History of open world game design on PlayStation

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Jeremy is an experienced games journalist who writes for Edge, PC Gamer and Rock Paper Shotgun amongst others.

That mountain is not just a backdrop,” Todd Howard once said, introducing Skyrim to the world. “You can walk all the way to the top of that mountain.” The winning quote has become immortalised as a meme: “See that mountain? You can climb it.”

Entering towns in Fina Fantasy VII changed perspective, beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds and bustling NPCs bringing the world to life. RPGs were our first taste of what ‘open’ could really mean.“Just when it appears that the entire game will take place in the city,” wrote IGN in its 1997 review, “the venue changes to a fully 3D, fully rotatable engine, and players will find that the city is a mere dot on the enormous world map.

GTA III spawned many imitators. We’ve a soft spot for the The Getaway, from the sadly closed PlayStation London Studio .Not that anybody was talking about the ‘open world genre’ in 2001. Back then, there was only GTA, and the games that gratefully inhaled its fumes. They were called the GTA clones. The Simpsons: Hit & Run, True Crime: Streets Of LA,'s The Getaway and even Driver 3 – all mimicked Rockstar’s blueprint in the years that followed.

Just Cause made its open world a vital part of the game design - dominating areas of the map had cause and effect.Then there was Just Cause, a Swedish invention which dropped a secret agent onto a Caribbean island and asked him to topple a dictator with the help of a guerrilla group. “We had what we called the Avalanche credo,” studio co-founder Christofer Sundberg told Edge in 2022. “‘If you see it, you can go there. And if you poke it, it reacts’.

By the time Fallout 3 was launched, stealth had become a nuanced spatial negotiation with enemy NPCs and voice actors were less obvious in their repetition across the wasteland. Oblivion’s persuasion minigame, meanwhile, was jettisoned completely . Later came TES V: Skyrim, which for many remains the highest form of the open world RPG. Heaven for those with itchy feet.

Ubisoft wasn’t foolish enough to assume it had got the formula right on the first try. Under Hocking, Far Cry 2 was designed to be hostile to its players – it battered them with malaria, jammed weapons, and enemy checkpoints that could never quite be wiped from the map.

 

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