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.
Just got into Shantae and The Seven Sirens. Haven’t had a good new side-scroller in quite a while. I’m enjoying it very much so far.
And ofcause, running around on Helldivers 2’s new difficulty being stupid. Getting caught up in that whole debacle (what is life without a bit of drama). Fun, if a bit unpolished.
I played rdr2 on a 1060 3gb before I upgraded my card. I had to turn pretty much everything down to low except for texture quality, keep that high or at least medium cuz anything lower and it straight up becomes a ps2 game. Was able to get around 50 fps most of the time, up to 60 indoors and 30-40 in saint denis. Your 4gb card should get better performance than that due to higher vram tho.
Don’t know if this counts, but Resident Evil 4 killed off the tank controls and single-handedly popularised third person cameras for survival horror games.
Resident Evil 4 still had tank controls, but it moved the camera behind the back. Unlike dual analog third person shooters at the time, it did have one major innovation: it moved the character to the left side of the screen so you could more easily see what’s in front of you.
Not even just survival horror, RE4 was a landmark title just as a third-person action shooter. It had a huge influence on the generation of third person shooters that came after it.
I think Spyro was the first mainstream game to standardise achievements, you could do random stuff in-game and it gave you a little pop up, carried over to Ratchet and Clank and now every game has official achievements
Not the first one on the PSX, that’s for sure. Also, getting some extra stuff for 100% a game wasn’t new by the time of Spyro, both Donkey Kong Country and Crash Bandicoot already did that
This. They were indeed called Skill Points, and Insomniac loved to tie cheats and bonus material to completing them. I played the shit out of Spyro and Ratchet and Clank back in the day.
Assassin’s Creed and the Open World Gameplay design. It definitely existed before then, but after AC came out, it felt like every RPG switched to the open world map.
There have been "open world" games since the 1980s. Just of course, memory limited how big that world could be, and how much you could do in it. The genre as a whole is ancient.
The first ones I can think of is legend of Zelda and final fantasy, but I think there was also Adventure for the Atari before those even. The first Assassin’s Creed was 2007, Adventure was 1980
It hasn't aged too badly, but it's from an era where you were not necessarily expected to figure everything out on your own -- talking about it with IRL friends or reading tips and tricks in a magazine (or on the early Internet/Usenet) were pretty normal. I would say give it a try but don't be hesitant to look for a guide if you get stuck or lost.
Dark Souls popularized the stamina meter and the “dropping all your money on death and having to go pick it back up” mechanic. Not to mention spawning a subgenre of similar games like Lies of P and Lords of the Fallen
The first Dark Souls was 2011. Diablo was released in 1997. World of Warcraft was 2004 and while you didn’t quite drop all your stuff and money you die you did have to run back to your corpse to keep from having all your stuff degrade and cost a bunch of money. The first Sonic was 1991 and getting hit makes you drop all your “money” and have to pick it back up.
It isn’t a question of who did it first, it’s a question of who made it popular. Look at how many games have a death run since DS came out. Hollow Knight, Nioh, Blasphemous, etc. It’s also not the same mechanic as losing your items on death.
Dark Souls is literally just Legend of Zelda for adults, which had a stamina system at about the same time Kings Field did. It’s honestly hilarious to me that it became known as the father of the genre, but the immediate copycats were also aiming for a similar tone to FromSoftware so I guess it’s fair.
I feel like Call of Duty 4 modernized and standardized the FPS genre on at least consoles. Every call of duty game still looks and feels exactly the same since CoD4 and every other first person shooter copied it’s control scheme because it was so firmly cemented.
I don’t know what game first came up with it, but Super Mario RPG was the first time I saw timed hits for attack and defense in a JRPG. While the mechanic isn’t exactly ubiquitous it has popped up in a handful of other games over the years and it always reminds me of that game.
I don’t think it’s just “being 3D”. Mario 64 put a lot of R&D into particulars of how jumping should work, the camera should work, and what the player’s goals should be. Quite a few games unintentionally copied them, while you could see some games not following their lead early in the 3D days that felt very janky to play. Tomb Raider could arguably be among them with the tank controls, though of course it has its own more niche appeal.
Legend of Zelda OoT followed up with popularizing a targeting button (good ol’ Z-targeting) to focus on one object or enemy in a 3D space and move around it or fight/otherwise interact with it. Such targeting has been a standard feature of 3D action-adventure games ever since.
And it’s a bad one if it applies at all. PC shooters of the time always kinda tried, but it didn’t work. The original Half Life got dinged a few points in original reviews because of a few janky platforming sections.
What’s the timeline on that mod versus the Battle Royale mod for DayZ? Because as far as I could tell, the DayZ mod is the true progenitor, but DayZ was itself inspired by Minecraft.
I couldnt find a release history for the Minecraft mod, however according to the following article, it was released about a year before the original PlayerUnknown mod for DayZ / Arma 3.
Day Z the standalone game was a result of Day Z the mod for Arma 2.
While Day Z (the mod) and Minecraft were in their early phases around the same time (i alpha tested both), I have never heard anyone say that Day Z was inspired by Minecraft, beyond the idea of it being possible for an indie game with a small development team being able to become a huge commercial success.
As the inspiration yes. But Minecraft hunger games was the first to do it in gaming while also reaching maybe not more people than movies, but definitly spreading to communities that the movies and books didnt reach (e.g. i didnt watch the movies until well over ten years after I had played my first game of MC hunger games)
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