I was trying to think of which games created certain mechanics that became popular and copied by future games in the industry.
The most famous one that comes to my mind is Assassin’s Creed, with the tower climbing for map information.
Please people, help me out with this, which game popularized any modern game to be a huge ass open world action RPG?
My best bet is that it is The Witcher 3’s fault.
First thing that came to mind are the Dragon Age games before, at least Inquisition was sort of action RPG.
Before that in a lesser extent the Assassin’s Creed games, although they were more action than RPG.
That said, I greatly enjoyed all these games, including Witcher 3.
In a way, I’d say World of Warcraft (2004 onwards) popularized that.
Here’s your starting place. Here’s a bunch of easy quests and monsters.
You quit the starting area. Everything feels huge and really, really fucking far away. One step in the wrong direction and you’re assaulted by an enemy with a 💀 for a level. Not only that, most people would only see the loading screen once before doing an hours-long playthrough and that also increased the sense of “fucking huge world”
Open world RPGs were always the goal, old games tried to mask the hardware limitations by using several techniques. By the time the Witcher 3 came along open world RPGs were the most common thing, in fact at the time lots of people called the Witcher a sellout because of that, it’s like if it had come up a couple years ago and had base buildiechanics, EVERYONE else was doing it.
There are LOTS of examples that pre-date TW3, I’ll limit myself to a few, just because it’s the ones I played. In the 90s and early 2000s I used to play Ultima Online, which is an MMO from 97 that has a vast open world. But if you want first person, Oblivion is old enough to drink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angband_(video_game)
Depends on how you constrain that idea. Open worlds were a very early idea, but old computers were somewhat capacity limited in how much content you could have.
I would say older than that (well maybe not elite), as much as the tech could handle it you should include:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Esprit
Here you had several town maps, including dual carriageways, main roads, side roads, one way streets. And you could just drive down any of them. They were all nondescript, but the amount of memory really limited what could be done.
There was also the games using the freescape engine. Driller, Darkside and Total Eclipse. These were all about as open world as you could achieve on the hardware of the time.
In terms of “open world” the definition is open to interpretation. I’d argue that text based adventures were open world too in their own way. So it really depends on what features people agree makes an “open world” game as to what the first game that contains all those features was.
Been around since at least early Final Fantasy / Chrono Trigger SNES era (for some values of action). Maybe Atari ‘Adventure’.
Could even say it goes back to the Zelda games on NES. Metroidvania games might also count. Those games all have the “you might progress in any available direction” mechanic, which IMO is the core of the open world mechanic.
There’s also some games like Star tropics where the whole world was open (as in you could return to previous locations) but progress was more linear.
Would super Mario world count as open world? Not as old as the NES ones I mentioned, but I’m curious. Or say if you could go back to previous worlds in SMB3, would that be open world?
funny how no one even mentioned World of Warcraft for MMOs because it’s too obvious.
There were popular MMOs before WoW, such as Runescape and Everquest. WoW just took a popular genre and rocketed it into the stratusphere.
The question was, “what games popularized certain mechanics.” The question was not, “what games created or introduced certain mechanics.”
Yes, there were other MMOs before WoW, but WoW took MMOs to a completely new level of popularity. I didn’t play ANY MMOs before WoW and wasn’t really interested to, but it was so popular that I jumped on to see what the deal was. Since then I have played ESO, LOTRO, AOC, and one other whose name I forget.
Other MMOs were popular among gaming nerds before WoW, but WoW made MMOs popular to normal people.
because it’s flat out wrong. WoW aped most of its systems from Everquest, which most of WoW’s development team was actively playing. They made some improvements on the genre, but the bones existed as early as 1997 with Ultima Online.
I promise you, Everquest was plenty popular at the time, and it didn’t invent those things either.
Assassin’s Creed and the Open World Gameplay design. It definitely existed before then, but after AC came out, it felt like every RPG switched to the open world map.
There have been “open world” games since the 1980s. Just of course, memory limited how big that world could be, and how much you could do in it. The genre as a whole is ancient.
The first ones I can think of is legend of Zelda and final fantasy, but I think there was also Adventure for the Atari before those even. The first Assassin’s Creed was 2007, Adventure was 1980
I feel like GTA planted that seed waaayy before that. I remember open world games being followed by “like GTA”. Assassin’s Creed was no exception.
Warcraft started an entire genre of games. Blizzard took that concept and created StarCraft, which spawned million dollar tournaments.
You mean RTS games? Warcraft is from ‘94, two years after Dune 2 was released.
Yeah, however before Warcraft there was Dune II. But I am not sure which one was more popular at the time and I think Dune II came way before Warcraft.
I think why Dune II is more notable though is that the first Dune game was more of an adventure style came, not a strategy game. Then they changed the game with its successor and introduced the asymmetrical factions that each had a few unique units with differing strategies.
Warcraft took that concept further of course. But even there its rather Warcraft II that really had a big breakthrough.
Skyrim for the horse armor dlc.
That was Oblivion believe it or not. Ahh, the good ol’ days where everyone got up in arms over even cosmetic DLC.
I thought that the uproar about horse armor was that it was the first pay-to-win DLC. The armor was not just cosmetic but actually provided a stat boost to your horse. The accusation was that the developers had made it too easy for enemies to kill your horse and decided to patch the game to fix it but made players pay for the patch.
I remember them having a sale on Oblivion DLC one time where the rest of the DLC was half-off, but the horse armor was double.
Oblivion was weird on DLC. Knights of the Nine was pretty good, and Shivering Isles was amazing. But they also had bullshit stuff like Horse Armour.
