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A trailer for American release of 'The Getaway'Whatever The Getaway was trying to evince in regards to world design got lost amidst GTA's monumental success. In the short term, Vice City was the "better" game, bigger, cooler, and more competently made, but nowadays it's The Getaway that feels like the real revolutionary. It took an approach to design that, to this day, belies what I'd expect from open-world games.
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And so, after repeatedly playing through the same sandbox paradigm—wackiness, "content," a location that's either entirely made up or merely based on reality—the idea of walking around, say, a comprehensively recreated Los Angeles sounds to me like a very special and vivid experience, something which I can't readily do in real-life and that only video games can provide. I'm sure there are simulators for this kind of thing, dry technology showcases for virtual reality or haptic feedback, but those don't fulfill the other half of this wish: for games, specifically games, to aspire towards education, for them to teach me the physical and social geography not of a close approximation of a city, but a city itself.The Getaway, quite often a bad game, and itself sadly bound to the idea that open worlds should be playgrounds for driving and shooting, is not a wholesale rebuttal to the kinds of sandbox games that exist today, but it could have been—should have been—the nexus point for a different strain of open-world design. Its defeat to Grand Theft Auto highlights how narrow the idea of a special experience is in video games, how made-up worlds are considered more vibrant than real ones, how fiction is considered more interesting than fact, how fantasy—childishly, tragically—is preferred to reality.Follow Ed Smith on Twitter.New on Noisey: Revisit the Best of Noisey Raps and Get Ready for Season 2