Sometimes a shift in gaming history doesn’t arrive with a press conference or a new console. Sometimes it arrives with a pistol bang. In retrospect, I think 2009’s Red Faction: Guerrilla may have been that pistol bang for the open-world revolution that would explode into the mainstream in 2010. I didn’t actually play Guerrilla when it originally released. My experience with the original Red Faction was great, but Red Faction II hadn’t left me particularly impressed. At the time I wasn’t especially sold on open-world games either. Open world had developed a bit of a stigma for me, much as games-as-a-service would later develop one. It was only years later, after playing Red Faction: Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered, that I finally understood what Volition had accomplished. Looking at it through the lens of the Ubisoft open-world games I eventually came to love, particularly Far Cry 5 and Assassin’s Creed Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla, I could suddenly see how much of that design language was already present in Guerrilla. Its destruction technology was certainly a hallmark of Red Faction, but the larger achievement was its systemic sandbox: a world populated with objectives and activities in which the player had considerable latitude in deciding how to engage with them. Guerrilla didn’t invent the open world, but it demonstrated that the sandbox could be much more than simply a big map.
The more important evolution, however, wasn’t simply making the world bigger. It was figuring out what to put inside that world and why the player should care about exploring it. The open-world action-adventure games that followed increasingly borrowed ideas that had traditionally belonged to RPGs: character progression, builds, crafting, upgrading, loot and experience points. At the same time, developers developed increasingly sophisticated ways of communicating these enormous spaces to players through maps, icons, objectives and activities. These systems eventually became tightly interconnected. Exploration could uncover materials. Materials could improve equipment. Equipment could change a character’s capabilities. Side quests could provide experience, while random encounters could produce rewards. The world stopped being merely the place where the game happened and increasingly became the environment in which an entire system of interconnected mechanics operated.
But there was still a major problem to solve. How do you combine that freedom with the cinematic storytelling that made action-adventure games so popular in the first place? RPGs had more latitude because their traditions were already built around statistics, systems and player-driven progression. Action-adventure games were different. Their appeal was often rooted in strong authored stories, and stories generally require some degree of directed progression. The challenge was therefore not simply creating a bigger sandbox. It was figuring out how to preserve player agency while still delivering the characters, cinematics and narrative progression audiences expected from a blockbuster game.
That’s where I think 2010 becomes the real turning point. The industry began producing games that weren’t merely putting a story inside a large map, but were experimenting with ways for the world itself to become part of the player’s experience. And suddenly, several very different games were approaching that problem from very different directions.
What happened next would help define the blockbuster game for the better part of the next decade—and, looking back now, I don’t think it was an accident that so many of the pieces came together in 2010.
Please join me this Saturday, September 12th, 2026, on the Rounding Off Infinity gaming channel on YouTube, where we’ll delve deeper into this historical breakdown, and discuss the evolution and progression of open-world games.
Rounding Off Infinity 