there is no point to it.
Not unless you like to LARP in your games.
15/07/2009 at 20:14 OoohShinyGraffix says:
Again with the quoting. Fuuuuuuuu-
15/07/2009 at 20:15 Frye says:
Glad everyone here seems to agree on Far Cry 2′s (obvious) limitations. Makes you wonder why Far Cry 2 got the ratings that it did. There were lots of better fps shooters around back then and i played those instead, so i gave fc2 an hour or two at most. Nice engine though, homemade by UBI Montreal if i remember correctly.
15/07/2009 at 20:19 Richard Clayton says:
Jim, you’re absolutely right about the player testing the boundaries of the world. It’s what children do in real-life and its the first thing most of us do when we’re dropped into a game world. We interact with everything, shoot windows, barrells, fire-extinguishers, trees, lights to see what happens.
Our expectations are often set pretty high and, in Far Cry 2′s case, the opening sequence does just that.
It is the gap between expectation and delivery that the developers have to manage. I remember reading at E3 several years ago that after visitors to the Crytek stand had shot trees in half in Crysis they started to compare that to other games “huh, this game sucks: you can’t shoot down trees”.
Few players are going to expect the phones to work in game and on finding out they don’t most of us will shrug and move on to fiddle with the next item as its not an immersion breaker. Magically respawning, characterless enemies, colour coded signposts etc. repeatedly remind us that this is a game.
Elegantly managing the gap between expectation and delivery is the key to maintaining immersive gameplay.
15/07/2009 at 20:24 reginald says:
good one jim, I agree with your sentiments. I’m hoping ID’s RAGE, or Gearbox’s BorderLands will provide what fallout didn’t
15/07/2009 at 20:28 Heliocentric says:
You ask why farcry 2 got high ratings in the same world halo games get 10/10?
15/07/2009 at 20:32 Andy says:
” Jim Rossignol says:
That is what dwarf fortress is about.
No, it’s not, at least not in the same personal-narrative adventure way. Dwarf Fortress is an open world management game, I suppose, but its quite different from what I’m talking about here.”
It is when you dump all your points into one guy, and then feed the other six to the wolves.
Of course this usually leaves you in semi-control of a mentally insane emo dwarf
Ultima Online player ran servers can sometimes fullfil the believable persistant worlds, but recently most servers either are full of d00ds waiting just outside the city limits to PK you, or nearly empty ghost towns because everyones out hunting monsters to get loot.
15/07/2009 at 20:32 ilves says:
@OoohShinyGraffix
LARPing has a point, but you can’t LARP if the endless world you’re in is repetitive and undifferentiated. Exploring/Role playing can be a point, but without a properly creating world, you can’t do it.
15/07/2009 at 20:41 Clovus says:
I have a weird probelm with the open worlds in Oblivion and Fallout 3. I like just randomly exploring but I get very concerned when I stumble on a “set piece” like a camp or dungeon. I don’t like to explore them because I’m afraid I’ll end up screwing up some side mission.
Just yesterday in Fallout 3 I stumbled on a little village of ghouls out in the open. I love visiting cities so I ran up. The inhabitants just started attacking me! It was odd since they had really crappy weapons and I just masacred them. I was really concerned and wondered if somehow a stray bullet from a scorpion fight a few minutes ago somehow hit a ghoul. Why did they hate me? Did I just screw something up? I almost re-loaded to a point before I even got close but eventually decided at worst it ruined a side-quest.
Maybe I’m just weird….
Any opinions here on Animal Crossing? I feel strangely compelled to play it, but I’d have to do so on my Wii and I don’t think I could take the ridicule. It has a sort of “open world” feel with characters who have their own lives. Apparently your actions affect the world.
I wish someone would just make a game based on “The Road” that actually felt like that world. A real survival game with no main storyline besides surviving. Survive on your own, or maybe create a little village.
Hey, what about Mount and Blade?? No main plot (that I found) and you definitely affect the world. No real exploring though…. put M&B into Oblivion’s world….
15/07/2009 at 20:43 Zyrxil says:
phil says:
Nice piece, though have you played Hunter? It essentially plonked you in the middle of war zone and told you to blow up the one of the biggest things in the game world.
Link? I suppose you don’t mean the hunting game.
15/07/2009 at 20:44 Mort says:
“Magically respawning, characterless enemies, colour coded signposts etc. repeatedly remind us that this is a game.”
Or the OH GOD glowing interactive stuff in Bioshock.
Also, I think that the mention of dwarf fortress was not about the fortress mode, but the adventurer mode, in wich you are dropped in a city with some equipment in the middle of an enormous and _continous_ and full of life map and have to go find your own adventures… only it´s a roguelike and not everybody´s cup of tea.
15/07/2009 at 20:44 Erlam says:
One thing I would comment about how to promote exploration over combat, and have combat be meaningful, is to have combat be NEGATIVE for your character. It can still be fun – but, and I think STALKER came closest to this, combat should be a drain on resources. You should WANT to find new areas without enemies, to find caches of.. whatever.
The main problem is that the games that try this are often “XP” based for levelling, and thus combat will always increase your character. However, if there was a way to reward for NOT going into combat, in a way that made it so the more you avoided it, the better you got, and the higher your level, that would be truly gold.
I know many games have tried, but I think we’re still a ways off.
15/07/2009 at 20:45 jackflash says:
Wonderful essay. I especially appreciated your articulation of Far Cry 2′s inherent flaws. Assassin’s creed was also a huge disappointment – I found myself struggling to play it for more than 10 minutes due to the horrible control interface and extremely shallow gameplay considering the incredible setting.
15/07/2009 at 20:48 Mike says:
I finally see somewhere the criticism Far Cry 2 and Assassin’s Creed most definitely deserved. The “only-enemy-AI” is one of the dumbest decision’s in the history of gaming in Far Cry 2. And too bad of the jamming of the weapons, the the troubles of the car, the fire mechanics and the design of some of the levels. The fact that everyone was shooting at me broke the game in many many bits and pieces for me, a game I had high hopes for. They had it all there and they failed miserably. Assassin’s Creed has the same bad design, wasted potential disease that most UbiSoft games seem to carry on them these days.
I don’s know if anyone of you guys has seen the conference at E3, but I did and I saw them bragging about how they rule in fitness games for the Wii. I hope they start making only those kinds of games and leave the great concepts they’ve squandered (I can’t even find an adverb to discribe the way they’ve destroyed these great ideas of games) to be dealt with by more capable developers. They clearly have neither the brains nor the guts.
15/07/2009 at 20:53 Clovus says:
@Erlam: Wouldn’t a variant of Oblivion’s levelling system work for this? Just get rid of the part where you “level up”. If you like sneaking, using lockpicks, etc. then those skills go up as you use them. If you like combat then the combat skills go up as you use them. If you eat healthy foods then your HP goes up, etc. The game would have to be carefully designed to allow a non-combat character to finish the game though.
15/07/2009 at 21:00 Mike says:
Jim, do you live with Quinns?
I love open worlds. They’re also the seeds for the best game diaries (see link in name, folks!). But there’s a big variety, and some weird crossover, where open world games feel very linear (Fallout 3) and some linear games feel very open (Mirror’s Edge).
15/07/2009 at 21:00 Tim James says:
One interesting thing to note about STALKER is that it was originally designed to be a linear shooter. That GSC was able to reboot and tack on enough content or design to make it feel like an open world is a positive mark for them.
15/07/2009 at 21:00 Lobotomist says:
I think you guys are forgetting a wonderful gem called “Mount and Blade”
In fact this is most sandbox game released in ages.
15/07/2009 at 21:02 Kadayi says:
Great article Jim. Pretty much how I feel about the open world gaming scene. Farcry 2 is to me one of those missed opportunities. The game had the potential to be one of the great gaming experiences, but a lack of depth & fidelity to the environment undermined it. Which is a pity because there was a lot that the game did well. Still like anything one expects that what comes next will build upon the previous model. I’m optimistic for the future.
15/07/2009 at 21:02 Tom says:
I’ve come to the conclusion that an “open world” environment and any form of heavy narrative is diametrically apposed. It just doesn’t work. Far Cry 2′s open world would have worked wonderfully if it hadn’t have been for the god awful re-spawning that made taking in the environment and “spending you time” almost impossible – but I still have a time for that game, but only in small doses.
Open world environments are the territory of MMOs now, imo – the novelty’s worn off.
I reckon simulated open worlds as RPS puts it, like Crysis, are the territory of any game that trying to tell a tale.
GTA IV’s environment only works in multi-player imo. I can wonder around GTA IV for hours, it’s glorious. As soon as I start following any of the narrative it becomes tedious.
I always think of an open world environment as a sand box. So surely it’s asking you to create your own adventure. Stick narrative in there and it starts asking you to follow someones else adventure.
15/07/2009 at 21:06 solipsistnation says:
It’s all solipsism vs. non-solipsism. Traditional shooters are solipsistic. Far Cry 2 is still solipsistic, but it tries not to be. Fallout 3 is solipsistic, as are most RPGs. Writing games that aren’t is very very hard and complex and tends to mean you’re doing a lot of stuff. We don’t have the technology to be convincingly non-solipsistic yet, but people are trying.
15/07/2009 at 21:06 LeFishy says:
The big problem I have with open world games is that they are often not at all open. Crackdown broke the system for me by really letting you go anywhere. Now I am distressed by my inability to scale every building in any open world game I play.
15/07/2009 at 21:09 Jim Rossignol says:
Mike: I don’t even live on the same continent as Quinns.
15/07/2009 at 21:09 Mihai says:
Funny, there’s one game you didn’t mention that I keep comparing to GTA4 in terms of “life”, and that’s Gothic (1, 2, 3, whatever). Even funnier, I find it more satisfying that the much more famous GTA4, with NPC’s that are persistent in the world, and don’t just vanish after you’ve turned a corner.
15/07/2009 at 21:09 solipsistnation says:
@Clovus: Animal Crossing is fun and kind of a very small open world. You do interact with the other creatures, and they have their own lives. It’s very very simple, though, and much of the game turns into you, the player, running errands for whiny animals and usurious Tom Nook the Racoon. (Who it turns out was “Tanuki” in Japanese. Suddenly it all makes much more sense.)
It’s fun, and there are lots of things to collect, and it interacts interestingly with real-world seasons and so on, but be prepared to get tired of having to fetch furniture and write letters to bubble-headed creatures who will get huffy and leave town if you don’t write nice things to them.
And then you’ll take a vacation or something for a week or two and come back to find that your little town is full of weeds and everyone has moved out and left you letters asking where you’ve gone. Can you bear the guilt?
15/07/2009 at 21:10 solipsistnation says:
@LeFishy: Yes! I want to climb everything! Thief spoiled me enough that way. I still need to play Crackdown, but knowing I can climb everything makes it that much more appealing…
15/07/2009 at 21:13 RagingLion says:
For me it’s very interesting that you should right this interesting article now. In just the last few days I’ve been revisiting Assassin’s Creed and just roaming around the cities enjoying the atmosphere and picking off the soldiers on the roofs without even doing any proper missions. It’s the first time I’ve really done that before in a game but I do love the world AC created and it feels like it lives and breathes without you – it achieves much while there is so much more it could achieve.
There are still many moments where suspension of disbelief occurs but I’m aware there are so many things that must be thought of in order to avoid it. I’d love to see a really immersive world like what you describe where there are so many possibilities for emergent gameplay because things react like you’d expect them too. I think many developers aren’t aiming for that though – they think of a few individual mechanics they can add to a game to increase realism but you need to come at it from the point of view of aiming for a truely believable world rather just a game – a much higher bar of expectation. I’m not sure developers fully see the realism of the world as of equal or greater importance than the gamey elements – not realising what a quantum leap in immersion could take place if they really started to deliver on a believable world. But yes, it would be a very hard thing to really pull off.
15/07/2009 at 21:19 Kester says:
@Erlam: Or just remove combat altogether. I’d certainly play a game which consisted of exploring an interesting locale – Rapture, say – but didn’t have any of the traditional game baggage dumped on top of it. Take out all the splicers and Big Daddies and whatnot, and just have you, exploring this mysterious underwater city you know nothing about. Make exploring the game, not something to do when you get bored of shooting guys.
Relatedly, Jim’s comment about using game systems to encourage exploring is totally off, I think. If you’re having to do that, then you’ve failed at creating an interesting world, and surely creating an interesting world is the point of creating an open world?
15/07/2009 at 21:21 TCM says:
The empty open world is why I find myself more drawn to JRPGs than WRPGs: JRPGs are linear, and as time goes on, they’re more freely admitting that, and in spite of the linearity create fun games and engaging storylines. Overworlds and exploration, while they exist, are fairly superfluous. Towns and characters are unique and varied, dungeons can be designed around specific themes, and overall, the world, while small, is very interesting.
WRPGs, on the other hand, tend to create absolutely massive worlds simply for the sake of it. Bethesda’s games especially suffer from this, and while things are certainly better now than they were with Daggerfall, Oblivion and Fallout’s dungeons and cities still have very few distinctions or unique qualities. They’re both excellent games, it’s just that there’s no reason to actually look at this gobsmackingly huge world, hoping you’ll find the one or two interesting bits.
Good Lord, typing my thoughts on this sort of thing messes me up. Ugh. I could not be a games journalist.
15/07/2009 at 21:26 Eli Just says:
That’s exactly what I was thinking too. I want a game that will go on if I’m not doing anything. I think Stalker did a great job of this, and to a lesser extent GTA IV. If somebody says “go kill that guy” and I decide not to, I don’t want that guy just to sit around waiting for me to kill him. If there is going to be an attack, I don’t want the attackers to wait until I get to my glowing spot on the ground and then stop sitting about and go. Open worlds need to be totally persistent, physically and temporally. Stalker almost is, with the exception of some triggers, but most games make time travel at whatever pace you like. In Far Cry 2 the same truck will drive the same ring for days on end until you blow it up. That just breaks the illusion.
15/07/2009 at 21:30 solipsistnation says:
@Kester: That sounds like, uh, Myst and Riven and descendants.
15/07/2009 at 21:34 Da'Jobat says:
This article made me think of Noctis. Anyone remember noctis? Brilliant DOS game, hopefully headed for an update soon, somehow manages to be beautiful in an incredibly ugly fashion with its myriad stars and planets and randomly generated animals and environments. Also, Outcast thought we would be sending shuttles to parallel world by 2007. AWESOME.
15/07/2009 at 21:37 Funky Badger says:
I’d just like to say, the leery cab driver in GTA4 is my favourite of all the characters.
(Well, maybe Baz Rutten – although he doesn’t really count as a character, per se…)
15/07/2009 at 21:38 Evernight says:
I agree with Jim for the most part. FC2 was a major disappointment in world building. AC did a great job of building a living world that I was able to explore and run around in… I need a few more missions, but at the end of the game I was having a ton of fun getting caught and fighting/running my way out.
As for FO3 – honestly, the FO3 world doesn’t feel “real” but that has some how not detracted my 100+ hours in it. I am still finding fun and new places to explore and new ways to explore it. I think the balance here is something very few games can achieve. FC2 felt too mindless action but had a good world to do it in…. AC had a real world, but little fun to have in it.
So to achieve this balance we need a game that gives us a world where the borders don’t feel intrusive and when the missions/quests/action/fun are so meaningful and varied that we don’t “see” the borders – we are so focused on the fun. Imagine Crysis where three or four of the maps are converged into one large map with all those objectives and missions able to be in any order (with 10-15 side objectives along the way or hidden) and I think you would have achieved what we are all looking for. Because Crysis gave me borders I never felt because I couldn’t wait to ambush my next scouting party/village/encampment. Granted you still felt the “levels” but I never felt shoehorned into a particular way of doing things. But that is just me.
15/07/2009 at 21:41 Stromko says:
It seems open-world games in general either choose to have a great illusion of being an open world, or have mechanics that reinforce the idea of being an open world. A game like GTA IV or Far Cry 2 skews on the side of creating a convincing illusion, while games like Mount & Blade give you open-world game mechanics but the experiential details have to be filled in by imagination.
Speaking of Far Cry 2, and also Ubisoft’s apparent approach to this sort of product– it’s utterly unmoddable from what I’ve been told. Its open world cannot be enhanced by modders, which severely restricts the lifespan of the title– which means we have to go buy a new game, right? You don’t want somebody playing Far Cry 2 forever when you’re also trying to sell Assassin’s Creed and others.
I usually attribute that sort of decision making to Electronic Arts, as I think they add deliberate flaws to every title they make just to ensure we only get a few giddy hours out of it and then have to buy a new game. It’s a rather logical and profitable habit for any big publisher, so I suspect both companies are guilty of it from time to time.
15/07/2009 at 21:43 Evernight says:
EDIT: Crysis: That is until I got to the gay ass aliens section of the game…. lets all try to forget that shall we??
15/07/2009 at 21:43 Biz says:
It’s very difficult to develop a connected open world. There can always be linear quests scattered throughout an open world, but making them meaningful outside of the stats/development of your playable character/party is a different matter.
open world gameplay pretty much is exclusive to strategy games, but that’s more like multiplayer (even if against the AI). i guess you’ll see a few with some sort of narrative in a single player sense, but it would be generated.
getting open world gameplay in something like an action game is more challenging. right now open world = “scripted events that happen in isolated regions that are part of a big world”
15/07/2009 at 21:50 JKjoker says:
no mentions about the “Malaria” mechanics in farcry2 ? having the player drop everything every 2~3 hours of gameplay to go on a fedex quest though half of the map or die didnt feel like “fun” to me
just like Prototype’s “hey, lets take away your powers for 3 hours, weeee”
15/07/2009 at 21:53 DaJobat says:
@JKjoker Why is it that games developers still think that is a valid part of gameplay that people enjoy. It is at least ok in Metroid Prime because you lose your abilities at the very start so it does feel like a quest, but when you have them already and lose your power it is so annoying.
15/07/2009 at 21:56 Evernight says:
@ Stromko
As an former fanboy of the Battlefield games I saw first hand as EA would quite literally destroy a previous iteration to pave the way for their next. They messed with 1942 just before the release of Vietnam. Right after BF2 came out Vietnam became almost unplayable thanks to random server drops and crashes. People asked for a ton of simple (read: patchable) fixes and improvements for BF2, but instead found most of those improvements in 2142 and no patches to BF2.
After all that BS I decided to leave it all behind. I tried BF: Heroes and it just sucks. Maybe 1943 will bring something around… but it will probably be ripe with DLC unbalancedness. Time will tell….
15/07/2009 at 21:58 suibhne says:
To me, the malaria mechanic felt like the game forcing me to see more of the (exquisitely-designed but mechanically-empty and repetitive) gameworld, just in case I was otherwise resisting the impulse. Bah.
15/07/2009 at 21:58 LewieP says:
Having just finished Red Faction Guerilla, I have this to say:
If you are going to make an open world game, and put a jet pack in it, you should not also put invisible walls in places that would make excellent shortcuts.
Top game though.
15/07/2009 at 22:03 Stromko says:
Biz: That reminds me of something else that occurred to me reading through this thread. “but making them meaningful outside of the stats/development of your player character/party is a different matter.”
A lot of folks here are wanting that, to have really great content that’s worthy of exploring without being key to gameplay. Just interesting places and things and interactions.
I think though, that this doesn’t happen often because it’s a lot more difficult to make a compelling experience that doesn’t implicitly reward you. They expect us to be invested with our characters, such that anything which enhances our characters are more interesting and worthwhile.
It’s a popular crutch because without it, the game rests entirely on how compelling the content is, and making compelling content is very challenging. Even if the developer is capable of it, it’s still more costly in time and talent than average content.
The first example I can think of is Indigo Prophecy / Farenheit. Here’s a game with some really amazing setpieces that at least promised divergent plot, but they had to string it together with linear quick-time events to pull it off, and in the last act it completely falls apart.
There might be a studio out there that can do it all right, either now or someday or definitely some time in the past (they really don’t make ‘em like that no more), but having truly compelling content from start to finish is something most developers just can’t do.
Once they do, of course, our palettes will advance and it will be the new standard, studios will have to redouble their efforts to be the next big thing, which might be why Ubisoft and EA always take a big dump on their masterworks.
15/07/2009 at 22:05 Gorgeras says:
Regarding MMOs, I’m reminded of a statement made by Warhammer’s Jeff Hickman which I explosively disagreed with where he said Mythic was trying to make a game whilst other MMO developers kept trying to make worlds.
No Jeff, they kept trying to make games. The lack of any real open-world is a criticism I’ve levelled at MMO devs for years and they’ve all trotted the same thing you have in some form.
Levelling appears to be the nemesis of open worlds and to a large extent even EVE doesn’t escape it. I’m waiting for developers to actually bother being original.
15/07/2009 at 22:09 Stromko says:
Evernight: I made that trip as well, though I stopped short at buying BF2042. Battlefield 2 had a crashy UI and flaky servers from day 1 (after the flawless Demo) to day now, as far as I could tell.
I distrust Relic for exactly the same reasons, though they’re particularly egregious with how they destroy game balance and rebork the network code with every _expansion_. They don’t even wait for true sequels to burn their bridges.
It’s like if a car maker decided to make their cars break as soon as the warranty expired, to encourage you to go out and buy the new model. … Oh wait, a lot of people think they do that exactly. Moguls think alike I suppose.
15/07/2009 at 22:10 JKjoker says:
eh, Red Faction GF is out for PC already ? i thought it was set for the end of August
15/07/2009 at 22:14 LewieP says:
I have it on the 360.
15/07/2009 at 22:14 MarkN says:
Sid Meier’s Pirates is still one of my fave open world games. It basically gives you a map of the Caribbean and a ship and says “Away you go, have fun!”. It’s lacking in variety for sure, but every time I fire it up it it gives me the opportunity to make my own mischief in a world that seemed to be getting on fine without me. More games that copy that template (and expand upon it preferably) would be most welcome.
15/07/2009 at 22:25 Richard Clayton says:
Regarding Far Cry 2 I’d love to know what was dropped in order to get a commercial release.
As Kad and others have said, FC2 did many things well. Its shortcomings were often rooted from the introduction of a number of features that were new to the FPS. I think it was a brave step. Some things worked others didn’t. Some didn’t work I suspect just because they weren’t given sufficient development effort.
Clint Hocking has been pretty honest about some of the game’s shortfalls and admits that they had to compomise about certain elements (respawning for example) in order to meet certain deadlines.
It is a franchise that I am genuinely excited about. Hocking has stated that he wants to revist the African setting and I’d love to think that the reason we don’t have those SDK modding tools is because Ubisoft Montreal have bigger plans…
15/07/2009 at 22:27 Serondal says:
@stromko = I love relic’s games, loved DOW and all the expansions for it I’m surprised people would complain about getting new content. It is obviously going to change the balance of the game but that’s the point, they’re ‘expanding it’ it has to be rebalanced to include the new units. You don’t have to buy the expansion and you can still play online with it so what ev :P
I loved the origonal Pirates! Gold, I played it for countless hours back on my Sega when I was younger. I didn’t like the newer release as much but it was okay. I’m still craving the ultimate pirate game. most don’t even allow you to have battle with more than one ship at a time. Pirate Hunter was okay but it allowed the enemy to use ALL their ship at once but you could only use one at a time O.o I disliekd that. At least in Pirates! Gold you could go one on one with just about any ship in the game as long as you were a good captain. I never ran into a ship I couldn’t beat (But I did literally ram a few ships I couldn’t beat by mistake ;P) I loved the fact that your character got older and slower as the game went on making it constantly harder to survive without making it unplayable.
15/07/2009 at 22:41 bananaphone says:
@phil
What’s this ‘Hunter’ game? Got a link?
15/07/2009 at 22:53 Tei says:
Farcry 2 feel to me like another corridor shotter. You are on a dungeon made of forest, with a maze shape.
It don’t feel to me like a GTA game. It feel like the engine can’t handle straigh long road. So this maze-ish shaper is forced on the game. And is boring and tiresome. .. *looking at a dictionary*.. “overwhelming or depressing to the spirit or sense”.
Sure, there are a few open areas, that look different, but these areas are just …hum.. like a brief pausa.
Farcry 2 is a game that I don’t want to play. Mercenaries 2 is make me feel much better at everything (maybe is also you can play “Carmagedoom” in Mercenaries, but no soo much in Farcry).
15/07/2009 at 22:55 Tei says:
And everybody shots me. Why? WTF?
15/07/2009 at 23:02 Ayekay says:
Grand post.
You were the centre of what was going on in those worlds, and you always knew it.
I never quite got over realising that no guard in a Thief game will ever say ‘ah, it’s probably nothing’ without being wrong: because they never say these things unless you’re there.
It reminds me of a Greg Egan novel (Permutation City, I think) where a character who knows he’s a simulation in a virtual environment recalls that no element of the world is simulated in full detail unless he’s looking at it; and has to fight the irrational temptation to keep whirling around to catch it in the process of being simulated.
15/07/2009 at 23:03 LionsPhil says:
What, WOLF?
Hmm. Survivalist open-world game. Someone ask Ray Mears if he feels like consulting on a project. ;)
15/07/2009 at 23:07 TCM says:
Sounds a bit like Unreal World, if roguelikes are to your taste.
15/07/2009 at 23:13 Bozzley says:
bananaphone – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_(video_game)
15/07/2009 at 23:17 Lintman says:
I loved Oblivion’s big open world and didn’t bother with most of the main quest until I had completed/visited almost every side quest/town/village. By comparison, Fallout 3 felt small, with far less stuff to do.
Stalker never really impressed me the way it seems to have done for a lot of people. Yeah, it’s a big, semi-open space and you could talk to people, but there wasn’t that much to do. And assorted barn, etc locations still repopulated with baddies when you left the area.
15/07/2009 at 23:19 the_magma says:
pretty sure the hunter game referred to is which i remember fondly on the amiga. dunno if theres a pc port
15/07/2009 at 23:21 the_magma says:
grammatical and html puke in previous post – soz. the link works though…
15/07/2009 at 23:29 Bozzley says:
One problem with GTA4 I had (and probably the others too, come to think of it) is that aside from when you’re doing a mission, your character seems to be the only active participant in the world. Every NPC just walks along the pavements, or drives their cars immaculately down the roads.
Imagine walking round a corner in GTA4 and seeing one NPC shoot another to rob their corpse. That Ferrari dealership on the middle island? Why not have an NPC go in there and drive a Ferrari right through the glass windows like I did every time? Maybe you walk past a house to see a SWAT van outside, hear police shouting at people, see them bring out the suspects and drive them away. Or to be all meta or whatever – you go down a back alley and see a guy in his car getting a blowjob off a hooker. You watch them finish, she gets out the car, and the guy drives over her to get his money back.
GTA4 had this amazing looking space, but it filled it with the same automatons the other games had. I want to see them act like people every once in a while. OK, so seeing fourteen murders in one day might not be realistic, but that doesn’t stop Niko Bellic. Give the environment some life. Let some NPCs kill other NPCs.
That all sounds really scary weird, but I’m sure there’s an awesome point in there somewhere.
15/07/2009 at 23:31 DaJobat says:
http://www.greatgamesexperiment.com/game/Schiffbruch
this is a good one too. hard sometimes, easy sometimes, always fun though.
15/07/2009 at 23:37 john t says:
I find it fascinating that almost everybody agrees that Far Cry 2 was ultimately a failed game, and yet no one can stop talking about it. I gave up on it when I hit map 2, but I’m still glad I played it.
I think creating an interesting failure like Far Cry 2 is a much better achievement than an overly polished turd like God of War part whatever.
15/07/2009 at 23:43 Magnus says:
Ultima VII: The Black Gate.
You could explore almost all of Britannia once you’d left the first city.
People in towns had their own routines, you could bring companions with you or travel alone, there were loads of little secret places you could discover.
All this from a game released in 1992.
15/07/2009 at 23:50 Dolphan says:
Isn’t that premise (here’s a world, survive, possibly escape) used for oldie Robinson’s Requiem? I think that’s the name, never played it, but it’s on GoG and is famous for being obscenely hard (you can die of all sorts of things, including illness).
16/07/2009 at 00:00 27kjmm says:
i think the game you might be looking for is called I Am Alive by Ubisoft or at least that’s how I’ve hoped for it to turn out since its announcement at last year’s E3 but haven’t heard much since.
16/07/2009 at 00:02 Spectre-7 says:
Hmmm… the description of hunter reminded me of Midwinter. Anyone else remember that game?
16/07/2009 at 00:23 Clovis says:
And everybody shots me. Why? WTF?
I can haz RPS meme, plz?
Seriously, I love everything Tei writes, and not just because of the language barrier.
16/07/2009 at 00:43 skalpadda says:
I’d just love a big free open game which didn’t revolve around shooting/stabbing people in the face.
I would adore something like a non-linear Dear Esther, set in a huge and diverse world, perhaps with a little problem solving, and a lot of interesting sights to see along the way. Being able to freely explore a narrative as you explore the world seems like an amazing thing, but I haven’t found anything that lets me do that.
That’s not saying I disapprove of games that have you shoot things in the face, I’m currently clocking up an alarming amount of hours in Fallout 3 just going on daily exploration trips and I used to do the same in STALKER (although it was too small to remain interesting for very long).
16/07/2009 at 00:50 Sam C. says:
@john t: I think it’s just that there’s so much potential there. It had beautiful scenery, some very solid combat, the interface was non-obtrusive and added to the immersion (I love the map that you hold in your hands).
It’s like a sandbox where your only tool is a gun, and there’s so much more you could do with it. Virtual safaris, actual subterfuge and politics between the factions, being able to change the balance of power between the factions.
If they would release a single player editor that’s even half as easy to use as their multiplayer editor, that would be amazing.
16/07/2009 at 00:56 Sam C. says:
@tei: I think it’s interesting that you mention Mercs 2. I think that’s another game where they failed to take advantage of it being an open world environment. You still have to trek back to your mansion for most of the mission, and the world isn’t dynamic enough. There need to be more battles, more conflict between NPCs, while still giving the player the chance to influence the outcomes of those battles. I think the first Mercs did a better job there, there were a lot more areas where you could always find a battle between two different sides.
It sounds like a lack of time or money for development is stopping a lot of these games from being fully fleshed out. I understand why, that there’s a limited return on adding more and it probably won’t translate into more sales, but still, it would be nice if developers had more money and time to raise the bar a little.
16/07/2009 at 01:02 luminosity says:
Interesting that a lot of people are talking about quitting FC2 when they hit the second map. I’m just playing it through now, having needed to wait for a patch to stop it crashing, and I think the second map is way more interesting than the first one, filled with a lot more unique, fun locations.
I can sympathise with wanting your impact on the world to be felt, and stay, and everything respawning annoys me too, but.. the game would also be bad I feel if everything stayed cleaned out after you’d visited. It’d lack tension which would lead to boredom. It seems to me like they just needed a better balance, like at certain points new enemies would appear, maybe a new mercenary troop hired to enter the country for instance. Maybe patrols would be mounted from the ceasefire zones and investigate camps that have stopped responding after a while, and reinforce them. You could track these, and destroy them on the way out even if you knew about it.
And yeah, some interaction with people other than soldiers and mission npcs would be nice now and again. It’d be a lot more poignant to me if say you came across families working farms, and then along came a patrol of enemy troops and in the resulting firefight the farm was wasted, or some of the family killed. Or hell, if you could come across soldiers abusing npcs sometimes and you had the choice to rescue them or go on past.
16/07/2009 at 01:18 solipsistnation says:
@Ayekay said: It reminds me of a Greg Egan novel (Permutation City, I think)
Yup, I believe that’s the one. He riffs on that theme in a few books.
/me points at username.
16/07/2009 at 01:27 Kester says:
@solipsistnation: I can see where you’re coming from there, but they were really adventure games at heart, more about solving daft puzzles than exploring. I was thinking more about the amount of time some people spend in MMOs just wandering about and admiring the scenery. I certainly used to do it a fair bit in Guild Wars, discovering ruined temples and whatnot at the edges of the map. Often I wished all the monsters would just piss off and leave me to it. It certainly ruins the atmosphere of a beautiful waterfall when a flying jellyfish is trying to curse you to death.
16/07/2009 at 01:50 Corey says:
I couldn’t have explained Far Cry 2 any better. I reinstalled it recently because of all this “perma-death” blogging that’s been going on. I couldn’t remember why I stopped playing the game. Then I played it again and it all came back, those god damned guard posts are the deal-breaker for me. It really does just make it feel like absolutely everyone in this country is out to get you. Half the time jeeps come flying out of nowhere at me. It kind of ruins that open world by constantly forcing you to remember that because its a game, the enemies instantly know you’re the player.
It’s a real shame because I really enjoy most of the game, but feeling like absolutely EVERYONE is out to kill me just isn’t fun. I felt similarly about fallout 3 as well, judging by the comments I think most gamers feel it.
I do generally like open world games, GTA 4 was amazing, I spent time just walking the streets to see what would happen to me. That game really got the world right, it didn’t feel like the world was constantly trying to strangle you, and the bonus was just in having so much there to see, you could spend a day just people watching in the game.
16/07/2009 at 02:04 LionsPhil says:
Damn, Spectre-7 beat me to it. Midwinter, woo! Bastard-hard thing, which I lamentably never grokked at the time. And I always crashed the bloody snowcat. :/
16/07/2009 at 02:27 Justin says:
The whole “here’s some coordinates for a package” think in STALKER was a great mechanic for getting the player to explore the world and get rewards for doing so.
Plus, it tied into the “must acquire EVERYTHING” reflex common to gamers. Well, at least me.
16/07/2009 at 02:42 Spectre-7 says:
LionsPhil: Ha! Glad I wasn’t the only one who found it stupid-difficult. After all these years, the only thing I clearly remember is dying on every bleeding inch of that frozen island.
Suddenly, the original DOS Terminator game comes to mind, too. I might have to hunt down a copy of each for open-world nostalgia’s sake.
16/07/2009 at 02:59 john t says:
I’ve been playing Fallout 3 recently and have been thinking along these lines a great deal.
Let me start about talking about identity.
Who are you?
You are what you do, essentially. And more than that, you are what you do repeatedly. If you go swimming once a year, you’re not really a swimmer. But someone who goes to competitions, sure is a swimmer. Most of us just don’t do one thing, we do many things, but we do have a limited number of things that we do, and we do them over and over again.
We’ve also got a limited amount of attention that we can pay to activities. Generally, most of us can only be actually actively conscious of a few things at a time — as in actively occupied by an activity, fully, thinkingly aware of it.
So, we spend our lives both doing the same things over over over again (work, drive, eat, go out clubbing/drinking, do our hobbies (wood working or what have you), and we focus our attention on the same things over and over again.
The more often you pay attention to or do the same things over and over again, the better you get at it and, somewhat paradoxically, the less you think about it. Doing something well without thinking about it is one of the most enjoyable experiences a human being can have — that’s all dancing to good music really is, after all. It’s can be a trance-like, ecstatic state for some people, almost like a drug.
This is one the key pathways to enjoying gameplay. Constant repetition, constant improvement, less thinking, until you’re in kind of a zen mind/no-mind state — flow. The most ‘pure’ games — Tetris, Tempest 2000, etc, are almost magical in the way they induce it. Notice, none of those games have a story, and that’s important.
Real life is a series of cyclical behaviors and activities for most people, it’s largely static.
A traditional narrative (at least a good one) begins when a cycle is broken — “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” The protagonist begins in a static, cyclical loop — for example, Luke moping around on a moisture farm on Tatooine. A pair of droids land on the desert — his entire life gets turned upside down, and now you have a story — a beginning, middle and end– not a straight line.
The key thing about narrative is that the protagonist DOESN’T have a choice. The protagonist almost always wants things to just be the way they were. This is like real life. Most of us establish a groove and want to stay in it, and won’t change unless we’re forced to.
So, let’s look at Fallout 3. Now, without the story, there’s no real ‘pure’ action gameplay at any point in fallout that’s going to trigger the ecstatic trance state. The game play is NOT really running and shooting, the game play is basically ProgressQuest — watch the numbers go up, watch the levels ding, collect loot. That’s the loop that people will get into on their own, without the story. They’ll attack monsters and collect loot and go up in level and then go kill bigger monsters to get bigger loot, etc. It has very little to do with the story for most people and everything to do with ‘progression’.
Cyclical, repetitive, real life — most distinctly NOT a story.
Fallout 3 gives the appearance, at the beginning of the game of breaking a cycle (the opening of the vault), but it IMMEDIATELY puts you into another cycle. It’s not a narrative, you just wander around, more or less at random, kill monsters and collect loot. You’re essentially a walking gun with a big suitcase. There may be some variety here and there in the missions, but it’s still, fundamentally a repetitive game.
There’s absolutely no urgency to actually complete the quest, and in fact, many people only do it when they have absolutely nothing else to do. They don’t WANT to break the cycle of kill/loot gameplay, ever. They enjoy the game, as a game, and the story is an obstacle.
Compare to Half LIfe– it begins with you doing the most routine, cyclical thing imaginable– taking the train to work. You even start the game doing stuff that’s implied you do all the time, everybody knows who you are, you’ve got a locker with your name on it. But as soon as the experiment happens — there’s a break, and from then on, at least the appearance is that you always MUST move forward. There’s no routine to get into (despite the fact that all you’re doing is running and shooting stuff– but the running and shooting stuff is exactly the kind of pure, fast action game play that actually can induce a trance state.) The story is ‘you must run and shoot stuff’, the game play is ‘you must run and shoot stuff’. They mesh perfectly.
In Fallout 3, the core gameplay says wander aimlessly, kill stuff, loot corpses, go in circles. The story says — care about these people, find your father and so on, go in a straight line. The gameplay says — play me forever, the narrative says play me until you ‘save the world’ then it’s over.
I think, you need to decide what kind of game you’re going to make. If you want to make a grindy RPG, forget a straight line narrative. Create some hubs, Create an economy and ecology, and set people free to make their own stories. Do randomly generated dungeons, have little one off stories here and there, but forget having an over-arching narrative. I think fallout + broken steel was kind of a step in that direction.
If you’re going to do an epic storyline, put the game on rails, and make the game play match the story. Always put stuff in front of the player and destroy everything behind him.
Though, you can create the illusion of an open world game in a world that’s really on rails — I think Final Fantasy games do this a lot. They gradually open up more and more of the world map, and then start restricting what you can do until you’re forced to the a climax.
They could have done something like that with a game fallout — At some point, when you hit a certain level or visit a certain area, the ‘big bad’ enters and starts threatening to destroy everything on the map. More and more of the map becomes inaccessible until you confront him — you’re forced to go to the climax of the game. Even better if you’re the reason that the world is being threatened in the first place.
For example (ignoring add on packs) — imagine that after you hit level 13 or something — the Enclave starts looking for you. All the towns you visit start saying they can’t all you in because they were told they’d be burned down if you entered, or they actually physically massacre a town or something like that. At some point, you either stop playing the game or you run out of equipment and food or you actually go do something about it. That would feel much more natural than just ‘oh hai, i’m bored let’s go back to the main quest now’.
I still don’t know if that is better than not having a main quest at all and just letting people do what they actually really want to do, which is just to min-max, level up and kill stuff.
Okay, I wrote way more than i intended to…
16/07/2009 at 03:24 Serenegoose says:
Hmm. Far cry 2 I actually enjoy quite a bit as a stress reliever, but that’s the thing, really. I don’t play it as a game with a plot, I play it as a series of encounters that I try to do more cleanly than before, and when I’m bored of that, I uninstall it and move to something else. But it’s so CLOSE to being something more. Some characters to interact with that don’t just give you missions. More ‘active’ weather as opposed to just the very ocassional rain. RADIO STATIONS, because you spend most of your time driving, to be honest, and the atmosphere of the world in general is so perfect. the way your dashboard lights up at night so you can see the dials, all that stuff. But yeah, even just a little bit more of a taster of an RPG would have made FC2 one of the best games ever. As it is, it’s just fun, and symptomatic of most open world games. it lacks a compelling direction.
16/07/2009 at 03:26 DSX says:
Mafia II promises to deliver some decent open world wow factor based on their developer commentaries *tosses salt* – they discuss how civilians react to you and your actions, how they’re going about their lives etc as you make your way through the city, how they’re more then just cars and people going in patrol patterns.
16/07/2009 at 03:32 Dracko says:
What of games like ArmA 2?
16/07/2009 at 05:06 John says:
I always thought Starflight (1/2/Star Control 2) did a great job balancing opennes and mission. Sure, have your fun wandering around. But the stars will disappear pretty damn soon.
16/07/2009 at 05:16 MC says:
Open worlds are best when exploring the world uncovers little stories and places that tell stories.
For example, while clearing out a fortress of Mauraders in Oblivion I defeat a Maurader leader and discover letters he’s been exchanging with his sister that tell of how they are searching nearby fortresses for an artifact at the urging of their mentor and former master, which leads me to hunt them down in turn and claim the artifact for myself. (BTW I think this is custom content introduced by Obscuro’s overhaul mod).
Or when exploring Morrowind, you occasionally come across paralysed naked Nords in need of help who’ve all been victimised by what must be one very strange witch.
16/07/2009 at 06:02 futage says:
Thank you for this piece, Mr rossyknoll. I agree with the first reply.
16/07/2009 at 07:35 Grey_Ghost says:
Sadly Far Cry 2 seems to be full of Anti-Modding badness. I don’t think it’s possible to do anything for that game other then make Multi-player Maps. I believe they built it this way on purpose, would have probably sold better overall with Modding support. Not sure what they were thinking.
16/07/2009 at 07:43 kyyninen says:
This imaginary game will, I hope, dump me on the midst of a strange place, perhaps with with a pyre of smoke on the horizon, and instruct me: “survive”.
Like TCM said, you should really try Unreal World, that sounds exactly like it’s starting scenario.
16/07/2009 at 08:48 MultiVaC says:
“Sadly Far Cry 2 seems to be full of Anti-Modding badness. I don’t think it’s possible to do anything for that game other then make Multi-player Maps. I believe they built it this way on purpose, would have probably sold better overall with Modding support. Not sure what they were thinking.”
They were thinking they could make people pay for horse armor DLC, which they did. If the game was moddable, players would download tons of user made content for free, and would never pay Ubisoft $5 for a couple new weapons.
16/07/2009 at 09:12 SuperNashwan says:
I don’t think I’ve ever agreed more with something you’ve written Jim, excellently put. In the past I’ve said I wonder if we’re expecting too much of these games, that creating the open world is difficult enough without also creating the open world experience. But then you rightly point out, something like Outcast has already shown it done, and so long ago. There’s a fundamental disconnect in games like Assassin’s Creed where you happen to the world, rather than exist in it, it’s the uncanny valley of game experience design; the more detailed the world around you, the more jarring your inability to interact with it is. I dont know about anyone else but I have real difficulty in enjoying AC or FC2 for what they are when I’m imagining what they could (or should?) be.
16/07/2009 at 09:16 Richard Clayton says:
I’d pay $10 for a dynamic faction DLC that realistically stocked the checkpoints. 3$ for a DLC to fire from the vehicle. 5$ for story items (notes, diaries, manuals, photos) to be dotted around the landscape, 5$ to allow buddies to drive / mount the jeep mounted machine gun… etc.
But I guess I’m going to have to be satisfied to save my cash until Far Cry 3 is released. You know, the much stronger story-based/adventure one where I play Reuben’s colleague who travels to Africa to find him after he goes missing… Mr. Hocking, are you reading this!?!?
16/07/2009 at 09:16 Ian says:
We’ve got a big thread in the forum talking about Far Cry 2 and its corridor-shooter-in-an-open-world mentality.
16/07/2009 at 09:29 Ayekay says:
@john t: good points.
‘The story is ‘you must run and shoot stuff’, the game play is ‘you must run and shoot stuff’. They mesh perfectly.’
I think you’re on to something here. In non-openworld games if our role doesn’t fit the gameplay, we don’t notice or worry. We may be a world-class secret agent who spends all his time in a sewer shooting cannibal pig monsters, but presumably we do all the rest of our glamorous life in between missions. As soon as we’re in an open world, the gaps between our role and our actual actions start to show. So I’m a mercenary in Africa but literally all I do is drive around shooting people? I don’t sleep, eat, get drunk, argue over pay? If FC2 were all missions this wouldn’t be a problem because missions would be, by definition, the bits where I drive around shooting people.
I guess it’s a special case of a more general problem with games: the more sophisticated the simulation, the more you notice the gaps in it. No-one ever criticises a roguelike’s graphics.
@solipsistnation: you’ve got a serendipitous poster name just above yours too, I think :)
@stromko:
A lot of folks here are wanting that, to have really great content that’s worthy of exploring without being key to gameplay. Just interesting places and things and interactions…
I think though, that this doesn’t happen often because it’s a lot more difficult to make a compelling experience that doesn’t implicitly reward you
I remember in the Hong Kong Deus Ex section a pair of triad bosses invite you to meet them in a bar, as a thankyou for various successes, and vie with each other in giving you bottles of increasingly fabulous wine. I mean the actual game items are the same wine items that you find sitting in a subway in New York, but they tell you things about the vineyard and the vintage and the history as they hand it over. I spent a little while puzzling over whether the wine was supposed to have any special properties, whether I could sell it or anything, until I realised – it’s just content and a prop. I’d been so conditioned to thinking interesting stuff must have an in-game effect – even in a game like Deus Ex which is stuffed with atmospheric context – that I couldn’t imagine it was just about the writing.
16/07/2009 at 09:29 Ayekay says:
Partly by way of penance I guess, I took the best bottle back to California with me and drank it sitting on the top of the ruins of a petrol station watching the sunrise. I mean ‘drank’, I right-clicked and experienced a 2-health-point boost and forty seconds of blurred vision, but it meant something to me. :)
16/07/2009 at 10:08 pignoli says:
Thinking about STALKER, I seem to remember one review (I think it was Eurogamer) actually complaining that objectives would spring up (I think this refers to the calls for for help you’d get over the radio) and resolve themselves without you actually doing anything at all. I just don’t buy that as a complaint. It’s part of the beauty of the game that events unfold regardless of your intervention – the atmosphere of the game is built on this kind thing, it enhances the feeling of insignificance and vulnerability that makes the game what it is. Nothing makes you feel less involved in a world than receiving an Urgent Call For Help! which then just waits for you to do something. Forever. I thought it was urgent?
16/07/2009 at 10:10 Jim Rossignol says:
Pignoli: my complaint wasn’t that they’d resolve themselves, but that the event would either not happen, or you’d have no signpost to where the flagged event was taking place.
16/07/2009 at 10:21 Dante says:
The original Fallout (and the second one) might be a better match for your sensibilities Jim. You’re simply turfed out of your vault and told they need a water chip before the timer runs out, you get pointed to the nearest settlement, but that’s about it.
There are a train of clues to follow, but you could equally just blunder into the appropriate location early on, you can even take the alternative short term solution of having water shipped to for a while.
16/07/2009 at 10:23 Ninja Dodo says:
To me the most successful living worlds have been Outcast, Gothic (1 & 2) and Little Big Adventure (Odyssey more so than Relentless)… characters that react believably and a world that progresses with you.
Aspects of others have succeeded in new ways – Assassin’s Creed (freedom of navigation), GTAIV (general atmosphere) – but few, if any, seem to recapture that sense of cohesion and unconditional immersion that this article so elegantly describes.
16/07/2009 at 10:25 Chaz says:
The most important aspect of open worlds for me is to have a reason to explore. Whether that be interesting places to go look at or people to meet and things to find. Whilst GTA4′s was undeniably a beautifully crafted world, outside of the main missions I found very little reason to wander around it. Ultimatly for me, it’s failure to draw me in made it feel as realistic as if it had been made out of cardboard.
Saints Row 2 on the other hand, despite it being a much more of cartoon caricature of a city, I found a much more engrossing world to explore and look around. It is chock to the brim full of interesting places to explore, and not just the odd building with a few flights of stairs to walk up. There were huge shopping malls, a large underground cave network, dozens and dozens of unique buildings to enter and look around ranging from shops, night clubs, homes, hotels and much more. It even had it’s own Alcatraz style island prison island. Not only was there more to see but there was also much more interaction with the world too, you could buy shops and appartments, mod your own vehicles, and even put on a flasher coat and run round exposing yourself to people. There always seemed to be something happening too, such as watching your gang members get into fights with the police or rival gangs.
So whilst GTA4′s world presented a much more believable and realistic facade, I found the world of Saints Row 2 much more engrossing and far more “alive” than the sterile world of GTA4. I hope it’s somthing they rectify for Red Dead Redemption.
My favourite open world thus far though still has to be Morrowind’s.
16/07/2009 at 10:26 Dante says:
I’m surprised you’re so enamoured with GTA actually. The ways in which you can intereract with the world are barely more than those of Far Cry 2. Outside of the (woeful) missions all you can really do is wander into the handful of shops and change your clothes, or start attacking passers by.
You don’t have to fight of course, which sets it apart from FC2 (although to an extent you do, because it’s nearly impossible to drive from a to b without running someone over, so dodgy are the driving controls).
And if you do do the missions, which rapidly become the only thing you can do (besides fly to the Statue of Liberty for the ninth time) you are forced down an incredibly narrow, choiceless path in which you’re forced to be a terrible human being even if you don’t want to be. Which seems to me to be the antithesis of the open world idea.
16/07/2009 at 10:30 Jim Rossignol says:
The thing about GTA4 is the that *the illusion of the world* is very good – which is all I talk about here. The other game systems are another matter. That said, the basic law-breaking mechanics mean you can get into crazy scrapes no matter where you go in the city. It responds consistently, and the city illusion is consistent where-ever you go: exactly how it isn’t in FC2.
It’s pretty clear that I *could* mention several dozen games, and write tens of thousands of words on this subject – but a 1500 word post, I’m keeping the examples tight.
16/07/2009 at 10:32 Dante says:
I should probably talk about Shenmue here, because for me that’s the definative example of open world/closed mind games.
In Shenmue there’s a fully realised, living Village (a city in the sequel, which I haven’t tried) each person has a full daily routine, the locale even changes over time (decorations at christmas). It’s got a full day/night cycle and you have to be in bed at night, there’s a whole host of varied stuff there.
And the only way you can interact with any one of the hundreds of NPCs is to walk up to them and press A. At which point the main character will either ask them about his current clue (and only that) or say “Um” and then let them dictate the course of the conversation. Seriously, some conversations have little more than you saying “Um” four times while they talk about whatever they feel like.
It’s a great early example of a living world, but there’s naff all to do in it, and half the time it seems like they’re giving you the brush off for trying to do anything but follow the main story.
16/07/2009 at 10:36 Dante says:
Maybe it’s just a difference between you and me then, because to me there’s not a lot of point having an open world unless you can interact with it in an open way.
That’s why Fallout 3 is more open to me than GTA; because when I trek across the map there’s something for me to do when I get there. Rather than just look at something and leave.
Exploration’s great and all, but eventually you’ll have seen everything. Then what?
16/07/2009 at 10:39 Dante says:
@ John T
Er… I didn’t spend Fallout wandering around shooting things and leveling up. I spent it wandering around talking to people, I imagine quite a lot of others did too.
Now Oblivion, there’s a ‘progress quest’ for you.
16/07/2009 at 10:49 Kefren says:
Sid Meier’s Pirates on the Amiga – I remember playing that for a whole summer when doing my A-levels.
One game that hasn’t been mentioned is Starglider 2 on the Amiga. It was the first game I got with my Amiga many years ago, and what a game to start with! Elite had disappointed me, because the planets sounded interesting but you couldn’t land on them. Starglider 2 may only have had a single solar system, but the feeling of freedom was fantastic.
It was possible to fly up from a planet’s surface after recharching your ship’s energy on a power line, leave the atmosphere, and be seamlessly in space speeding away from the planet with no loss of control. Warp for a while then fly down onto one of the moons looking for a scientist in a land speeder.
You weren’t restricted to exploring planet surfaces – many planets had tunnel systems to explore.
Fly into a gas giant? Check. The screen would get redder and redder until the gravity eventually crushed you.
It was possible to fly away from the solar system for an hour, turn round and see it as small dots against the black loneliness of space. The feeling of insignificance was amazing.
In terms of exploration, I would explore the outer areas of the huge gas giant, and oocasionally find robot ducks and whales. The whalesong was haunting as you tractor beamed them to pull them close, then let them go and followed them slowly, just watching them float in the dense atmosphere.
Since then I have played many space ‘simulations’ like Freelancer, and been disappointed that you just seemed to be moving along a flat plane in space; you couldn’t fly down onto a planet, only choose to land in a way that gives a cutscene then has a static screen of the planet’s surface. Somehow the standard set by Starglider 2 on a 16 bit system doesn’t seem to have been recaptured despite all the power of a modern PC.
Maybe developers are afraid that if they let a player actually fly down to a planet surface, the graphics might not be as good as they expect. However why not just say that the ship has to land via a computer interpretation since the main windows are locked down with shields for re-entry – then people could land a la Captain Blood (Amiga again), with some updated computer representation; on landing the shields open revealing the scene before you. That would be better than the current systems, if not as good as Starglider 2.
16/07/2009 at 10:58 Jim Rossignol says:
Dante: you seem to be missing the point here. I’m not doing a “game x vs game y” comparison, but pointing to the elements of games which I think worked in various open world games. I don’t think any of them are perfect.
“there’s not a lot of point having an open world unless you can interact with it in an open way.”
Yes, I haven’t said any different.
16/07/2009 at 12:02 Simon says:
Is the open world in the game a character for the player to interact with? (which is what seems to be favourite in the post)
A toybox to play with? (sim-city, civilisation, etc.)
Or a playground to play in? (the new red faction, console spiderman 2)
When a game doesn’t quite know, or isn’t willing to properly choose what it’s role or purpose of the open world over a linear game structure actually is (assasins’ creed: character or playground?) then it seems most likely to fail and the design choice then feels for the player, at least it does for me, like either an easy way out, a popular option or possibly there so it can be a bullet point on the box.
16/07/2009 at 12:10 Dinger says:
Okay, now that everyone’s gone, let me just say that Jim is wrong.
He’s right that there’s some games that work, and there’s some games that don’t, and he’s right that being player-centric has something to do with it. And he’s right that the good games give the thrill of exploration.
He’s wrong simply because he can’t put his finger on what it is, the “reason for exploration,” the magical meaning that gives “me a direction, a purpose, without telling me exactly what I need to be doing.” He doesn’t suggest what it means for a game “to ignore me, but nevertheless carry my mark when I choose make it.”
What he seems to be begging for is none other than a simulated environment where the player’s experience is scaled to the player’s ability to interact with it.
By simulated, the entities therein follow rules based on the simulated world, not the player’s position in it. This would mean no grinding or levelling: if there were tough areas, you would learn quickly not to go there until you were strong enough. In Burnout: Paradise, when a race starts, the other cars would go at speeds according to the constraints of the race (maybe easy, medium and hard ones) and not according to how fast the player’s car is going. In GTA, the cars would not just be passing by, they’d be going from somewhere to somewhere. The illusion has to be that, when you’re on the other side of the map, the world continues turning.
By scaled experience, if all a player can do is kill things, don’t make the player the head of an international crime syndicate, or the boss of the Mage’s Guild. ‘Cos those are positions where I at least am going to want some control over what kinds of drugs we’re selling on the streets, or the power to make the Corpus Hermeticum required second-year reading for the Thaumaturge degree. And if all I can do is kill stuff and collect my pension, what the hell am I doing here?
Yet it’s a lot easier to build, balance and debug a game around the player’s position in the world. And it’s easier to write a game with amusement-park-style ‘rides’ than with completely open gameplay. And all a game needs is for the player to have a single adrenaline-pumping act of gamespace interaction. Killing is a good one. Crashing is another. BoneTown still hasn’t gotten sex to work.
Come to think of it, Jim’s right after all.
16/07/2009 at 12:18 AndrewC says:
So to what extent are these ideas in the original design briefs of every open world game and, if the answer is ‘a lot’, what are the forces that inexorably remove them?
16/07/2009 at 12:50 The Sombrero Kid says:
it surprises me how wrong you’ve got it, it’s all about suspension of disbelief, far cry 2 didn’t work because it made it unlikely that anyone in the game would even know you and then made them instantly hate you, in crysis all the people who are supposed to hate you hate you and all the people who are supposed to like you like you, it’s simply a case of the more freedom the game allows the player the harder it is to present a world which doesn’t break their suspension of disbelief.
16/07/2009 at 12:55 pignoli says:
@Jim: Fair enough, I’m illicitly posting at work so couldn’t look it up, it’s just the impression I had had of it.
My point is that many ‘open worlds’ are only open to things the player directly puts into motion which works completely against the whole idea of ‘openness’. I find it very hard to suspend my disbelief when everyone in the world is just waiting for me to come along. I don’t want the Truman Show. I want the NPCs to be their own people with their own goals which they persue in preference to waiting around for me. On this note, I think a real economy which functions with or without player interference a la X3 would always be a crucial element in my ‘ideal’ open world.
16/07/2009 at 13:14 some guy says:
Great article. Found it here: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/91js2/some_stuff_about_open_world_games/
I’d like to have more procedurally generated content. It can’t be *that* hard to make the computer actually build and furnish houses/rooms and whole cities, and once a nice sandbox environment exists, one could explore that very game forever. Or – why not invent came content on the fly? This way, a whole universe with galaxies, star systems, planets, cities, houses, rooms and people could be created. The machine just needs to memorize everything that the player has met yet (and maybe coarsle simulate it in the background).
Another thing: It can also not be *that* hard to create a sandbox game in which the actual objects (like guns, tools, plants, lab equipment (that you can actually use)) are procedurally generated. They could have properties like “can be attached to” or “is container” or “grows when water poured on it” or whatever, simply said.
If game design were about making the player happy, then we could expect many good things. Sadly, it’s mostly about “get it out yesterday”, “follow a time-tested concept (shooter etc.)” and “the graphics must be better than the actual substance of the game”.
16/07/2009 at 13:24 schwerpunk says:
IMO: open-world games are all (or should be) about player-driven narrative. That is, like an RPG, you choose your role and — ideally — the world of the game reacts satisfactorily to that role. For example, while playing Fallout 3′s The Pitt, I sneakily killed a guard and donned his costume, then went about the ‘city’ much like a guard would. I was very disappointed when other guards referred to me as a ‘scab’ (or slave). Didn’t they see my uniform? Clearly, I wasn’t dressed as a slave, and if I was a slave, how did I get this armour? Shouldn’t they wonder? In short: I agree with the article.
16/07/2009 at 13:47 The Sombrero Kid says:
@some guy
my next project is going to be something very similar to what your sugesting but drastically simpler where the game is that you make the objects and the computer has AI’s that play with them
16/07/2009 at 13:52 Dinger says:
Andrew: exactly. Why do they get removed? Because they’re expensive and hard to do right. It means running more world than you need to, getting more bugs than you need to. Just look at some of ArmA II’s bugs for the problems. Better to just spawn that helo stage right than fly it in from the base.
some guy: the problem with procedurally generated content at higher orders is that it’s gaming prozac. No highs, no lows, just a sameness to it. The Grind is a friend of Procedural Generation. Make a procedurally-generated world, and once you learn the rules used in the generation, there will be no surprises in the whole world.
16/07/2009 at 14:14 The Sombrero Kid says:
the world we live in is procedurally generated and that’s pretty exciting now and again, i reckon the ultimate goal of games is to progress towards simulations of things, even alien things, we use shortcuts by necessity not by preference.
16/07/2009 at 14:20 AndrewC says:
The most exciting thing that happened to me in the real world recently is playing a computer game.
16/07/2009 at 14:35 Mike says:
Red Faction 2 is the most recent open world style game that I’ve lost myself in. Oddly, it has more to do with what I put into the game than what the game gives me to work with.
16/07/2009 at 15:20 Greg says:
I’m thinking of Nomad Soul here, and also of Rings of Power. Is this a console idea? Is this is a Sega idea?
16/07/2009 at 15:59 bill says:
i explored morrowind for years, without ever really wanting to follow the story or quests.
I think my problem is that when given a remotely open playing field I try to think of unconventional ways to achieve the objective. But often the game can’t cope with this.
In farcry i’d spend ages lining up enemies to shoot out a branch and crush them with falling logs… but often they wouldn’t be crushed. In RPGs I try to say “yes” and then double cross them… but the game holds me to my word.
It’s my main problem with RTS games too… I have a level and an objective… i want to be able to achieve it any way i want… but usually only the standard way works.
Objective: Destroy building A. So instead of building up a huge base and army I sneak in a cloaked team and take it out. At which point a massive counter-attack is triggered and my tiny base is annihilated.
Open worlds need AI-Gamesmasters… ones that react to the gamer’s actions in logical ways, aimed at making the experience challenging and fun.
16/07/2009 at 16:05 pirate0r says:
@mike
It’s Red Faction 3 (or Red Faction: Guerrilla) , Red Faction 2 was set on earth and was similar in play style to Red Faction 1.
16/07/2009 at 16:16 armlesscorps says:
I agree with Jim’s idea of what a open world game should be, but would such a game actually sell?
I can imagine some players being lost if they werent directed by a core single player narrative and its hard to see such a game having the appeal of say,gta4, or fallout. Very few games haver actually tried to do this, and the biggest open world game so far (gta4) tried it probably the least.
For us hardcore gamers it seems the perfect idea to have a open world game where your just plonked in a world and set about your way, but i dont think its what most people want. Probably more casual gamers who play less and are therefore more easily led into suspension of disbelief probably felt while playing assasins creed that they were doing exactly what they wanted,even while following the linear narrative.
16/07/2009 at 16:58 JuJuCam says:
One day the level of fidelity and realism expressed by a videogame will exceed that experienced by many in real life, and the uncanny valley will be felt in the world around us as we walk down the street.
16/07/2009 at 17:00 Juror #9 says:
As a casual gamer I haven’t touched on the current titles that use open world concepts, due to lack of time to play them. Years ago i was literally lost inside the Torment: Planescape world. I loved it, like we all do, we loose track of time. Granted the scrolling of the world did have it’s ends and didn’t have the truely open world geography but at the time i thought it was something and thought about what devs are going to do next. These past 10 years since Torment: the more recent open world games like Eve, GTA4 and Fuel have exceeded expectations, wether the gameplay is what you want, the worlds are becoming stunning.
BTW – remember BurnCycle…then there was Zork too..those were interesting. Anyway, carry on.
16/07/2009 at 20:32 Skyvik says:
Interesting piece, but I’m comfortable with different types of games being set in an open space – some of these types are linear, some not so much. Open World isn’t a genre any more than side-scrolling is a genre.
“It is, like any traditional shooter, a rolling battle.” – this is what makes FC 2 so extraordinary – it is a traditional shooter, but it gives you tremendous freedom and big spaces to plan, improvise, mess up, try again with another approach – crash through the guard post, stop and snipe the guards, simply set fire to everything, creep past at night, go offroad, take a boat and if if you really can’t be bothered, take the bus.
And this is before you get to the often stunningly realised mission locations – I’ve played 3 missions in the mountain-hugging Dogon village, each one panned out in strikingly different ways. It shares many of the strengths of Deus Ex.
That’s not to say FC2 is perfect – I agree that it fell short of its potential in so many ways (although the areas I think it falls short are not always thoe areas mentioned in the article and comments here), but it achieves so much, and I had so much fun playing it.
How sad it would be if open world games were all to converge on some idealised simulation or rpg vision of open worlds. Would driving up to a checkpoint and showing your papers really be more fun? Isn’t this a bit like wishing Half Life carried on as it began and the game and was a simulation of Gordon Freeman’s day at work?
16/07/2009 at 21:32 dan says:
For those looking for a game that basically says “Survive.” here it is.
http://stranded.unrealsoftware.de/s2_infos.php
You are stranded on a desert island. Survive. Escape if you can.
I guess the graphics will not be great now but it was fun.
The whole open world scenario sort of applies in that you can do whatever you want but until you’ve build a treehouse and have weapons and such you’ll mostly be focused on surviving and getting away from the lions.
17/07/2009 at 09:26 Ninja Dodo says:
@some guy:
Procedural content is overrated. It’s inherently generic.
Gothic was a lot more interesting to explore than Morrowind because every corner was handcrafted and recognizably unique. You could find your way without a map, inside or outside. Try doing that in Elder Scrolls.
Which is not to say that it doesn’t have its uses, just that (in my opinion) it is at its best when paired with deliberate directed content, adapting it to create variation…
17/07/2009 at 10:14 odeed says:
“the problem with farcry2 was that the missions were all the same (kill a camp, kill a person or destroy a car, rinse and repeat)with a long drive between objectives and mission givers made even more annoying by the infuriating, respawning “guard posts”.”
I think this is why people didn’t like Far Cry 2, they didn’t ‘get’ it. Now, this isn’t meant in a cendescending way, I hated the game at first, but the experience that I had, has been mirrored in countless reviews. People seem to want Far Cry 2, to be some RPG, first person blend, it is not, it never has been, the original was the same. The idea behind Far Cry 2, is that of experimentation, you are given repetitive missions, because they are a framework as to how you complete them. The way you choose to finish them is up to you, you’re given a vast arsenal, and a cool physics engine, and the rest is your choice.
For instance, you’re given a missions to destroy convoys, there are so many ways to do this. The obvious way is to park your car across the road, as the cars come barreling over a hill, they’ll smash into your ambush, throw a grenade in, and BOOM, burnt out shells fly 60 feet into the air. You can also just plant some ieds on the ground, and take out the convoy as it drives over them.
Ieds are a good example of these ‘sandbox’ weapons, an awesome way to use them, is to strap them onto your car, drive into an enemy camp, leap out of the car, and watch the fireworks.
In other words, Far Cry isn’t a created experience, in the way that Fallout, or GTA are, it is the basis to create your own fun.
17/07/2009 at 11:07 Ayekay says:
“The idea behind Far Cry 2, is that of experimentation, you are given repetitive missions, because they are a framework as to how you complete them”
I get this (and I liked FC2, flawed though it was) but it’d be a better game if the lessons were less repetitive. There may be a half dozen ways to destroy convoys but if there were also a half dozen kinds of convoy, the gameplay would have that much more variety and the experimentation would be more sophisticated, interesting and challenging. ‘Play is fun with surprises.’
17/07/2009 at 15:58 Keith says:
To Dan’s last comment:
It’s like real life, but…. with save states. Yeah, that’d be sweet.
17/07/2009 at 17:43 Geoff says:
I’m surprised to find such a one-sided hate-fest on Far Cry 2. I’m half way through it now, and really enjoying it. Everyone seems to be upset that it’s not whatever game they had in their heads, and thus are unable to enjoy it for what it actually is. It’s NOT Grand Theft Auto 5, or Fallout 4, it’s FAR CRY 2. You know, Far Cry? Not a dialog heavy RPG where you build lasting relationships with store owners. It’s a first person shooter, and you’re meant to be surrounded with bad guys to shoot.
The fact that the “checkpoints respawn”, that everyone attacks you… that’s the point! It’s even explained clearly by the plot and the tapes, repeatedly. This is Africa. And the themes involved are rather interesting, and match with portrayals of Africa in movies (kept making me think of Blood Diamond) or even news…
There’s two factions, but this isn’t about the idealistic struggle of the socialist faction against the capitalist one, or the democratic against the authoritarian. They’re basically big strongmen, each of which wants more power, men, guns… Virtually indistinguishable, and locked in a permanent struggle. Then there’s all the foreign agents (and you can pick a specific one as your character, while the others appear in the game as well). The “buddy” mechanic is quite interesting, because it further highlights the notion that you’re all outsiders, that everyone is against you, and having a friend isn’t the result of building up your “Faction A” points, but rather building a rare relationship with one of the other outcasts. And the “having a buddy means being rescued” is a vastly superior safety net to “level up, +5 HP” or respawn chambers and whatnot.
You don’t become a high-ranking member of UFLL or APR as part of the plot of the game. That’s not the point. You’re an outsider. They hire you to do their dirty work, then explicitly tell you that their guys won’t know you, and will attack you just like any other heavily armed outsider who came swooping in to their guard post. You are a tolerated mercenary, not a treasured apprentice, gradually working your way up through the ranks.
The lack of XP, the deteriorated weapons, the limited inventory, no “money” dropped from bad guys, all contribute to the notion that you’re not supposed to be “grinding” enemies. Avoid a fight if you can, unless you badly need to restock something, or you’ve been specifically paid to fight somewhere.
And the fighting never ends. And in the game. That’s the point. You thought if you killed a couple guys in a guard post, APR would just decide not to have a guard post there anymore? Never send replacement guards? You thought they’d be shocked, and ask the police to start a murder investigation? No, it’s a common occurrence, just send some more guys…
Of course it’s not a perfect game, and there’s plenty of things that bother me about it, but most of the stuff people are complaining about is stuff that makes sense, by design. I’m just surprised to see so much hating, and so few people jumping in explaining all the things it does right – which is much more than just the beautiful environment…
17/07/2009 at 17:50 Geoff says:
That comment was clearly long enough already, so I’ve separated my Fallout 3 / Oblivion thoughts into a different one.
My problem in these games (not in Far Cry 2!) is that much like Jim, I’m drawn in at first with great enthusiasm, and really enjoy the process, but somehow left feeling disappointed and dull at the end. As many others mentioned, I steer off away from the “main plot” as soon as possible, and try to hit EVERY side quest possible. When I’ve finally finished with that, I’m an unstoppable badass (Archmage? Head of Thieves and Fighters and Assassin’s Guild?) absolutely weighed down with epically game-unbalancingly powerful loot, and I start trying the main plot again. But it seems so uninteresting and unimportant now.
FC2 does a slightly better job of weaving the “main plot” together with the side missions (second half of the game requires main plot, buddy side missions are either alternate versions of main missions or only spawn after main missions completed) but still has that clear Main Plot vs Side Quest distinction, which ruins the open word feel.
This idealized Open World we’re all seeking needs to either do away with the Main Plot altogether, or do a much better job of weaving the two together and blurring that line…
19/07/2009 at 00:29 Gutter says:
30 years ago, Boulder Dash had it right. If you play that game (not the iPhone version, I’m sorry about that one) you’ll see that the world lives before you come in it, and continue to live after you do. The maps are randomly generated (procedural content 30 years ago? yep, thats right) so they weren’t designed *for* the player. Boulder Dash’s maps are just Conway game of life like simulators, but interactive.
This is what open world game need to be : A life simulator, with NPC actually being part of the world and not the scenery. If you can gather and resell loot, make it into a “real” economy, with merchant that need that loot to make armors (not to make YOU an armors. Just to make armors). If you can freely kill people, give it real consequences. I mean, whats the fun being a criminal in a city where criminals apparently make the rules?
In order to make the player part of a world, designer and developers will need to think of ways to make the NPCs integral part of the world as well, and not just moving billboards. Nothing makes me more sad than seeing my 30 days old loot still in the hand of the merchant that I sold it to in Oblivion. How cool would it be to see some NPC walking in the magic robe that I sold to some merchant the day before? How cool would it be to see that merchant prosper because of all the crap I bring him. How cool would it be to actually see NPCs grind for loot or pick herbs?
How cool would it be if the cars in GTA4 didn’t just vanish when I turned by back to them? ;)
19/07/2009 at 09:22 Requiem says:
@JKjoker The trouble with Prototype is you are trapped on a island under military law, all exits are blocked and there’s a virus outbreak going on. Yet outside of the red infected zones no one gives a toss. If it was real people would either be bunkered in their homes, out rioting and looting or trying to flee the island enmass. Sure there’s some of that going on but most of the City couldn’t care less.
@odeed/Ayekay the real problem with the convoys in Far Cry 2 is they never go anywhere, they just go around and around in a circle until you destroy them. It would of been more interesting for them to be able to reach their destination and you either fail the mission or then have to destroy the delivery in a heavily guarded camp.
I think Far Cry 2, like it’s collectables, is a rough diamond. It needs cutting and polishing to show it’s true worth but even as it is, it’s still a diamond and has value. I thought that it handled the openworld vs mission factor really well. The missions are integrated into the world, sure there could of been more variety but having to visit the towns or the bars to get a mission beats having missions flagged by great big neon beacons reaching up into the sky. Or press button to enter misson/event, likewise the side missons were appropriate for the setting and plot. They weren’t out of character like supercops taking time out from cleaning up the city to take part in dangerous road races that often caused multiple road accidents and civilian deaths. The collectables were also appropriate and integrated not just some meta object there just to improve your stats. But most of all I think Far Cry 2 managed to balance it’s open world nature and the main plot just right. Okay I didn’t like the ending but up to then the simple game objective of kill the Jackal was perfect for not getting in your way of exploring. In fact it promoted exploring (at least on the first play through) as how were you going to find you target without going out and looking for him? Too many games with an open world or at least the illusion of an open world have an urgent main plot that doesn’t gel with it’s open nature. Too many of these types of game have you either saving the world or saving someone important to you when you just want to go and see what’s over that hill or around the next bend.
One thing I hope comes from Far Cry 2 is that I want every current RPG developer to play it and see that conversations don’t have to be static. That characters can be animated while talking to you, they can sit down, get up, move around and pick up objects and still keep talking. And that you can move away and look around, that you don’t have to be locked in position to have a conversation. I was more immersed by the mission briefings in Far Cry 2 that by any RPG conversation I’ve played recently.
20/07/2009 at 16:25 Harvey Smith says:
Ayekay, yeah, that wine stuff in DX1 was interesting because of the internal wrestling over ‘in game mechanics’ vs more experientially-focused ‘text fantasy’ bits. In the end, the combination of both is what makes the game feel layered. Sheldon Pacotti and Steve Powers provided the specifics of that conversation, but the point is that different elements on the team felt strongly about ‘all mechanics’ vs ‘text fantasy’ (ie, stuff that was in the player’s imagination), and we compromised as long as it didn’t violate consistency.
20/07/2009 at 20:54 Cid says:
Sounds like you need to give Pathologic a whirl, Jim. Quite an amazing game, despite its many bugs.
23/07/2009 at 15:17 Demiath says:
I used to dislike sandbox games because, as Jim points out in this blog post, designers didn’t seem to know what to do with the open worlds they had just created. Lately things have been improving somewhat, and although we still have to suffer the occasional clueless Bethesda title there are now vastly more satisfying open world games available such as inFamous, Burnout: Paradise, Crackdown, Red Faction: Guerilla and (to a significantly lesser extent) GTA4 and Assassin’s Creed 2 (the latter worked so well as a tourist simulation that I didn’t mind the less-than-stellar gameplay). All of these games manage, in their own way, to make one big interactive playground of the sprawling landscapes they provide, thus making the open world design feel legitimate and meaningful. It’s still far from perfect, but at least it’s starting to grow on me…
23/07/2009 at 15:21 Demiath says:
[Freudian slip: I obviously meant Assassin's Creed 1. I realize this website was created in 1873, but an Edit Comment function wouldn't be out of place as a first step towards modernization. Having to fact-check our own statements before posting requires an attention span far beyond what the Age of Twitter allows for...]
24/07/2009 at 17:39 Susan says:
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Susan
http://onlinegamesforgirls.net
25/07/2009 at 21:16 WordandPictures says:
I have explored the idea of separating a gameworld like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. from the mechanics of gunning, running and health packs. We are so attached to the notion of ‘game’ that we cannot understand the purpose of ‘experience’ in sandbox computer-generated environments.
The word ‘game’ presupposes Objectives and Rules, and then there is the idea that it should be pleasurable. Anyone who has played SOC knows that it is compelling, even when it is uncomfortable, mildly disturbing, and even a little bit scary-hairy.
I would love to see more 3D worlds with all the physical realism of games like Clear Sky and ArmA 2, but with the emphasis on generating a type of experience rather than A –> B = WIN. To this extent, SOC and Clear Sky do create a need to survive, but they are, after all, shooter games, and very good ones at that.
28/07/2009 at 06:14 Schwerpunk says:
[b]Geoff[/b] says, “This idealized Open World we’re all seeking needs to either do away with the Main Plot altogether, or do a much better job of weaving the two together and blurring that line…”
I agree with Geoff. I would love for an Oblivion/FO3-type game to just do away with the main plot (I’ve never completed either game’s – didn’t see the point), and instead focus on what makes these two titles great and fun in the first place: their amazing, open, rich worlds.
The main quests should be whatever you decide it to be. Whatever motivates the character you’ve created.
That said, I realize the technical nightmare it would be to actually produce this – let alone while feeding the graphics whores we’ve all become (at least, judging by game sales).
03/08/2009 at 02:59 Cephlin says:
The last line in the article refers to being dumped in a place and told to survive.
Well I do believe that this has already been done on the DS with the game series called Lost in Blue.
Don’t know if you’ve heard of or play this game or if anyone else has for that matter since I never played it for more than 10 minutes before giving up on finding food.
27/03/2011 at 22:01 SoupDuJour says:
Great post, Jim. It’s as if I’m reading my own thoughts.
22/11/2012 at 04:09 28843253 says:
3 years on, how about Skyrim?