SPLICED LIFE /
ISSUE 02
COLUMN
Hey, welcome to 2013, the year of the Open World. That’s right,
we’ve seen a slew of great and successful open world titles hit
our shelves, not only this year, but for this generation. More
powerful consoles meant we could play games like Far Cry,
the Batman Arkham series, Saints Row, Crackdown, Skyrim,
Assassin’s Creed and GTAV. It’s been a fun ride, one with
critically acclaimed games as bumper stickers.
This might be a problem. But before you throw your
pitchforks into the air, hear me out.
Open world titles might soon be experiencing the
same wall that First Person Shooters have hit. We’ve
polished the tried-and-trusted formula of ‘runcorridor-run-shoot-corridor-run-shoot’ so much so
that every major release in this genre seems to be
a carbon copy of some other iteration in the same
pool. Review scores of these titles are starting to
wane (ever so slightly, but wane nonetheless) due
to lack of ingenuity and repetition. The novelty has,
for the most part, worn off.
The same can be said about open world games.
Some games benefit from an open world
experience, a sense of exploration. Red Dead
Redemption would not have been the same without
experiencing the sprawling landscape of the
Wild West. Or take the sense of majesty, of sheer
heroism that Skyrim offers as you clamber up a
mountain face to slay a dragon. The openness of
the world is a character in the game, it’s an essential
part of its lifeblood.
But here’s where it gets dangerous: Developers
can be all like, “Hey, kids be buying that, we need
to make all our games open world.” It’s an inane
paint-by-numbers method that corporations follow
in order to ruin everything we love. If people are
buying GTA V, we need to make all our titles open
world. If people are buying Call of Duty, everything
must have army camo adorning it. As if these are the
defining characteristics of their spirit and success.
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just the final step in that evolution. It will come to
a point where most gameplay will just consist of
walking from point A to point B and players will love
it. We can see that players have grown accustomed
to exploring grand landscapes and collecting a
hundred little trinkets along the way. That’s the
evolution of gaming right there.”
That quote right there, sucks.
And it’s already happening.
The Crew is possibly the most distinctly
unnecessary open world title coming to next gen
machines. Racing titles in particular, do not need to
be open world, time-wasting-level-traversing-untilI-get-to-a-traffic-light sort of games. Sometimes
a guy just wants to race a track. Formula 1 drivers
don’t do open world racing, so why must we? It’s
similar to making FIFA open world. Who would
want that? Sometimes a shooter needs to just be a
well told story in corridors with a few challenging
puzzles, simply a level-by-level plantation fighting
off zombies. Sometimes it’s just got to be open
world. But not everything needs to follow suit.
Soon games like Halo are going to be open world.
And God forbid we get an open world Call of Duty.
Actually, that does sound pretty cool.
To nail the point home, NDPs head analyst Marshel
Cohen said in a report released earlier this year,
“The only reason people play games is to become
immersed in new environments. Open world is
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