I'm taking a break from Far Cry 4 for the time being as I try to decide if I even want to bother finishing it. Earlier today when I was thinking about what else to play I knew that I wanted it to be an open-world game, no matter what. Then I got to thinking: What was the first open-world game ever?
Turns out it is a game that I did in fact play, but have very limited memory of because I was so young. Ultima 1 is largely considered the first 3-D (ish) open world game ever invented and it had a very limited initial release since it was only available on the Apple II computer, which very few people owned. It was an extremely basic game and calling it 3D is a bit of a stretch but what can you say? It was released in 1981 and video games as well as computers, couldn't really do all that much.
I still have fond memories of the freedom that the game had because no other game I had ever played was really like that.
The only reason I got to play this game at all is because one of the teachers at the school I attended was a super nerd and was really into gaming before most of us were even born. During breaks or after school I would go by his classroom and he would let me play Ultima, and I absolutely loved it.
The graphics were of course very basic and in those days most box art was a real letdown when you actually got to see the game. It didn't matter though, because we didn't know any differently back then and had nothing to compare it to anyway. In combat, you would mostly just run into stuff and hope for the best. It was truly open-world though and you could go anywhere you wanted even though there was a main quest to be accomplished.
When you would enter a dungeon or castle, that's when things got even more silly looking by today's standards.
The very idea of having anything that was truly 3D was just a pipedream at that point in time and instead, they did their best to create the illusion with simply line-drawn enemies that at the time seemed pretty wild because it did actually look like you were going down a hall, but compared to today, it looks like something a child made.
The way the game would let you know that you were going in the "wrong" direction would be by having enemies that were much more powerful than you and would beat the crap out of you. I compare this to the first time I played Skyrim and ventured towards some giants only to get whacked and thrown miles away by a single club strike that killed me instantly. I don't remember if Ultima did this or not, but I do remember dying a lot if I strayed too far off the path. There was some incentive to venture off the path though, because if you played your cards right you could stumble upon some loot such as a weapon that would make your attacks far more powerful than they were before.
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It just looks so silly, doesn't it?
I don't know what came second in the open-world genre but the next one I would later play would be once again an Ultima game called Ultima 4: Quest of the Avatar. A lot had changed by the time I got to play that and the only reason why I didn't play anything inbetween was because I changed schools and no longer had access to my nerd teacher pal and his Apple II computer.
In my mind, open-world games are tied for 1st place as being my favorite. Tied with MetroidVania games. These concepts all had to start somewhere though and Origin studios had just the right kind of people to make it happen, even though they didn't sell very many of them because computers were absurdly expensive back in those days and most people didn't have much use for them.
If you did play Ultima 1 I know two things about you though: 1) You are old and 2) you are a true gamer!