Take a gander at Dishonored, Gamescom’s best game this year. It’s as if Arkane built it in another universe – one in which developers really had spent the last decade thinking about and iterating on the achievements of Looking Glass and Ion Storm’s best, just like we expected they would at the time.
Truly, it’s a good time to be ogling video games. And the fact hasn’t escaped Warren Spector.
“A lot of people are making big open world games now, and a lot of people who are building games of choice and consequence and I couldn’t be happier,” Spector told The Guardian Games Blog.Twenty years ago I remember sitting there with the guys at Origin and the guys at Looking Glass and saying, ‘Why isn’t everybody doing this?’ We would look at each other and say, ‘Why isn’t everybody else making games like we do?’ And now everybody is, which is cool.”
The ‘big open’ part of these games comes at a price, though, says Spector: “I’m kind of an inch wide, mile deep sort of guy. There are people who are trying to simulate massive worlds at a level of an inch per mile, and I don’t get it. I really want deep worlds that you can interact with. My ideal game would be one city block – some day I’m going to make that.”