Since the very beginning the promise of the open world game has been to allow the player to go anywhere and do anything, but that rarely works out. An open-world platforming game is generally defined by jumping and other parkour abilities, for example, while your more traditional Grand Theft Auto-alike is driving and shooting. Even in an open-world farming game you have the options of growing crops and livestock plus socializing, with nothing in the way of options for cattle rustling. This makes a kind of sense thanks to games being difficult to build and every new verb in the player’s arsenal providing a new way for things to go horribly weird, but for the first Streets of Rogue “horribly weird” was the goal. The “do (almost) anything” part came through but even so, it was a more level-based affair than open world so the “go anywhere” aspect was limited.
It’s the ________ Of the World As We Know It
That shouldn’t be a problem for Streets of Rogue 2, though, which features procedurally-generated maps ten thousand times larger than its predecessor and sets you free to… whatever. Follow the plot? Wander off to explore? Go all farm-sim? Sure, why not? It’s your world and nobody is going to bat an eye if you’re a friendly day-job worker who knocks over banks at night. Assuming you’re a stealth-thief, that is, rather than the kind who takes a potion of gigantism and loves nothing more than triggering all the alarms on the way in so there will be cops to fight afterwards. If you can survive the resulting attention it’s definitely allowed behavior, so there’s no reason to keep the gameplay anything resembling sane.
PAX West 2017: Choose Your Friends Carefully When Walking the Streets of Rogue
Just because you can live normally in the Streets of Rogue 2 world doesn’t mean the options to break into pure chaos are limited. Summon vampires, create a zombie outbreak, hypnotize people, or use the perks from a huge number of character classes to role-play their strengths into and out of trouble. The weapons options are also strong, with the promise of a wide arsenal including the usual guns/flamethrowers/explosives/rocket launchers, or being able to saddle up and ride the sheer destructive power of a bear. If the game has a goal it’s for the player to have a huge number of options available at any given time, enabling them to create as much havok as possible or even more than that if they get creative.
The original Streets of Rogue was a fan-favorite from its March 2017 Earl Access release, and the long series of regular updates it received through its full release and years after kept the players happy for a very long time. Seven years seems like a good wait for a sequel, though, so today received the announcement of Streets of Rogue 2’s launch into Early Access. The madness kicks off August 4, but there should also be a demo released for the Steam Next Fest kicking off tomorrow according tothis news post. It’s a crazy world out there in Streets of Rogue 2, and the go-anywhere-do-anything gameplay will guarantee it won’t be getting any more normal any time soon.
