Back in the day, Asscreed 1-4 and Far Cry 2-3, there were constant improvements and innovations in level design, mechanics, graphics, cool shit to do basically.
Recently the 2 “highly praised” Star Wars “open world” games essentially haven’t moved the needle but are just Generic Game with a star wars skin
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The new Open Worlds, firstly we have the Horizon Dawn killers, Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring. Exploration focused game design, unique mechanics include unrestricted interaction and massive dungeons hidden behind tiny doors. Honourable mention to Death Stranding where deep mechanics are overshadowed by top notch facial animation by famous actors
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Hero shooters, not a fan, but probably huge improvements and gameplay mechanics in Apex, Overwatch, Fortnight, maybe someone could chime in
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RPG, Baldurs Gate 3, an impressive step up from Witcher 3 where every choice is considered, voice acted, millions of lines of dialogue, every player thought predicted by the designers.
4 The indies - usually the place for innovation but recent indies are super polished for small teams, bug free, fully thought out, addictive game loop, Balatro, Tactical Breach Wizards, Animal Well,Thank you for Coming.
In summary i think the industry is just spread out across more budgets, team sizes and countries now, no longer are the days when western Devs come up with fun or innovative AAA games, the focus more is on casual appeal and form over function
Outlaws doesn’t really feel like either.
It has elements like both, but it doesn’t do exploration towers that unlock areas. It feels more like a third option between the two, which makes most sense because it comes from the devs that did both The Division and Avatar.
I enjoyed Outlaws open world gameplay, even though it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. It was still an enjoyable experience that felt like discovering the worlds on your own, instead of being guided and follow a checklist of stuff to do, despite having a list to get upgrades and do story and missions. It felt a bit more like Rockstar style open-world, where you just go about your business and run into encounters, instead of going from A to B all the time.
I’m right in the middle of this game currently, and I do fully see some of the jank that shows up in this game. And it does have some issues (I couldn’t land my ship on the starting planet until I finished a specific quest, but the game doesn’t tell you this).
However, I’m finding the game pretty fun overall and kinda hope they iterate on this scoundrel idea and make sequel. I’m having fun sneaking in and looting all these places.
I really hope they make a sequel game, or maybe a similar game based on a different character that would allow for a bit of a wider range of gameplay. But I wouldn’t mind if they kept going with Kay, she’s a likeable protagonist to me and I just love Nix.
Have to say I ran into very few bugs and I wrapped up the main story and loads of extras after about 45 hours. Funnily I ran into only one bug after finishing the main story, getting stuck in ingame cutscene-camera that prevented me from doing anything else, including being able to reload the game lol.
There’s definitely been some minor goofy and janky stuff throughout the game, but nothing that ended up gamebreaking. I think the most un-finished part of the game that I wish they’d fixed up before launch is the lipsync issues. It just looks so bad in some scenes and takes away from the otherwise great immersive experience.
Yeah other than this weird thing where the quest made landing the ship weird, I have had anything totally break the game — though it did crash on me once. But the autosave got me maybe ten seconds before that so I loaded right back where I was.
Mostly I’ve just seen little graphical bugs. Like when you fly off world and the “loading clouds” show up. Sometimes there will be a flash of a big, black chunk of the screen that shows up for a split second. Stuff like that.
I wouldn’t mind if Kay got her own little series out this. She’s cool, and Nix is cool. I like them both.