Over the past seven years, however, many studios have assimilated characteristics from true, free-roaming titles into a variety of properties. From Tomb Raider to Dark Souls, there are a bevy of titles that incorporate a handful of the genre’s tropes —non-linear exploration and crafting systems, for instance— even though they aren’t, strictly speaking, open-world games. As a matter of fact, this amalgamating process is similar to that of Call of Duty; with Infinity Ward’s behemoth introducing progression systems that were traditionally associated with RPGs post-Modern Warfare. Mechanically speaking, this typifies how a genre evolves across the generation span. How they adapt and conform to meet the supposed expectations of their audience. In fact, many analysts concur that for a game to gain significant traction in 2014, it must have some open-world components.
For example, Marshal Cohen, from analyst group NPD, touched upon the subject shortly after E3, 2013:
“Open world is just the final step in that evolution. It will come to a point where most gameplay will just consist of walking from point A to point B and players will love it. We can see that players have grown accustomed to exploring grand landscapes and collecting a hundred little trinkets along the way. That’s the evolution of gaming right there.”
In the post, Cohen outlines the various, aforementioned perks of the open-world genre — player agency and branching narratives, for example— and how they ultimately infuse a game with an innate sense of longevity. When applied correctly, this durability often evokes hundreds of hours of enjoyable content and allows the game to capture imaginations with its unobtrusive freedom and immersive environments. Much like the underlying appeal of first-person shooters, the open-world genre taps into a primitive desire within gamers; only in this case, that desire relates to traversing uncharted territory as opposed to shooting your friends in the head. Nevertheless, it’s clear how each of these genres have respectively served as pillars within gaming culture since their infancy.
First-person shooters have subsisted as a bankable lodestone in the industry precisely because they act as the culmination of accessibility and hardcore score-chasing. There’s a certain purity to the point and shoot mechanic that has allowed it to survive for generations and, as it evolved and gained more clout, various progression systems were layered over its rudimentary skeleton. Games such as Wolfenstein and Duke Nukem, for example, would later go on to influence some of the genre’s seminal titles like Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, which were cornerstones of the Nintendo 64’s limited library.
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