… And the rest
So many more companies announced, revealed, or showed off open-world titles at E3 that we can’t get to most of them in too much depth. Here are the shorter versions.
- Electronic Arts Labels president Frank Gibeau described the newly announced Mirror’s Edge title as “an open-world action-adventure” in an analyst call during E3. The game, which developer DICE is making for PC and next-gen systems for release “when it’s ready,” is otherwise a mystery.
- Lego Marvel Super Heroes, which will come out on all major platforms between now and early 2014 (read our E3 preview here), follows up on last year’s Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes. While the latter was a more straightforward open-world title, Marvel will scale back and feature a combination of nonlinearity and more controlled objectives.
- Sony revealed a game based on director George Miller’s Mad Max film franchise at its press briefing. Avalanche, the studio that brought us the ridiculous island-hopping (and -grappling and -parachuting) Just Cause series, is bringing the Aussie-apocalypse title to PC, PlayStations 3 and 4, and Xboxes 360 and One next year. Miller’s films have already heavily influenced such well-regarded games as the Fallout and Borderlands series.
- Ratchet and Clank creator Insomniac Games announced its latest, Sunset Overdrive, at the Microsoft press briefing. The Xbox One exclusive will feature the studio’s trademark ridiculous weapons, including a gun that fires vinyl records like a supercharged version of that scene from Shaun of the Dead.
- Dragon Age: Inquisition, the latest role-playing game from Mass Effect developer BioWare, might make like The Witcher 3 and use Skyrim as a jumping-off point. The third entry in the series got a new trailer at E3, but it’s not due out on current and next-gen systems until fall of 2014, so details are still scarce.
- Capcom’s Xbox One exclusive Dead Rising 3 takes the zombie fight out of the mall and/or casino and into the neighborhood. The reveal trailer at E3 showed the new hero driving down streets (and into storefronts) and sneaking through people’s garages to craft weapons to fight the undead horde, including a sledgehammer/circular saw combination that I swear is a modern-day version of the lirpas that Kirk and Spock used to fight each other in The Original Series episode “Amok Time.” Anyway, Dead Rising 3 promises a massive world with no load times. So that sounds all right.
- Dark Souls II, developer From Software’s newest attempt to express its Scrooge-esque disregard for gamers’ sense of progress and efficacy, will retain the previous two titles’ free-wheeling world-hoppery when it launches on PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 in March.
Why is this happening?
Now that we have a giant list of a bunch of open-world games — and that’s not even counting the de facto open worlds of massively multiplayer online games like The Elder Scrolls Online and Tom Clancy’s The Division — maybe we should try to figure out why we saw so many at E3 this year. The most obvious possibility is that we are seeing two brand-new pieces of hardware with the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and one thing brand-new pieces of hardware love to do is show off. “Look at our draw distances!” they will say. “Look at how much we can handle without loading screens! Love us! We’re new!”
New hardware is so needy.
It makes sense, though. Cramming a new box’s launch window with as much impressive tech as possible is a pretty effective way to get people excited about buying a new box. And a pretty straightforward way to do that is to promise gamers giant, good-looking worlds to play around in with fewer technical limitations.
Another possibility is that this is a side effect of games becoming more social overall. How much time did both Microsoft and Sony spend talking about “connected experiences,” streaming, and sharing with friends? The new metagame isn’t Achievements or Trophies; it’s building the network to give your play wider social context.
Even outside of the open-y world-ish games, we saw an increased focus on building teams. Bungie’s Destiny, The Crew, Sony’s Drive Club, The Division … these aren’t games about playing with random people online. They’re about building your go-to team that you will spend all your time playing with. They’re about establishing and building a tightly knit group to play with, and while it’s not true of all of these games, one of the ways developers might establish and promote such solidarity is by dropping you and your friends into a big world and saying, “Hey, go explore this together and see what happens.”
A third factor exists: the cloud. Everyone was talking about it. Forza 5, for example, will use the cloud to create your virtual “Drivatar” stand-in to race against others in your stead. Sony is using Gaikai’s cloud-streaming service to do … something, we hope. And all the while, gamemakers were talking about “persistent online worlds.” Ubisoft has The Crew, and Bungie has its online first-person shooter Destiny. All of these games keep going even when you’re not playing them. Cloud processing allows developers to create the illusion of a living virtual world that can be as big and varied as they can make it.
So it’s a little simplistic, but that may be the final reason game worlds are opening up: because they can.