I read some article somewheres about the amount of 'verbs' in a game. Like, the amount of actions that you could perform in-game. It kind of got me thinking. With all of the genre cross-pollination, will there be eventually be a 3D engine that will enable pretty much any type of game experience? Where you can interact with the world almost any way you'd want to? Walk into a building, pick some dude's pocket, defenestrate said dude, and then shoot him on the way down? And then drop a cabinet on his head? (Actually, I just want to be able to do THAT.)
Which games do you guys think have done the best job at allowing you to interact with a game world in the largest variety of ways, without becoming needlessly cumbersome? (I'm mostly talking about real-time games in a 3D world. It would be pretty easy to count the 'verbs' in, say, a SCUMM game. They're right there on the screen!)
Twilight Princess had a lot of gameplay modules, but they weren't really smoothly integrated. Red Dead offered some freedom, but it seemed mostly illusory, to me. You'd think a good Superman game would at least allow for the basics... melee, throwing, projectile weapons, flight, walking, running, jumping... Crackdown actually had most of that (albeit with climbing in the place of flight), amped up to the nth degree, which is why it was so fun to play around in that world.
I dunno. I haven't thought too much about it. Feel free to include non real-time games, if you have a really good example of freedom within a game world.
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