Howdy, gents. I hope that this post finds all of you starting the holiday gaming extravaganza that this time of year is typically known for. As I said, we’re mostly taking it easy for the next couple of weeks, but because I like you all, I thought I’d share a post with you that I found.
Over at the Moving Pixels blog at Pop Matters (one of my favorite gaming blogs), a recent article goes over the idea of owning the open world in single player sandbox games. Taking a look at new games Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Fallout: New Vegas and Fable III, they study the recent trend in game design that pushes players to control major portions of real estate and owning/converting as much of the game world as possible. It’s interesting to think about the idea that in many of these games, the players tend to want to set the main storyline aside in favor of getting invested in the world itself, which I guess is the case with many RPG’s as well, even apart from owning land.
I think this gets to another interesting issue as well: does this mean that the stories in those games aren’t actually all that compelling? If we are willing to set them aside to do everything else but the stories, is there a problem with the design there? In addition, most of these games almost seem to require a fair amount of exploration and sidequest upgrading in order to stand a fair chance in the proper endgames.
So what do you guys think? Do you tend to set aside single player campaigns in favor of sidequests? Do you like the idea of controlling game worlds, or do you just focus on the stories when you play? Go!
Source – Pop Matters
