Upcoming third-person shooter Vanquish is not an open world game. At one time, however, it was.
"Vanquish was originally an open battlefield type of game, where the goal was to move around crushing enemy positions," writes Vanquish game designer Shinji Mikami in a recent blog entry. "However, once we got started with development, we quickly made the decision to change to a more linear structure."
After abandoning the open world concept, Mikami and his team concentrated on making Vanquish "as visually dense as possible". That's why Mikami thinks the game's graphics are "really quite wonderful".
Packing enemy after enemy on screen presented its own challenge for the developers. Mikami wanted the bad robots to be white, but finally consented that they should be red.
"When you think about it from a realism standpoint, camouflage exists to make things difficult to see, so in that way things make sense," Mikami adds, "but from a game standpoint, it was not the best idea."
The Graphics of Vanquish [Platinum Games]