MORE EMERGENT MECHANICS
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, Far Cry 5, Assassin’s Creed Origins and Odyssey are all just a few examples of recent open world games that focused on building a world full of systems, and then having those systems constantly interact with each other to create new stories told through gameplay on the fly. Grand Theft Auto did all that before the majority of the industry even knew what emergent meant, and Red Dead does that as well- but in both games, there has been a schism between open world gameplay and missions. While the former is obviously emergent, in missions, everything is structured, and highly linear, with there only ever being one single way to finish an objective, and even attempting to do anything else results in instant failure. Red Dead Redemption 2 is guilty of this as well, and hopefully, GTA 6 will learn from this particular flaw in Red Dead 2 and improve upon it to offer players more freedom within missions themselves.
