Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction vs. ProtoHYPE

[Oskuro]

This is amusing, because many people hated GTA4's attempt at stronger storytelling, and Saints 2 is a better game precisely because it DOESN'T have a strong story with personal motivations etc etc.

Mafia had pretty strong story-telling, although the game world wasn't nearly as open-ended as the GTA games, but that might be the thing, if you're striving to create an open-ended game world, maybe you should focus in letting players run loose doing their thing. But then again, not even MMO designers get that concept.

[Starglider]

if you're striving to create an open-ended game world, maybe you should focus in letting players run loose doing their thing. But then again, not even MMO designers get that concept.

Currently that thinking produces Crackdown. Which is ok as far as it goes, but ultimately kinda bland and repetitive. However it's theoretically possible to use something like L4D's 'director' AI to make 'attacking random enemy-held buildings' play like doing missions, by adapting and chaining individual gameplay challenges (snipe this, handle a mob here, do driving stunt here) in arbitrary locations rather than fixed ones. It's also theoretically possible to make a storyline that feels reactive to player choices with a resonably limited content base (see; things like the Facade tech demo). All this involves high technical risk though, and games companies (particularly games publishers) hate to sink money into speculative R&D, so I'm expecting slow incremental progress at best.