I will remain on the GTA franchise. The GTA franchise is well known for its open-world / Wide Open Sandbox games in which you spend more time exploring and doing what you want, than doing quest and interacting with npcs. They have the record for bestselling. And GTA 5, the last episode, exploded the selling. So there are many publishers that thinks that if they want to sell their games, they have to be open-world. And indeed, many of them published open-world games.
This is a non point, because if you want to associate open world with GTA, that's fine. They were obviously one of the first to do it successfully to the point of capturing a major audience, but as bug ridden and clunky as Bethesda's games are, they do open world MUCH better than Rockstar in my opinion. One of the main reasons Bethesda's games have historically been ridiculed for fps drops, slowdowns, and crashes has been their struggles with memory management, particularly on the PS3, but that's because they try to add that element of realism to actually keep track of stuff you dropped, rather than just have it disappear. In GTA you can literally stand there and look at a car, and then wait a minute go around the corner where it went and it will be gone. Because the game barely keeps track of anything.
GTA peaked for me with San Andreas because not only did it have a great story with great comedic value and a character I could relate to, it also had better controls than its predecessors and it really took mini games to the next level. And they were OPTIONAL mini games.. (more on that below). I played GTA III, and then GTA San Andreas before going back and trying to play Vice City and I couldn't do it, in the same way I couldn't go back and play GTA III. There was so much more control in GTA SA as far as your camera movement that I found GTAIII a chore to control my player. If I had played VC before SA, I might have a better appreciation for the game, but I didn't. I could probably go back now and play it, but trying to play it fresh off SA was an exercise in frustration for me.
Someone actually bought GTA 5 for me this past Xmas and it's still sitting on my tv stand, wrapped in the plastic. GTA4 was a step backwards in terms of story and characters, IMO.
But there are two things that need to be considered. First, Open-world is a genre, like RPG is a genre, or strategy is a genre, (with multiple sub-genre). Genres depends on the kind of fictionnal universe you are depicting or the taste of your target audience. There are many genre and gamers has many taste. Some people hate open-world, some other don't care about it. You can't decide that every game should be open-world. It's like, if the movie that sold the most was a comedy, every new movie should be a comedy. So the new Silent Hill movie adaptation should be a comedy. A documentary about people starving to death should be a comedy. The next Jaw sequel should be a comedy, let's forget about the franchise core genre. Let's forget about horror, documentary, social study, police genre. It's comedy that must rule them all. Second, do you consider that Fallout 3 is the best open-world game ? There are plenty other open-world game that do far better. If you want an post-nuclear open-world FPS you have Rage & Borderlands that have a far better engine, and far more impressive scenery shit.
I disagree again.. I think every game COULD be open world. Do I think they all should? No. But I love the freedom it gives. One of my major complaints in NV is the damn invisible walls. I don't approve of associating a game franchise with a certain genre at all. I think taking the risks that you mentioned in your first paragraph that I had to snip makes things interesting. I also believe that when a studio really puts the work in its hard to mess up in any genre. But honestly I don't know what these studios are doing.
You look at movie franchises and you can tell the games were rushed. I mean it's clear they're not trying to cater to anyone, they're just trying to cash in on the success of the movies. The games are utter dog shit and there's really no debate. If you look at one of the most failed console games of all time, Superman 64... Did that game fail because of their choice to make it an open world 3d game? Absolutely frig'n not. It failed because it was a bug ridden mess with no attention to detail. Even without playing it, you can look at screen shots and ask yourself if they tried to do Atari in 3d.
There absolutely needs to be more innovation in gaming. A perfect example is fighting. Why does 90% of the games out there with the exception of sports and puzzle games, have to have fighting in it as the core game mechanic? I'm seriously waiting for a game to come out that's still open world explore everything, but is maybe puzzle driven instead of walking around being attacked every 5 minutes.
And as a side note, your comment about Rage is highly debatable. I have it and I've played it, but while I find the scenery impressive, there are a lot of people who dislike the new LOD approach that Carmack used. And I'm not alone in finding the game highly repetitive. I also dislike the mini games (racing) that are forced on you as part of the quest line to continue the game. Rage was one of the last games I rented before my local blockbuster closed. I always like to try a game before I buy it since I've been burned in the past buying new releases. I liked it when I rented it because it seemed really fun. Then someone gave me a copy of the 360 version for xmas and after playing it for a while I started to see its glaring flaws and it's lack of fulfilled potential.
Also, you disregard top down games as games that has horrible/awfull/outdated graphics.
I'm not disregarding them. Like I said. FO1&2 are fun games. But if you give me a choice I'm going to pick the 3d game every time (assuming all other things are about equal) I certainly feel like they have their place and I conceded to Lujo that there is indeed a place for them, but at this point that place is in the value game section of a store. As I said to him, nobody is going to pay $50 or $60 for a top down game now. He was spot on when he pointed out that you can create those top down games with a much smaller studio, so you can sell them at a lower price point, but at the end of the day I think they're still a lot less popular, you're going to sell a lot less, and some people just won't play them. Now granted there are some people who won't play 3d games either, but I think the majority of those people just don't play video games that often. There are probably some out there like Lujo who just refuse to play 3d games and believe they like the older style games better, but I would be surprised if that was the majority. Also, the amount of bias Lujo clearly displays makes it hard for me to believe that he's genuinely given 3d gaming a chance, but I could be wrong.
At the sprite era, you add to create manually every image. The animation of Fallout 2 ou Duke Nukem 3D characters were, indeed, animations, sequences of hand-made individual pictures. In the case of 3D, the dev only have to make some squeletons, for each type of creatures, then they only have to make textures.
You have seriously over simplified the process of making a 3d game. Skeletons aren't generally made until you get to the rigging stage of production unless you're specifically trying to create multiple characters using the same skeleton. You generally have to build a low poly model first you will actually be displayed in game. Then you have to go through the process of making a high poly model so that you can display your texturing. This can be done in the modeling program or in a sculpting program. After that's done, you can use the high and low poly meshes to bake a normal map, and finally you can start filling in your textures. At this point, or after you've finished your low poly mod is when you can actually rig your skeleton and start the animation process. But that's just for one individual creature.
The real work is in the world itself. The physical terrain is generated from a heightmap, and yes there are algorithms you can run to generally fill in things like vegetation and whatnot, but each individual piece of terrain, and background piece like a cave or whatnot from an interior cell are all created individually. In a top down game you can render a background in a single image and call it a day if you want. In a 3d game, the entire set piece has to be created and modelled in the same way as creatuing a creature. And in Bethesda's case (which I think is a smart approach) those pieces are created like puzzle pieces, so that you can use them with more versatility instead of just creating one big 3d model and only being able to use it one time. Then when all those pieces are done, you still left out the part about creating collision data for each item.... then you have to go and create your static items like all the little milk bottles, tin cans, garbage cans, etc. that lie around the world.
Then when all that is done, you still have to go and individually place each piece within your world and fill out all your interior cells, each of which are individually hand crafted. It's seriously a metric **** ton of work, and you haven't even gotten to scripting and voice acting yet.
On that same subject, Fallout 3 as a First person perspective open-world dungeon crawler doesn't represent a new gameplay genre. First person perspective dungeon crawler exister at the beginning of the 90s, far before Fallout 1, with games like Lands of Lore, Might & Magic or The Eye of Beholder. As for open-world games, they already existed at the end of the 90s in the same time as Fallout 1, with games like GTA 1, Urban Chaos or Outcast. So you can't say that Fallout 3 gameplay represents the future while Fallout 1-2 gameplay represents the past, as both games were made at a time both gameplay genre co-existed.
Both games were made at the same time, but you can only do so much with a top down game. 3D games are forever improving because computers are getting more and more powerful and capable of more and more detail. A sprite is a sprite. It's always going to be flat no matter how many pixels per inch you give it. The future is going to be something out of the realm of Otherland where we're doing full on VR, but despite the support for Oculus Rift, that technology is still FAR from being perfected or even practical.
Its also nice to learn that Fallout 3 was intended for children, while at the same time, i can read in the Bethesda official website that the same game is forbidden to anyone less that seventeen. So, considering the good selling, we have to suppose that everyone born the same year bought it.... Or that there are games for children and games for adults. (I will try to make my 5 years old niece play Paper please and see if it was intended for children)
I didn't say FO3 was aimed at children, I said video games in general are aimed at kids, and that includes teenagers as well. And if you think kids aren't playing these games regardless of the ESRB rating, you're extremely naive. Don't tell me you never watched an R Rated movie as a kid or tried to sneak a peak at your dad's playboy.
) Why did a Fallout game have to be one of those, when the original Fallout 1/2 very distinctly WEREN'T that kind of thing back when it was "Baldurs Gate", "Neverwinter Nights", "Diablo 1/2", "Icewind Dale" etc...
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