How big is big? How about 5,560 square miles of accessible in-game terrain big? Yeah, that’s big.
That’s also FUEL, a racing game coming next month from Codemasters/Asobo Studio for the Xbox and PS3, along with a PC version. It’s just been entered in the Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition for “Largest playable area in a console game”.
According to the article, if you wanted to drive straight across from one end of the map to the other, it would take three hours. Shucks, with that much land, I’d have thought it would be more like five ;).
FUEL is described as an “open-world, sandbox” type of game, with a dynamic weather system. And, naturally, a multiplayer component, with room for up to sixteen competitors at once.
Y’know, I wonder how they managed that much space. Especially as the world is fully open, on-road or off. And the weather effects on top of it all. The PC version minimum is 3 gig CPU, or (recommended) 2.4 with a Core 2 duo. Also recommended is a video card with 512 vram. Unfortunately, SecuRom will be used for DRM.
So anyway, it’s big. Could it be too big? What do you think?
5,560 square miles ends up being a square about 75 miles on a side for a longest as the crow flies route of about 105 miles. Must be epic traffic, ridiculously switchbacked Riverworld-esque roads, or low speed limits and lots of cops if it takes three hours to cover that distance.
We PC gamers laugh at their pathetic distances.
I played a lot of Falcon 4.0 in the day - ONLINE, with other players as either opponents or allies. According to National Geographic, Korea is 38,321 square miles. Falcon covered all of Korea, and a decent amount of surrounding ocean and a chunk of China besides. All dynamic and pretty frickin’ amazing (especially flying towards the front line at night when a battle had broken out - you can see the fighting and explosions from a hundred miles away… which is something like 15 minutes away in an F-16 at cruise speed.)
Woops, that was only South Korea (in square miles). North Korea is even bigger, at 46,540 square miles. So - yeah, probably well over a hundred square miles of terrain, and far too little of it on the enemy side of the FLOT was boring.
That’s big??? According to Wikipedia, the game world of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall was 62,394 square miles in size (plus more than 15,000 towns, cities, villages, and dungeons for the player’s character to explore).
Now THAT is big! :)
And I’ve got to say that I loved just wandering around Tamriel, poking my nose into dungeons and towns on a completely random basis (where I wasn’t on some minor quest). I never did get too far on the main quest (if I remember correctly, the combat was too tough for me - I’m terrible at that kind of thing), but I loved the game.
That’s one that if I decide to buy I will skip the PC version, the Securom is just another incentive NOT to purchase it.
I prefer to play racing games on a console. The controls feel tighter. I wouldn’t want to play a RTS on a console, and shooters seem less precise with a joystick vs kb/mouse, but racers are one that to me excel on consoles. Recently I got to try Burnout Paradise on the PC, it was playable, but was greatly improved if you attached a 360 controller and used it instead.
I read about this the other day and thought it sounded like something to watch. At the PS2 launch, the best game in my opinion was Smuggler’s Run. It was an offroad racing game, but it had a free exploration mode where you could drive anywhere. It was one of the first racing games I remember where you weren’t limited to a fixed track. If you saw a mountain in the distance you could drive to it. This was my son’s first video game too. In free mode, all you had to do was hit the button for the gas so he used to love to do that; control of the car came later.
Well, I meant to say a hundred THOUSAND square miles for Falcon 4.0… ah, well. Maybe I can blame it on fatigue due to a cold. Yeah, that’s it…
Hey, maybe someone should alert the Guinness folks about those numbers, eh? Yeah wcg, Daggerfall sounds like it was a LOT bigger. Was it ever ported to the consoles?
Coyote, not feeling well? If so, hope you’re better soon.
I’d love to see a remake of Daggerfall. Yeah, Morrowind and Oblivion were great, but I’d still like to revisit Daggerfall, if someone just modernized the graphics.
It’s kind of funny, but I remember the game as having really cool graphics. I LOVED the snow falling, in the towns and countryside (and was a bit disappointed not to find snow in Morrowind). But when I re-installed the game a few months ago, just to relive the experience, I was shocked at how bad the graphics really were. Heh, heh. Well, our standards change, don’t they?
And while they’re at it, they might as well do the same to Arena, the first Elder Scrolls game. Yeah, I know, none of this will happen. If they ever do re-release these games, they’ll change everything, I’m sure. Too bad. Oh, well, enough nostalgia. :)