Yeah he’s right, the 2010s saw a flood of open world video games that all claimed to be bigger and better than ever before, but very few of them had any substance. That said, I’ve just started playing the Outer Worlds and it feels like Obsidian weren’t ambitious enough. There aren’t enough choices, especially in dialogue, and it often comes down to being mean or being nice. The planets are small so I only spend a few hours on each of them, and I don’t have much of an impression of them.
Anyway if you’re making a big open world game movement needs to feel fun, because that’s what you’re doing between objectives. Riding a horse works in the Witcher and Red Dead Redemption 2, and climbing and paragliding works in Breath of the Wild. Skyrim and Fallout 4 have terrible movement mechanics but there’s something new and interesting to see every 30 seconds, so its not that bad. This is because the thing Bethesda are best at is designing a handcrafted world, so why the fuck did they randomly generate Starfield’s world. What were they fucking thinking
Dont forget grappling, gliding and parachuting around the Just Cause games. They rarely felt like a slog.
Oh yeah definitely, I could spend so long in Just Cause 3 just flying around because it felt so good
Outer Worlds
Fetch Quest: The Game
Yeah so much of the game is just a sightly more fleshed out fetcb quest. Go get this book for the vicar and he’ll be your companion isn’t a good quest, Obsidian. It’s still better than Bethesda quests because Obsidian can actually write interesting characters who are at least flavourful quest givers.
Also I’ve started playing the Witcher 3 and I’ve noticed that a lot of quests seem to have two stages: one where you set out on the quest to fulfill the mission, and another where you realize your original mission wasn’t the full story. Like when you go to find someone’s brother who was wounded in war, then you find him hiding with a deserter from the other side. A lot of side quests feel like they have a built in gotcha moment as part of a formula
Better wide as a puddle, deep as an ocean than wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle.
I’d rather have interesting hand crafted content than hours upon hours of procedurally generated slop.Depends on the rest of the game design, I’m a big fan of proc gen in certain genres but for an RPG? Hand crafted with some tasteful repeatable randomized tasks to help with economic issues is really the way to go.
Yakuza can get away with putting you in Kamurocho pretty much every time because the design philosophy of Kamurocho is to make it denser than osmium.
People (generally) don’t like the open-world commute. It becomes tedious. They like being able to turn the corner and find something novel.
Saw a time ago people calling Yakuza open-neighborhood, smaller open areas works really well.
Another example is the Phantom Liberty compared to the rest of cyberpunk 2077.
Something huge about Phantom Liberty was the verticality, one of my biggest pet peeves with open world design is having an x and y axis but no meaningful z. Even having 2 stories for a combat arena dramatically impacts the complexity of encounters, not to mention how much better the environment becomes visually.
Yeah, this is my problem with most open-world games
There’s a lot of space and nothing to actually do in it
Like, Assassin’s Creed has basically become Wander Aimlessly with the occasional bit of rock stacking
Why aren’t I sneaking around, gathering information on targets, setting traps to whittle down a target’s bodyguards or doing anything that really involves assassinating?
Why aren’t I sneaking around, gathering information on targets, setting traps to whittle down a target’s bodyguards or doing anything that really involves assassinating?
AC1 had that idea poorly executed, for some reason ubiflop abandoned it in AC2
