Editor's Note: While Bro Planet is mainly a (pretty awesome) gaming news blog, I also publish articles containing my own opinions, which are not to be confused with facts. Pointing out these opinions, and calling them opinions is hazardous to your intelligence, and is not recommended.
I remember a time when games were 2D, linear, and required you to jump on the heads of small, pixelated, and vaguely penis shaped monsters in order to win. Not too long ago, this is all there really was. Not that this type of game was even bad in it's day, trust me, the day that I got my NES I think I played about 80 hours of Super Mario Bros. in the first month that I had the console. But obviously, playing the same game over and over does get boring. Sure, you could try to file down your time on speedruns, but it was still the exact same game.
Not until 1986 was I blown away by the possibility of the open world genre. That year, my parents got me Metroid and The Legend of Zelda, and I fell in love with those games more than I think I have with any other Nintendo product to date. Not only were these my first games that I actually got to kill shit other than goombas, but they also showed me the re-playability, and artistic depth that Open World titles often contain. My elementary school friends and I spent hundreds of hours trying to find all of the hidden unlockables, and other goodies that these games contained.
Flash Forward 12 years. This was the year that I got Grand Theft Auto for the PS1. Being the pot smoking hippy that I was at the time, I didn't fully appreciate what the game truly did for the industry, and how it revolutionized open worlds outside of RPG's. The game gave you an expansive city that allowed you to do whatever the fuck you want without having to be specifically guided around. Want to drive around in a fire engine, and crash it into ambulances? No problem. Want to go on a killing spree in a stolen cop car? You got it. This game really changed the way that I thought of games forever (it also made me extremely sadistic in the ways that I regard violence). I really loved Ocarina of Time, but Grand Theft Auto 1 will always hold a special-er place in my heart.
That same year, I played Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Before Bethesda fanboys start moaning, I'm aware that this game came out 2 years prior to '98, but I didn't actually own a computer up until that point. When I got my glorious PC, I picked it up from my local Circuit City on the advice of my nerd-friends. And good grief, I was happy that I had those nerd friends after I realized what a great game Daggerfall was. I played as a lone ranger traveling the massive, procedurally generated continent of Tamriel alone, doing quests for those who were willing to pay. I felt like the ultimate badass when I played that game. Jesus Christ, I was a serious geek back then (but then again, I still am).
The next Open World game that changed my perceptions of what a game was capable of was Bioware's classic, Baldur's Gate, which I didn't get around to playing until 1999. Like Daggerfall before it, this game was an excellent open world RPG that gave you a lot of choice in how you wanted to play it. Unlike Daggerfall however, Baldur's Gate created a rich open world that had a seemingly endless supply of well written missions that weren't just "Kill 10 goblins, and return to me". The characters also resonated with me more than any book that I had read, or movie that I had seen. In fact, I still have a female-bro-crush on Imoen to this day.
Of course, then in the early 21st century, things really started to shift in favor of the open world. More and more games were released year after year. Morrowind & it's expansions, Baldur's Gate II, the 3D Grand Theft Auto games, and of course, Shenmue. All of these games really just took everything that had been established as good during the 90's, and made it better, and the high-quality 3D graphics allowed for games to break new boundaries that only served to make open world games better as a whole. On PC, since the internet had finally become fully mainstream, these game worlds could be expanded for free with the use of mods, and less freely with expansions. In addition, this generation of games brought a new level of continuity to the playing field, and made it so that your actions truly effected the world, rather than just occuring within them.
Later on in the decade, developers expanded the concept of the open world even more. Games like ArmA, STALKER, Crysis, and Mass Effect all made the concept of an open world viable in genres that are predominantly linear. Some of my fondest memories from 2007 involve me playing Mass Effect. The dialogue, the story, the characters, the universe. All of it was top notch. It's just a damned shame that Bioware ran out of money before they could make the gameplay live up to the writing.
And now, here we are in 2010. We've had home entertainment consoles for over 30 years, and every developer and it's mother has made at least one open world game. Open World games obviously have room to grow, and most likely will since are fairly popular among pretty much every kind of gamer (Even casual wiibros). With games like Red Dead: Redemption in the works, and hopefully many other Triple A open world titles, we have nothing left to do but wonder, and wait to see what the future will bring for the art of the Open World...
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