After Arkham, Black Flag and GTAV, is this the end of an open-world gaming golden age

[wraggster]

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-content/uploads/edgeonline/2013/11/GTAV.jpg (http://media.edge-online.com/wp-content/uploads/edgeonline/2013/11/GTAV.jpg)Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag can easily see you through to the new year with its heaving open-world of missions and quests. You could put hours into Arkham Origins over the winter weeks, too, hunting for all the snowbound secrets and swooping down on rampaging thugs. Then there’s Grand Theft Auto V, with its generous urban sprawl and endless opportunities for exploration (and mischief). What’s more, you can satisfy your appetite for months for a one-off, upfront fee of roughly £40. People often compare videogames to film, and as two audio-visual based mediums that’s fair enough, but in terms of the current value proposition games offer they’re far closer to albums: media bought once that lasts for a virtual eternity.When you press pause and think about it, that’s astonishing. We’re in a golden age of value for money that could vanish in a couple of years, if not sooner. We might nitpick certain creative decisions and directions. We might complain about the over-familiarity of certain yearly iterations. We might balk at locked, on-disc DLC and extras. But I say we should take Christmas 2013 as a time to take stock and to count our blessings. Currently, we can buy entire worlds – carefully curated and meticulously crafted worlds – that allow us to engineer our own stories and make our own improvised entertainment and set-pieces without friends, from the comfort of our home.We have NPC playgrounds that take vast teams of technicians, engineers and artists years to create and fine-tune, and they often even go the extra mile to maintain and update these ecosystems over time. When you catch a movie at the cinema and enjoy it, you have to wait to shell out the same amount of money again to own it. With a game, presently, you buy it, you keep it and you revisit it as often as you wish. If cinema is a non-refund restaurant, videogames are Star Trek’s food replicator.

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