A Case Against Open World Games
It’s not often that I argue against adding features. It’s counter intuitive. It goes against everything I normally stand for, and everything everyone else normally stands for. We want more. We want our dollars and cents to be giving us a tangible experience, as massive as possible. We want the cost benefit analysis to be as positive for us as possible. To be able to milk every single last hour and minute out of a game. Read More…
Skyrim and Individual Experiences
I want to talk about Skyrim. Well, I guess not just Skyrim, but I recently dove back into the game and it really started to make me think. When I first played the game back in 2011, I had an experience similar to many others who picked up the game. I ran through the giant world, stealing everything I could lay my hands on, murdering everything in sight, and grabbing every piece of loot I could find before finally putting it down, 200 some odd hours later without ever having completed the title. Read More…
Let's Talk About Fallout 4
Let’s talk about Fallout 4. I’m a pretty big fan of the franchise, and while it might be sacrilege to some to mention, my favorite game of all time is Fallout 3. It really made me love games like none other, and it got me into this whole criticism thing. It’s the first game I ever marathoned, playing it for seven hours straight the first day I had it, as a weird thirteen-year-old sitting in my basement in front of my TV.
So when I heard that a sequel was coming out, I was a little bit excited, to say the least. From the announcement to the release I could barely contain myself, and when the day came I kicked my friends off of my TV so I could play my preloaded copy. And as I first dove into the game it was amazing. It controlled so much better, and I didn’t have to rely on the crutch of V.A.T.S to make my way through encounters anymore.
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Super Mario Odyssey
< Super Mario Odyssey continues to baffle me. I don’t always fully understand the decisions that Nintendo makes, but somehow they generally work out for them. So when they released a trailer for the new Mario game for the next real generation of Nintendo consoles, I was actually excited in a way that I don’t usually get about Nintendo products. This is how we got Mario 64 and Galaxy, and the entirely-less-cool Sunshine. New Nintendo consoles ideally drive innovation in gameplay and graphics, so the first real new 3D Mario in years enticed me. Read More…
Ghost Recon: Wildlands - First Impressions
The beta has ended and in one short week Ghost Recon: Wildlands will be in everyone’s hands. So we sat down this weekend and tore through all of the content that the beta had to offer, both solo, and together in co-op. There was a huge amountof content to be found, and more than a few baffling decisions made. I don’t know if it feels like a Ghost Recon game, but it was damn fun. You can clearly see the influence that other open world games have had on its design. It’s an amalgamation of different ideas and tones that come together surprisingly well.
Boundless Discover: The Majesty of Adventure in Games
Games as a medium are about letting you enter a new world, step into the shoes of someone else, and see majestic things. They are different from other kinds of media like film or literature because you have to interact with them. A movie will keep playing, a book will keep going, no matter how you wish to proceed through it, but a game requires you to interact with it, and this interaction can change the course of the story.
More and more games are being built around open worlds and non-linear experiences. They let us as players take this sense of adventure that is so inherent to games and amplify it, and there is no better example than The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.