I don’t think it can be too large, but like others have said, there has to be enough quality content in each location you can visit to compensate for the vastness of the open world.
It be amazing if you could go inside every single building/dungeon/etc. and have every one of them chockablock full of things to experience, like they did with Elder Scrolls 6, but look how long it took for that game to come out…
I did hear about Light No Fire from the No Man Sky devs. Looks impressive from what I’ve seen so far on it with it’s supposedly literal Earth sized world.
hypnospace outlaw !! it’s more subtle things, of course, since it’s just a sort of parallel reality to our own 1999, but i think that’s what makes it feel SO real. i’m a really big fan of the news page and advice pages you can find in the game because they show you the mundanities of the everyday lives of these people
Depends on a lot of factors like what the actual game is.
A sandbox game, bigger is better. Like Minecraft. If the goal is exploration and resource gathering you can plop me into an infinitely generated map and I will be happy.
Outside of that, narrative games can be too big if there’s nothing to do in between points of interests. I don’t mean like side-quests, but more like random encounters or crafting/gathering stuff. There has to be something there I can either get distracted with or to “on the way” to the next location.
I think a lot of games want their cake and eat it too. It’s not an open world game, but Final Fantasy XIV promoted the Heavensward expansion with the zones being like 5 times bigger than the base game…
…but there were only 6 of them and between already being able to teleport to each zone there wasn’t any difficulty navigating the zones and they added flying which made them seem smaller than the base zones.
1.0 XIV had impressively sized zones that were unfortunately very copy pasted and between the rushed release and the engine limitations enemies were very spread out.
An Open World is only too big if it requires loading screens at transition points that aren’t natural. An Open World can have an insufficient density of relevant content, where exploring it has too little marginal utility to the player, and therefore it is ultimately not useful to exist.
I don’t think that there’s a “too big”, if you can figure out a way to economically do it and fill it with worthwhile content.
But I don’t feel like Cyberpunk 2077’s map size is the limiting factor. Like, there’s a lot of the map that just doesn’t see all that much usage in the game, even though it’s full of modeled and textured stuff. You maybe have one mission in the general vicinity, and that’s it. If I were going to ask for resources to be put somewhere in the game to improve it, it wouldn’t be on more map. It’d be on stuff like:
More-complex, interesting combat mechanics.
More missions on existing map.
More varied/interesting missions. Cyberpunk 2077 kinda gave me more of a GTA feel than a Fallout feel.
A home that one can build up and customize. I mean, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t really have the analog of Fallout 4’s Home Plate.
The city changing more over time and in response to game events.
Ease of travel and speed of travel. Even a small map can feel cumbersome, repetitive, and boring. If the missions are designed poorly, and the game mechanics ignore an entertaining user experience, walking down the same hallway a thousand times can feel like a chore.
“Too big” is a relative feeling that involves many factors.
Can relate. Our home server has every single NDS ROM and several thousands of other games, that will all play without ads on my kid’s phone or laptop, but he will go straight to the shitty browser games and feel totally bereft without them.
To be fair, playing a DS game with touch screen buttons feels pretty bad compared to playing Fruit Ninja or whatever that was designed specifically for phone touch controls.
Even then, the DS is pretty specific for its dual screen setup, and makes playing on anything that isnt a DS or similar form factor feel pretty unapproachable. Have you tried other consoles, like the PSP? Since it only has one screen, and does not have touch support, it can feel like it was designed for normal console style play.
Its only a suggestion, there may be other reasons he doesn’t play. Maybe the games just don’t interest him?
Measuring size alone is meaningless, as gameplay affects perceived size, and density of meaningful content in relation affects the experience.
Size should match content.
Skyrim is canonically pretty close to the size and shape of Estonia, but in game it’s very small. If the game’s content was spread out to the “real” size, it would feel completely barren.
The map in Deus Ex MD was quite small, just a couple tiny districts, but it punched way above its size because it was so dense in detail.
Agree. If you could go into every single store, house, nook and cranny of Cyberpunk 2077, and talk to all the NPCs, it would feel absolutely humongous. Gameplay significantly affects perceived size.
I don’t think there’s a too big for a simulation type game world, go all the way. But for more directed game styles that are narrative driven or more carnival ride than simulation don’t make it boring use techniques from past games; the keeping distant landmarks in view outside like in New Vegas, or hilly landscapes to obscure stuff to discover like in Zelda or Skyrim. Bad examples would be like traveling between towns in daggerfall or those monuments in the middle of nowhere in starfield.
I recall True Crime: Streets of L.A. being too big. The city felt so similar, I just lost interest. It could have been that the hardware wasn’t where it should have been to land a project that ambitious?
Its not about being too big but too little stuff to do IMO. The first Assassin’s Creed wasnt even that big but felt like a wasteland going from one side of the map to the other
How do you find the time to play all these games, and the friends to play them with. After work and personal chores I feel like I have so little time left for myself I usually can’t bring myself to play anything other than a few short rounds of Dead By Daylight solo queue and I’m single right now, can’t imagine the situation if I had a family
I’m a college student currently living with his parents and i don’t work, and I planned my courses really well. Like right now I only have classes 3/7 days a week. So the result is just a lot of free time on my hand. And I’ve always been kind of diligent about personal chores (or found ways to be efficient about them)
So outside of class time, I really only spend my time studying, playing games, and hanging out with friends. It’s really a situation I’m lucky (and thankful to have)
We all go through time like that. If you like single player games, what helped me was getting a Switch (I had almost quit gaming before that), the ability to play on a handheld which you can pause (put in sleep) anywhere is a godsend. Everyone is different though, but can be worth a try. You can try getting a SteamDeck, and see if that works for you.
At the end of the day, if playing short rounds of Death by Daylight is what you enjoy the most, nothing wrong with just keep doing that.
Yeah I’m either gonna get a steam deck or get a tablet and setup moonlight for remote gaming in the future, I think because my job involves sitting at a desk 8 hours a day, after work I just don’t want to sit on my computer for much longer, a handheld gaming device would help with that
This is pretty much why I can’t play much PC games either (even though there are some genres I love that work bes on PC). Handheld works best, or sitting on a couch in front of TV.
I love tablets as a good general purpose device, but don’t have much experience with remote play. Just check how well it works with controllers and the latency / lag.
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