kontextmaschine:

MGS Phantom Pain’s free on PS4 this month, so playing that. It’s striking how much “open world” is its own genre that’s quietly but TOTALLY indebted to MMORPGs, particularly WoW

• you ride a mount
• collecting plants and animals and minerals
• around an open world full of enemies you see before you aggro
• or sneak by
• to collect treasure
• for the townbuilding and crafting money sinks cause why not?
• but sometimes you’re in a special enclosed space for a scripted run

i waved this off for a bit but it’s really getting to me now

how I’m pretty sure aggro radius scales with level, and how much they encourage you to play old content (missions/dungeons)

by way of bonus challenges for completionists and an even more streamlined way that it leads to the new gear you want

it’s like the abortive gear level/instancing of AC:French Revolution finally met… ohh, whatever point I was trying to make GTA Online made it already

but I haven’t even gotten to the stage where the game apparently becomes an online townbuild/attack/defend resource gatherer with a real-money currency to hurry things

which sounds so on the nose it might be a Kojima tease no matter how much the mechanics suggest it

the outlier as open world games go is Just Cause, which somehow took its physics energy seriously enough to invent a “physics” base to match Skyrim’s “RPG” and Destiny’s “FPS” and MGSV’s “Stealth” and Zelda’s whatever

coulda been HL3, just saying