Real Time Worlds beat you to it -> http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/c/crackdown/

GTA IV’s ‘flying rats’ on the other hand, I couldn’t care less about.

I love exploration, but when its done, that’s it.

Collecting is mostly a waste of time rather than gameplay.

Ah found the mod list (not all of these are vital I would say, in fact I had to mod MTC travellers myself to make it in keeping with the lore. Actually, I’ve tinkered with a fair few on that list. But yeah, it makes for a pretty lore sensitive game. Things like the paradise lost (re-skin for the book) and ‘enclave are friendly’ are things I made myself, I just forgot to take them out.)

http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/4286/modlist.jpg

Pentadact:

Of course, mugs are awesome.

RP in single player games is great. I really wish that kind of fight for survival was a tenable gaming experience in vanilla Fallout.

I had a character, (no-loads (i.e. if you die, that’s it), no-fast travel, rp, need food and water to live, worse rad effects, brutal combat, etc. Basically everything possible to make it hard to live) that lived in the Northern Wastes of the FO3 map. I was rp-ing (using a mod) as an escaped android from the Commonwealth, so tried to limit human contact as much as possible. So I used a drainage chamber north of Canterbury Commons and made it into a home for the all the nick-nacks I picked up during my scavenging trips.

http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/6902/screenshot275k.jpg

I never trusted Oblivion enough to make a house in the wilds, I was worried that containers/areas might reset (which many of them did).

Then when they let you buy houses to store your unique loot in Oblivion, I never even tried it. There’s no more impersonal way to acquire something than with money.

For the record I decorated my Megaton house by buying the big heart shaped bed and throwing all the pre war money I could find on it.

However, Fallout did a lot better at making the town feel like yours: all your neighbors seemed to have weird little secrets and stories you could slowly learn about, or projects you could participate in. Elder Scrolls NPCs (probably because there are so many more of them) tend to recede into a blur. I’d only ask for the ability to participate in quest lines that upgraded the town defenses or shops’ stock.

For the record, I offed the guy in the green robe who would hang out by the bridge on the north end of Balmora. I think his name was Radarys? His house had a trapdoor on the roof.

This is also a good solution for having the world react to you without going to Molyneux levels of solipsism. It makes sense that a character might end up with a lot of influence over the town where she spends all her time.

I should also add: moving around should be enjoyable. I played a free weekend of Champions Online, which certainly wasn’t enough time to get any sort of feel for the game, but I have flirted ever since with the idea of subscribing more or less entirely because zipping around on jet boots was such a blast. Characters should have a really bitchin’ way to move around the open world, partly because this makes far-flung objectives less of an issue, but mostly because it’s the simplest conceivable incentive to explore.

I also think video game designers could learn a lot from tabletop design, especially not being frightened of making options in the world exist as is most convenient for the player – we don’t need a genuinely consistent open world in a game, only a theoretically consistent one. Why not have quests stumble upon players easily when they are looking for them, and rarely when they aren’t?

GTAIV’s gotten some (justified) crap from people for having an over-wrought story, but at the end of the day, I really liked Nico Bellic. And that made playing as him, even if I wasn’t doing stuff that advanced the story, more interesting.

This is admittedly, a nebulous, weird area, since it varies from player to player how much they’re going to empathize and identify with a given character. And it brings up questions about our relationship with the characters in FPS open-world games, like Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3, where we’re supposed to be identifying as “ourselves”.

It’s not just the matter of the way the character looks. And it’s definitely now about what reactive soundbites they’ll inevitably repeat a hundred times over the course of play (if they’re not just mute). But thinking back, the open-world games where I LIKED my in-game avatar were the ones I gave the most time to.

Did the game have fast travel?

If it didn’t, did people complain?

If either of those are true, it probably isn’t that fun. GTA 4 added teleporting cabs because driving across the city wasn’t much fun, which to me smacks of treating the symptoms rather than the disease.

Assassin’s Creed 2 on the other hand, allows you to transport between cities, but if there was an option to teleport me within a city, I wouldn’t take it. Saints Row 2 also doesn’t have fast travel, but I never missed it, why would I when inside an hour I could have a respawnable helicopter to parachute out of?

LaZodiac – definitely, whether moving through the world is fun is a key thing. It’s not really a way of filling the world, but it determines how you should fill the world. I think GTA over-estimates how fun moving around is: having to drive to the mission-giver for every attempt gets arduous. In Just Cause and Assassin’s Creed, though, travelling is the joy of the game and I’ll gladly go any distance for an objective.

Chris – Ha, Borderlands didn’t even cross my mind. I think it’s borderline: if it’s an open world, it uses it so poorly it might as well not be.

Rei – Yeah, using the main story to teach side missions, and informal missions, is definitely smart.

All I really know about APB is Graham’s preview in the mag – I wouldn’t know what kind of stuff would be appropriate without really getting what the game is going for.

For me, though, the choice of mission-giver wasn’t an interesting one, because it didn’t really determine the type of mission. And I hated everyone.

The GTA series has always been great at giving you fun, semi-informal mini missions like vigilante stuff you can do in a cop car. I used to like the Ambulance ones a lot, for some reason. There seem to be less of these in GTA IV, and the friends/lovers system they added instead did nothing for me.

Mostly GTA IV is good because it’s a great world, with awesome physics and a good driving model: all the product of talented coders and artists with time and money. I don’t think it was actually all that clever about how it filled that world and led you through it. The same world in smarter hands could have been truly incredible.

It’s also probably one of the best open-world games when it comes to “pick up and play,” because you don’t have to do the – or any – missions, and just mess around. Kill a bunch of cops and get into a chase or do a few jumps. This was also possible (and fun) in Prototype though not in many of the other games you mentioned.

Which is interesting, really. I mean, there’s more approaches to problems than in most games, but it’s got a linear forward push that denies a sandbox structure entirely. No messing around with UNATCO after you meet Savage (Unatco).

You do side quests, collect stuff, and depending on the choices you make can end up with different endings.

Some mentions were made of ‘having an effect on the world’. I do want to say that one thing I like less and less the more I get exposed to it is the Peter Molyneux model. Even if it weren’t always tweely good/evil, I think that kind of reactive world-shaping should probably be treated at this point as a failed experiment unless the actual point of the game is solipsism/psychosis/pathetic fallacy. Certainly actors within the world should react – see also the Invincibles discussion about neighbourhoods and the leagues ladder – but let’s not, say, play with the weather or the lighting model or the world geometry.

What’s APB? I probably will smack my self once it’s revealed.

I think open world games can encourage more exploration gameplay if there are simple, early main missions that get you to do those sorts of tasks. The only example I can think of right now is Freelancer. In an Elite style game, you can easily confused or lost due to the sheer number of options. There’s so much choice that you don’t really know what you can/can’t do. But a lot of Freelancer’s early missions are “fly with wingmates and kill people”, “escort this cargo”, “deliver these goods to that space station”. When the game finally says “earn a lot of money”, it’s already shown you a multitude of ways to do it for yourself, either through exploring or picking up jobs on a bounty board.

RE: Crackdown’s loose structure
The main “plot” definitely did leave a lot to be desired. It felt so trivial and unbound that I didn’t feel a great deal of necessity to complete it. Furthermore, killing a gang boss meant that his island was now a safe area. There was almost no reason to go back. No more baddies to kill or take on. The further you progressed in the story, the less play area there seemed to be.

I liked it a lot, but it was linear.

In regards to Prototype and AC2, yes. For Fallout 3? Not so much. Maybe a little if you enjoy finding random stuff, or get alot of random encounters, but otherwise its just “walk in a vaguely strait line”