The jibe goes that all video games – at least those at the blockbuster end of the budgetary spectrum – are now one and the same. Since 2001’s Grand Theft Auto III plunged us into Liberty City, a doe-eyed homage to Scorsese’s Manhattan, and allowed us to pick out own route through its grubby streets toward whichever mission marker took our fancy, the so-called “open-world” game has slowly, inexorably, morphed all genres into its image. This monogame has become the standard template to which every major crime, fantasy, cowboy and, in the Forza Horizon series, racing video game now cleaves.
With their geographical and extracurricular expanse, open-world games are inordinately expensive to make and therefore come with high risks for those who build them; the video game industry is haunted by the ghosts of companies that dreamed, then failed, big. But the potential winnings are equally life-changing. Five years after its release, Grand Theft Auto V has never ventured far from the summit of the monthly charts, selling close to 100m copies to become the highest-grossing entertainment product yet built, in any medium.
Playground Games, a British team from Leamington Spa, is another studio to profit from the format. Its suite of four open-world racing games, which have variously condensed the topographies of Colorado, France/Italy, Australia and, in this latest game, Great Britain into a series of delightful, high-contrast pastiches, now outsell the strait-laced parent series, the American-made Forza Motorsport. There is, of course, a place for racing simulator games, which allow players to test drive physics-perfect recreations of bedazzling race cars (for one thing, these games can provide a route into professional motorsport for young drivers who otherwise do not have the resources to catch the eye of manufacturers and teams). But for most players, the opportunity to bomb across an idealised recreation of Suffolk to Bach’s Air on the G String in a souped-up Range Rover, desecrating miles of dry-stone walling without so much as denting a bumper, comes joyously closer to the heart of why many of us play video games with their simulacra of power, escape and exploration.
Forza Horizon 4 is a game filled with diversions and interludes. From racing a steam train across the Yorkshire Dales to hunting for long-lost vintage wrecks to salvage from remote barns, you’re never a few hundred yards from something extraordinary to do. But the game’s irresistible appeal derives from the development team’s understanding that it’s the journey not the destination that counts. Almost nothing in this Britain, which cycles alluringly between the seasons, slows you down. Only the thickest tree trunk, widest reservoir or fattest tractor is enough to bring your E-Type Jaguar or Mini Cooper to a stop. In all other instances, the game allows exuberant, hedge-flattening flow, as you tear through fields of wheat and up wuthering tors, whooping with uncomplicated glee.
With a galaxy of open-world games on offer, the quality of movement and traversal is often the deciding factor in luring players from one reality to another. Marvel’s Spider-Man is another that understands the crucial appeal of travel, allowing us to swing with dizzying speed and grace through New York City. Superman may be able to fly like a bird, but what Spidey loses in manoeuvrability he makes up in swooping parabolas. Below you sits the metropolis, a patchwork of nagging mission markers, of people who need rescuing, of environmental disasters that need recording, of masked villains that need baiting. But up here, where the air is thin and the sun is brilliant, you can escape all of that.
While the open-world template may have gobbled up most forms of design that don’t fit its ravenous mode, it gives us the freedom to ignore the noise of the virtual to-do list and, whether it’s cresting a Scottish hill in a Ford Cosworth, or gliding with the pigeons in a Lycra suit, experience the simple joys of virtual traversal.
Also recommended
Dragon Quest XI
(PS4, Switch)
Beloved in Japan, where since the late 1980s the series has inspired mass outbreaks of truancy among schoolchildren, the Dragon Quest games have always been overlooked in the west. Something like Dungeons and Dragons meets Aesop’s Fables, they are written by the 64-year-old comic book veteran Yuji Horii. Unlike rival Final Fantasy, whose stories are often difficult to follow and laced with arcane terminology, Dragon Quest has the robust construction of a fairytale, with clear, consistent characterisation and compelling arcs. This, the 11th game, is one of the strongest, following a royal infant who escapes a besieged castle in a Moses basket, and returns years later to find himself the kingdom’s pariah. Horii’s storytelling is rich and alluring, even if some of the game’s attitudes to female characters haven’t matured so well.
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