E3 Notebook: Brave New Open World

Senior Writer Troy Wolverton attended the Electronic Entertainment Exposition -- aka E3 -- in Los Angeles this week. Below are some of his thoughts and impressions from the show.

Keep an eye out: The game publishers are looking to do a new twist on Grand Theft Auto.

Following the success of titles such as Take-Two Interactive's Grand Theft Auto III, many in the industry tried their hand at knockoffs, such as the True Crime series from Activision .

But now, publishers are going beyond doing their own versions of shoot-em up cops-and-robbers games. Instead, they are focusing on -- and trying to duplicate -- what many see as the essence of the game.

One of the buzz phrases heard around E3 this week was "open-world gaming." The idea is to create games that, like the GTA series, allow users much more choice in how they play.

Most roleplaying or combat-type titles force gamers to accomplish particular tasks in a specific order within a particular virtual area to advance. The way the game is designed, they can't move their characters out of a particular area -- a hallway, say, or a bridge -- until they accomplish the set task.

In contrast, games such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas create an entire virtual world that users can explore at just about any time and in any order. Although the games still require users to accomplish tasks, they have more freedom about the order in which they accomplish those tasks and the way they do them. Need some money? You can rob a bank or beat up some poor guy walking down the street. You get the idea.

Other publishers do, too. They see the open-world concept as a way of creating titles that are more compelling than the standard video-game fare currently offered and figure that consumers are going to increasingly demand games that give them more choice and greater room to explore.

Electronic Arts' recently released The Godfather game and THQ's upcoming Saint's Row are essentially direct descendants of Grand Theft Auto in that they combine the gangworld concept with an open-world format.