I love openworld city games with a modicum of life to them. It's something that most fail at, prototype and infamous feel sterile and empty. They're more like linear games that happen to have open maps and the comic book gameplay isn't very engaging or memorable. Burnout paradise and midnight club LA's settings have a lot more life to them and they're just racing games. Fallout 3/NV, GTAIV, RDR, Yakuza 3/4 - they're the really brilliant ones this generation. I can suffer through mediocre ones a lot easier than I can stomach linear games. I completed wheelman, mercenaries 2, just cause 2, far cry 2, guerrila red faction and many others and I just really enjoy the design of driving around and getting to know the city. City games feel a lot more immersive, there are no invisible walls or blocked paths and the corridor design is so fake and I have no respect for the work developers put into level design in linear games. It feels wasted to design an area that you walk straight through and never see again.
Wheelman is the most under-rated, it's a lot more carefully crafted location than the others and deserved more praise. I suppose it feels so much better because it's based on a real city and doesn't look like it was made in a simplified map editor where you cut and paste buildings and features like just cause 2 does. I don't like it when the maps are huge and empty, I like it to be concentrated society and to be memorable enough that I recognise where I am on the map. Fallout 3/NV have a lot of society, but the lack of vehicles really lets them down and it's not as fun to explore the world.
I really think reviews treat these games unfairly. GTA has set the standard too high and other games can't come close. Yakuza gets low ratings simply because it has a small map, but you can't expect them to do anything better with 1/20th of the budget that GTAIV had. I would very rarely give a linear game more than 8/10. It's so much easier to make a linear game (as the FFXIII developers realised). Reviewers need to punish them more. If you translated a 90% linear game directly in quality to an openworld game, it'd probably get 70%.
Has anyone else noticed this? RPGs also get unfairly rated. There's a lot more room for flaws in a deep game, so they get punished for it. Meanwhile games like shadow of the colossus, ico, braid, portal, okami, mario, etc. that don't bother with more than a comic strip worth of narrative or characters get called perfect and flawless because of it. It's teaching developers to not be ambitious and that it's better to not try rather than risk failure. Dialogue, characters and quality writing is really hard, so let's just have 3 characters total, no dialogue, and a meaningless mysterious ambiguous plot that people will lap up as if it's artistic and meaningful.
