Game design frequently informing story, the story of most open world games centres around the world, obviously. And open worlds are very frequently detrimental to narrative, or at least tend to produce very similar ones. And I’m sick of “player choice.” See, I’m someone who appreciates, indeed practically specialises in, the medium of interactive narrative. I’m sick of highlighting the little icon and following the line on the minimap to get to it. I’m sick of long treks through beautifully detailed scenery.
You CAN go inside every window and look at all the drug dealers’ furniture and knock all their chairs over and leave their taps running just to be a dick. We’ve got games with entire fully detailed cities, wildernesses, deserts, alien landscapes. It was only a matter of time before the dream of a fully 3D fully detailed go-anywhere setting would be realised. Memory improved, allowing for more and more details and assets to be rendered simultaneously. Then 3D graphics allowed us to fully explore the in-game space from multiple perspectives. First Super Mario 3 let you go left as well as right and explore the whole map. Or when we looked at the cosmetic windows on the buildings in, say, Robocop for the Commodore 64 and thought about how cool it would be if we could go inside all of those windows and find an individually crafted room in each one and see what pictures the drug dealers hung up.Īnd at the highest level the advance of gaming technology has been one long road to achieving that dream. Ever since we first played Super Mario and thought how cool it would be if we could escape from the fixed horizontal line of the level and explore that green hill in the background with the mysterious eyes. Something like it had long been the dream of gamers and developers alike.
Its invention was practically inevitable. The history of the open world game might as well be the history of gaming itself.
0 kommentar(er)
