The open world game, or sandbox if you prefer, isn’t a genre any longer. At this point, it’s just another method of structuring other genres in a way that gives you more freedom in how to play the game. Open world games aren’t GTA clones anymore; they’re just games with a modern version of the ol’ Mega Man boss select screen. It’s been neat over the past couple of years to watch the open world platform branch out. Crackdown, Assassin’s Creed, Burnout Paradise, Far Cry 2, hell, Spider-Man; all very different games that let you do whatever the hell you please in their world (to a degree) on your way to completion.
One of 2008’s more promising games, Radical Entertainment’s Prototype, is a violent action game with a nice open world foundation. It looks gruesome and brutish but it also has some neat ideas behind it, particularly its brand of character customization. Alex Mercer, the genetically altered amnesiac protagonist with a spooky past, eats his felled foes and gains all of their characteristics, abilities, and memories. This lets you come up with all sorts of horrific, bombastic ways to destroy things but it also lets you blend in with crowds, a nice twist on the open world formula of manipulating hordes of NPCs. Sounds cool, no? As of last April, Prototype was all but done, ready to ship after one more coat of polish. Then, days after it was last previewed, Sierra announced that it was getting delayed until 2009. Then Activision killed almost all of Sierra’s upcoming line-up after their merger with Vivendi. Activision did decide to keep Prototype, but no one’s seen hide nor hair of it since.
Shane Bettenhausen has intimated on the 1UP Yours podcast that the game’s being dramatically altered in order to score a Teen rating from the ESRB. Of course, Activision laid off close to one-hundred Radical Entertainment employees back in August. Losing half your work force makes it hard to finish a game that’s undergoing a last minute redesign. Activison’s homepage for Prototype says it came out on September 15th. It didn’t. So where the hell is Prototype? Who knows!
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