Fast travel remains a staple mechanic because game devs:
Often can’t figure out a way to make travel itself into a gameplay mechanic or experience that is varied and interesting.
Keep designing checklists of things for the player to do, with games built around them, as opposed to inverse of that… which trains players to just be checklist checker offers.
There’s no point to having an open world if it is not engaging or interesting, so… when your open world lacks depth, you end up in a nonsense situation where you have a poorly designed feature, with essentially a ‘skip’ mechanic for said feature.
… Why bother with the feature, at that point?
Hell, even the Rockstar games would give you interesting dialogue, in transit… not really gameplay per se, but it is generally engaging, can help with action intensity pacing, and of course, give you the story.
There are so many ways you could gameify or at least make travel itself more interesting.
Do that, and fast travel becomes near totally pointless.
Realistic open worlds are generally boring, to most players.
Thats why almost no popular open world games have realistic distance scaling.
Skyrim, for example, is a teeny tiny place, compared to how large the lore describes it as, everything is scaled in a kind of exaggerated way, same with all GTA games, even RDR and 2, they’re not even close to being realistically scaled, they’re scaled based… basically on an estimate of a player’s average attention span.
You want realistically scaled?
Go play an ARMA game, and just go on a hike, over a close to one to one scale replication of an actual island or penninsula, for a real world entire day.
Yeah that shit’s boring as fuck to most people.
… But I did not at any point say that a good open world is a realistic world, or anything like that, but thats what you appear to have read, out of what I wrote.
Fascinating.
Anyway, what you should do to make an open world that doesnt suck, is make it interesting, in an actual game mechanical sense, not merely ‘pretty’.
Maybe as you travel, enemies of one kind or another have a chance of spawning nearby and cresting over a hill or emerging from a forest.
RDR2 does shit like this very well, oh I’m just gonna relax, trot along, enjoy the scenery… and … my throat has been ripped out by a pack of wolves, goddamnit.
Or you go for the Bethesda approach and have 500, one time discoverable locations with basically some kind of a mini dungeon or staged scenario you can wander into.
Or you can do the Kenshi approach, no real questlines, just simulate the entire world as a kind of sandbox that tens of thousands of other npcs live in, do their own thing in… with actually closer to a realistic sense of distsnce scaling… and just give the player save states and the ability to fastforward or pause time, by default… and maybe they bumble in to some particularly interesting people, or maybe its oops all beakthings, or maybe you’ve now been enslaved by either cannibals or the Holy Nation, while you were afk for your literal 12 mile hike across the map.
Or you could just make some kind of game where fast travelling requires the player to engage in something on the order of a hacking/lockpicking minigame, to… keep the wheels from falling off or something, I dunno.
Maybe vehicles are simulated in some kind of way that… if you’re reckless and innatentive, you’ll break em, and now you’re fucked, in the middle of nowhere. State of Decay 2 comes to mind, sort of.
Point is… there are many ways you can make travelling itself into an engaging, alternate form of the game itself, or a kind of minigame, or a way to experience some kind of story or plot development, or reward the player for picking up on contextual cues during transit, punish them for missing them…
Hell, make a minigame out of trying to pick a song to listen to that your npc companion doesn’t hate, throw in guitar hero style karaoke minigame, why the hell not? maybe it can boost or demerit your relationship with that npc, land you on different paths of a branching storyline.
… Travel doesnt need to be realistic.
It just needs to be more interesting, rewarding, engaging, than skipping it.
I almost never fast traveled when I played Skyrim. To busy exploring every random cave and building along with climbing random mountains because why not.
The mountains I managed to clip my way up… I spent way too much time doing that. Climbed the “Throat of the World” before I got the shout that would clear the wind barriers—because why not lol
I’d take you up on it, but I already have thousands of games in my backlog, so it’d be a waste of a key. But I wanted to let you know I appreciate you doing this for the community!
When I’m sick I often get nauseated, almost like vertigo. So my answer is none of them.
If I’m not nauseated, any of them. I play a lot of low-impact, easy games. Animal Crossing on the Switch is both of those, until you see a knee-high tarantula! (They are in the game and are big because they’re not to scale, like most of the bugs. They run away from you though… unless you have a net out, in which case they will attack! You can’t die in AC though, they just knock you out and you wake up in front of your house, no harm no foul.)
I play Blue Prince on Mac and on Xbox (it’s also on PlayStation and PC). It’s a puzzle game, kind of a deck-building (but not really) building game (also not really). It’s pretty unique. I absolutely suck at it, but I like taking a run every other day or so. It’s fun to fail at. You have to get to the 46th room of a house, but its 9x5 grid resets every day, and as you come to a door, you choose the room to “build” (or blueprint, the name is a pun) and when you run out of moves, you call it a day and try again the next (in-game) day. It’s weird but it’s pretty chill. There’s one scene where you think there will be a jump scare, but it never happens (entering the Security Room).
Hello, honestly I’ve been in a gaming rut. I’ve been playing Halo MCC with one friend group, and Peak with the other. I’ll take any shooter, open world game, or friend slop multiplayer game.
Edit: I got Prey! It’s actually one I had on my wishlist and was hoping it would be on a deep discount for the winter sale. Thanks again for the giveaway!
Nah the best bug was cats dying of alcohol poisoning because they’d walk through the tavern, get booze spilled on them, and then lick it off themselves when cleaning. Since they weren’t programmed to drink booze directly, they had 0 tolerance for it and would easily die from it.
Nonono, alcohol tolerance is a function of the creature’s weight, and it works perfectly.
The problem was the amount of alcohol that would get transferred on their paws when walking on spilled booze. If the alcohol was spilled from a mug, then the game would place the equivalent of a full mug of booze on each paw, which would then be ingested when the cat cleaned them.
Four full mugs of beer would be more than enough to waste anything the size of a cat.
The kicker is, everything you mentioned is intended behavior.
animals wander around (maybe implemented just to make things more lively)
creatures get splattered with whatever liquids are splashing around (perhaps initially implemented to have dwarfs get splattered with blood on a kill or to have things gradually get wet close to a waterfall)
animals clean themselves, licking off whatever dirt there is
All these mechanics just naturally interact, by virtue of being implemented in a generic way, which allows for this amazing emergent behavior.
IIRC the bug was that the amount of booze ingested by the cats during cleaning wasn’t scaled correctly to how much splatter they received or should’ve. Either way they ended up with excessive amounts of alcohol and overdosed immediately.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne