GTA VI: 10 Lessons It Must Learn From The Competition

6. Making The World Evolve With You - Far Cry 3

One of the best moments in GTA V was when you finally switched over to playing as Trevor, with his starting location lookiong absolutely nothing like the previous city or gangster-filled suburb we'd been in as Michael and Franklin. Journeying down out of the mountains and across dusty trails through windy roads to then come across the big city unfolding over the crest of the approaching hill... it was sublime, but never replicated. It may seem like a strange comparison looking to Far Cry, but one of the best things about this open-world first-person shooter's take on the genre was the inclusion of watchtowers that you would have to climb to then unlock the surrounding elements in the world. It gave a great sense of progression to your time in the game, and again as in the previous point encouraged you to nip off and explore the world for more than just the sake of it. For the most part in GTA V the map was in darkness, with our journey through it uncovering a radius around where we'd been like some giant all-revealing paintbrush - however all this lead to was completionists routinely pausing the game only to move a few inches in a particular direction to make sure they'd uncovered every inch available. You'd come across a few icons this way, but with the vast majority being zero use to your core progression they could just be ignored. In addition to the watchtowers Far Cry also had encampments full of enemy soldiers that you could tackle whenever you fancied a break from anything story-driven. It's a trait that Ubisoft carried over to the divisive Watch Dogs too, and as Red Dead Redemption featured the same idea of 'liberating' small enclosures of bad guys, if Rockstar ever add a string of interiors we could see the same thing present in GTA.