Could even say it goes back to the Zelda games on NES. Metroidvania games might also count. Those games all have the “you might progress in any available direction” mechanic, which IMO is the core of the open world mechanic.
There’s also some games like Star tropics where the whole world was open (as in you could return to previous locations) but progress was more linear.
Would super Mario world count as open world? Not as old as the NES ones I mentioned, but I’m curious. Or say if you could go back to previous worlds in SMB3, would that be open world?
Depends on how you constrain that idea. Open worlds were a very early idea, but old computers were somewhat capacity limited in how much content you could have.
Here you had several town maps, including dual carriageways, main roads, side roads, one way streets. And you could just drive down any of them. They were all nondescript, but the amount of memory really limited what could be done.
There was also the games using the freescape engine. Driller, Darkside and Total Eclipse. These were all about as open world as you could achieve on the hardware of the time.
In terms of "open world" the definition is open to interpretation. I'd argue that text based adventures were open world too in their own way. So it really depends on what features people agree makes an "open world" game as to what the first game that contains all those features was.
Open world RPGs were always the goal, old games tried to mask the hardware limitations by using several techniques. By the time the Witcher 3 came along open world RPGs were the most common thing, in fact at the time lots of people called the Witcher a sellout because of that, it’s like if it had come up a couple years ago and had base buildiechanics, EVERYONE else was doing it.
There are LOTS of examples that pre-date TW3, I’ll limit myself to a few, just because it’s the ones I played. In the 90s and early 2000s I used to play Ultima Online, which is an MMO from 97 that has a vast open world. But if you want first person, Oblivion is old enough to drink.
In a way, I’d say World of Warcraft (2004 onwards) popularized that.
Here’s your starting place. Here’s a bunch of easy quests and monsters.
You quit the starting area. Everything feels huge and really, really fucking far away. One step in the wrong direction and you’re assaulted by an enemy with a 💀 for a level. Not only that, most people would only see the loading screen once before doing an hours-long playthrough and that also increased the sense of “fucking huge world”
I think the fault lies with Ubisoft and Assassin’s Creed. They really championed the idea of a bloated open world stuffed with systems that don’t really interact with each other, and now AAA gaming just keeps trying to stuff more mechanics in the pile.
Yeah, you’re right to highlight warcraft although I don’t think it’s a clean line with Warcraft between dune 2 and c&c. C&C was probably around 2 years into development by the time Warcraft came out, and my assumption is most of the actual game design was pretty finalised by that point. Though I’m sure some minor influences made their way in, I don’t think Warcraft massively affected the kind of game we got in the end.
But yeah that’s not to diminish the contribution of warcraft to the genre, there’s loads of games that followed copying the Warcraft style of RTS, even as part of the c&c series in the end with Generals.
Towards the end of the decade Total Annihilation would be released and it’s modern day fan made remake, Beyond All Reason, is really good. Sad there’s no campaign though, I really loved the TA campaign
gonna be real, WC1 was not a huge title at the time. I think a lot of people look back, rightly, at WC3 being one of the greatest RTS of all time and then think the whole series was lauded at release, but Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was just okay.
Spacewar! was a F2P PvP game with no microtransactions and no battle pass. Although it’s hard to quantify exact player numbers (it precedes Steam charts), for a while it was the most played videogame in the world.
Its real-time graphics and multiplayer combat were very influential, and widely copied by many other games.
for a while it was the most played videogame in the world.
I see what you did there!
Space War historySpaceWar is the first game to be frequently ported to different computers, back when computers took up a big portion of the room they sat it, and when “porting” was practically re-coding, from scratch, in Assembler.
WASD + mouse aim in FPS. Wolf3d, Doom1 and Blakestone used the arrow keys, spacebar and Ctrl back in the day. The arrows were turn, not strafe too.
I reckon it was some friends of mine in the 90s in Box Hill, Melbourne, Victoria who were the first to use WASD/mouse aim. Share house above a shop at the end of a tram line.
Blasphemous, a 2D Metroidvania game with a very distinctive art style.
So far loving the world design and level design, it reminds me strongly of Dark Souls, without feeling like a clone in any way. I do unfortunately suck at platforming, and this game is so far not forgiving about it…
Yeah, however before Warcraft there was Dune II. But I am not sure which one was more popular at the time and I think Dune II came way before Warcraft.
I think why Dune II is more notable though is that the first Dune game was more of an adventure style came, not a strategy game. Then they changed the game with its successor and introduced the asymmetrical factions that each had a few unique units with differing strategies.
Warcraft took that concept further of course. But even there its rather Warcraft II that really had a big breakthrough.
I wonder what the source of the RTS conventions was. Ctrl num for making groups. Double press to centre on group. X for scattering units. A to stop them. Pretty sure these predate C&C but the only one before that I can think of is dune.
Maybe because that one didn’t come from videogames. Selection sets or groups have been a thing on UI for a long time, ever since vertex editor on CAD software.
And also the concept of your collection of souls being recoverable from your last point of death.
I know the “death bag” mechanic had been done before, but the disappearing cache is a core element of Soulslike gameplay that has been repeated so many times since then. It adds a sense of urgency and FOMO to the recovery of your stuff. If you die again, it’s gone for good.
It sure feels like more than half of them label themselves as some blend of metroidvania, as long as it isnt a cardbattler or a roguelike, its 100% going to label itself a metroidvania.
Battlefield 1942 always stands out to me as the one that popularized large scale online battles on big maps with vehicles. At the time it was revolutionary in online gaming.
Command & Conquer: Renegade came out around the same time as well, with similar features. I kinda wish that game had a sequel as well.
Another gameplay feature that comes to mind is the exclamation/question mark above NPC characters for quests. I remember it first from WarCraft 3, but I think it really kicked off with World of WarCraft to get adopted by many more games.
I don’t remember being possible to spawn on teammates in BF1942, but definitely remember it as a first to select spawn points on map like Battlefield always did.
I can’t remember if that mod had squad spawns. But I definitely remember playing it a lot, that was an absolutely revolutionary mod with so much content, not to distract from other great BF1942 mods though. I believe the original DICE team originated from that mod team to create Battlefield 2 as well.
DICE hired a few of the DC devs to work on BF2, then promptly laid them all off about 6 months or so after release, and then the laid off devs and others who weren’t hired made Kaos Studios, and made Frontlines: Fuel of War and Homefront, before being corporate acquisitioned into non existence.
There were a few BF42 mods that, on certain maps with certain vehicles, allowed you to spawn in vehicles.
IIRC, Forgotten Hope had a number of para-assault maps that allowed players to spawn inside of the aircraft they would parachute out of.
I believe you could also do this in… I can’t remember the name of it, but the Star Wars themed 42 mod (which the BattleFront series either largely copied or was directly inspired by), I think it had some spawn-in-able vehicles as well.
Also BF Vietnam, the official game, used a similar concept of having ‘tunnel exits’ that could be built/placed by Viet Cong engineers, which were placeable spawn points, and the US had the ‘Tango’ … mobile river boat with a helipad thing… which was a mobile spawn point.
I am 99% sure it was BF2 that first introduced being able to spawn on a player, I don’t think any of the mods for the earlier games pulled that off always had to be a vehicle or placeable static object.
I’m not sure I’ve ever had more fun with any game than I did with BF1942. It was just so much fun. There were games with smoother play and deeper mechanics and better graphics, but none were as fun. The dumb mechanics made it amazing, like being able to lie down on the wing of a plane and snipe people while your buddy flew, or dive bombing and parachuting out at 10ft above the ground to capture a point, or shooting the main cannon from a tank into a barracks that has 15 people spawned inside it, or piloting a goddamn aircraft carrier and running it aground to get to a spawn point safely. It was so stupid but so fun.
It is, and I don’t think it’s even the first game to require a subscription fee. It was just so successful at it that everyone wanted that monthly recurring revenue. When it doesn’t work, they’d often rather see the game cease to exist.
Maybe cheating a bit but there are several genres of games that are named after the games that popularized their mechanics such as roguelike/roguelite, souls-like, metroidvania
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