Friday, November 8, 2019

Skyrim Redefined the Open World Genre

Games are a fantastic entertainment media and it’s been a blessing for me to be able to experience the evolution of it throughout my life. One thing I’ve particularly enjoyed seeing is the evolution of the open world genre that was especially made popular with the introduction of Grand Theft Auto on the Playstation 2. The concept is pretty simple: create a sandbox with a few objectives and let the player decide how to approach it.

After the rise in popularity of the likes of Grand Theft Auto, many other companies have followed suit and created in the process derivatives of the Grand Theft Auto genre.

The genre grew stale over the years until the arrival of Skyrim.

What did Skyrim do differently?
Not only did Skyrim have an open world game but it also had an unlimited amount of adventures to be had. The quests in Skyrim can be replayed an unlimited amount of times and it always feels like there’s something new to see or explore. While they’re not the first one to have attempted something like this they are surely the first ones to have done it in such a way that it resonated positively with gamers.

Skyrim is the only game that I've own on every system that it was released for because I know that the money I spend on the game is given back to me by an almost unlimited amount of entertainment. Sure, I get bored with the game sometimes but the point is that the game stops when I tell it to rather than the game tell me when it’s over.
Even though I’ve completed the main quest, I can still hop in and work on my character or do some other randomly generated quests.

Many other gaming companies have tried to re-create the success of Skyrim with mixed results. More recently, we can see the Skyrim approach pretty evidently in the Ghost Recon Breakpoint game but it sure didn't resonate to the player the same way that Skyrim did.

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