Montana Smith said:
Prior to getting into Fallout 3, the last sandbox game I played was GTA: San Andreas. When I got heavily into FO3 it felt much more open and involved. After talking you often have to do some killing, but there were nearly always different ways of going about it, or even avoiding the killing.
While FO3 ends at the same point, the outcome can be slightly different, and the way you got there could be distinctive. Distinctive enough to have an effect on the people you meet, altering the way they react to you.
The RPG element comes into that as well, since certain skills give different opportunities.
See, here's the thing. Having an open world in an RPG is really not a new thing. Ever since the dawn of the digital gaming the genre has aspired to go there. Think of the
Ultima series for example. Heck, the first in series which came out in 1981 had a top-view map that was free to roam for the player. These days, people keep wondering how large is the open-world map of any upcoming
Elder Scrolls title going to be, and are kinda forgetting that the first one, titled
Arena, already had all of Tamriel for the player to explore. Or, if you pick any Bioware title before the Mass Effect craze, they're definitely built around the concept of openness. Sure, they're still divided into separate sections, or levels if you will, but regardless, they're somewhat free to roam in their condensed state, and the players can definitely tackle them in the order of their choosing and even come and go between 'em at will.
Now, those craving for some straightforward action were for the longest while treated with sidescrollers or, in the early 3D era, very condensed and linear dungeons (or castles, or office spaces, or whatever) with forward being usually the only general direction.
I guess you're starting to see now why word "sandbox" is all the buzz and marketing point in more action-oriented games, whereas in RPGs it is even something of an overlooked element. When the first GTAs rolled around, they essentially revolutionized action gaming. Whereas with RPGs a truly open space has been a foregone conclusion for decades now, all that's held them back has been the progression of technology.
In fact, it was something of a shocker that the title which set a landmark in the open world game design,
GTA III, had essentially no roleplaying elements whatsoever.
Montana Smith said:
I haven't played GTA IV long enough yet to see the longterm effects Niko's actions have.
I don't know if this is a spoiler, but there are none. The game will give you a handful of choices between choosing whether an (usually minor) character lives or dies, and the game actually does have a branching ending, but they're all on-the-spot decisions with earlier ones having no bearing on the options open for you.
Still, they can go a long way (along with your free-roam gameplay, whether you choose to kill and maim random pedestrians at will, or not) in determining what kind of man the Niko you play is. It'll all be in your head of course, but does one really need tangible rewards in the game world for it to matter?
Montana Smith said:
It also lacks driving. Would've been cool to become a 'road warrior' in the wasteland every now and then: FO3 + GTA IV = complete mayhem!
Incidentally, in
Fallout 2, you could have a car (which actually appears again in
New Vegas, as a wreck run into a muck pit near Novac). Of course, given the technical limitations, there was no running down beasties or raiders or random townspeople with it (unless it was a scripted sequence) - but it does kinda make you wonder whether these new open-world Fallouts are a step back. In the good old nineties you could essentially roam around the whole of American west coast at will, now you're limited to the immediate surroundings of a single city.
And it does also serve a point to why people see action-oriented sandboxes far more sandboxy than RPG ones. The former are essentially a mixture of different genres - you can have a shooter, a racing game, even something of a platformer in the same package. For the latter however, combat and conversation and consequence have been staples since god knows when, the only difference is in presentation.