I think it’s a bit of a stretch to describe games with loading screens of that kind (whether disguised as choke points or not) as open worlds. Sure, they might allow more freedom than a game that stays on rails for every step of the journey, but to me, “open world” suggests something more.
Continuity while exploring the landscape, unimpeded by artificial barriers or immersion-breaking interruptions, is a big part of it.
Almost as important is that the world be interesting and diverse enough that I would want to spend my time exploring it. This is one of Skyrim’s great strengths: It’s full of unique things to discover, most of which aren’t marked on the map (except sometimes when you’re already there), and some don’t even stay in the same place. It ensures that exploring the world and paying attention is rewarding and satisfying. The Witcher 3, on the other hand, is weak in this area: Its world is mostly open, but practically everything in it is a copy/paste instance of a handful of events, and clearly marked on the map. Exploration quickly becomes a tedious exercise in running from dot to dot, doing the same few things over and over again. It doesn’t deliver the satisfaction I expect from an open world game. In a world like that, I get bored fast.
And it was something people were hoping would save the game. But, it’s unfortunately more confirmation that Bethesda can no longer produce quality games.
he’s saying “they” haven’t improved since 76 came out. i don’t know what else he could possibly mean by that, especially since 76 itself has improved immensely since coming out
So Bethesda is good because Starfield might be worth playing 10 years after it was released? You’re obviously not understanding the point here.
It doesn’t matter that they improved '76 after the fact. It matters that they keep releasing top dollar garbage that needs years of work after the fact to even be playable.
Like imagine if you bought a brand new car that broke down immediately after you drove it off the lot. You take it back to them and they tell you “We understand you’re disappointed, so if we get time we’ll fix it for you and should have it back to you in a year or two.” Are you going to be satisfied with no car and no money for that long? Does it really make it better if they do actually fix it at some undetermined point in the future?
Is that my “line of thinking” when I never said anything of the sort? I don’t think so.
I’ve never played Cyberpunk 2077 nor No Man’s Sky and have zero opinion on them, but you bringing them up out of nowhere as some sort of ‘gotcha’ screams “my argument is based on emotion and not fact.”
what is factually wrong about 76 being improved after release? that’s the entire thing, i’m not the one convienently ignoring those facts because it doesnt support my argument 😂
For the fourteenth time, it’s completely irrelevant to the discussion.
You talk about conveniently ignoring things while you’re ignoring the whole topic so you can keep talking about some updates to Fallout '76 as if that has any bearing on Bethesda trending toward doing worse and worse with each new release. You’re making a completely separate argument to the rest of us.
actually its only the 6th time, not 14th. how can i trust your word now?
and 76 has gotten new releases pretty frequently. they are called content updates or dlc, which are free on that game. i think bethesdas only released 2 other games since 76, redfall, which was done by a different studio, and starfield
Can we stop posting screenshots of games on here. It has taken over the games sub, and nobody really cares about what you’re playing at this very moment.
From what I understand, things like squeezing through walls were supposed to go away with the PS5. But, Ragnarok is still available on PS4 to cater to mass audiences, so they need that extra bit of time for loading.
Ironically, one game that’s handled open worlds a bit better is on a console less capable of handling them. Breath of the Wild uses it to promote exploring towards vantage points and then interesting sights.
Sea of Thieves does something similar. You start a session, and want treasure, so you take a basic and boring assignment with a treasure map. BUT, you spy a bunch of interesting happenings throughout the ocean and beaches on your way, and so your adventure becomes more complex. Coming across those at random feels a lot more fun than picking them as a targeted assignment on an objective board.
To be fair, even if the open world is not well used, it can provide a sense of connection for the world. It can be more fun than just having a mission select screen.
Ironically, one game that’s handled open worlds a bit better is on a console less capable of handling them.
This is even more interesting when we consider that BotW was not developed for the Switch, but for an even less capable console: the Wii U.
Hardware limitations haven’t been a real barrier to open world continuity for a long time, if ever. (Seven Cities of Gold allowed you to sail from Europe to the New World, and then explore it over land, with no loading screens along the way. That was on 8-bit computers with 48KiB of RAM, loading data from some of the slowest floppy drives ever, back in 1984.) Doing it on lower-end machines does require some planning ahead, but the effort is worthwhile, IMHO.
Breath of the Wild uses it to promote exploring towards vantage points and then interesting sights.
Not only that, but to incorporate verticality into the game mechanics. Reaching things that are surrounded by hazards, or taming especially wild horses by gliding to them from a mountain, for example.
Yeah anyone who thinks 3D games without loading screens are only possible on SSDs needs to go back and play Dungeon Siege or Asheron’s Call. GTA3 mostly didn’t have loading screens either. The Witcher 3 wasn’t even that long ago and it didn’t need loading screens on HDDs. (I guess traveling between the main big areas did, but I guess that’s more because they didn’t have an animation of Geralt taking a boat or something, everything else streamed fine)
Sea of Thieves is honestly great. There have been many times where I’ve been on the way to an objective and I’ll find random loot floating in the water, or something skinny catches my eyes on a passing beach, or I’ll get attacked by a pirate ship or even a megalodon.
I think God of War is fine since the entire experience is supposed to be one that does not get interrupted, there are never any camera cuts, and they hid a few loading screens behind portal effects.
I liked the Jedi Survivor style as well, it feels natural and doesn’t interrupt the gameplay. Much like Outlaws using cleverly hidden cutscenes to go from planet to space and other planets. It all keeps you in the immersion and experience. Climbing and other parkour stuff don’t feel out of place in these games, it would be quite boring if everything in games existed only on a flat plane and you’d never ever have to turn corners or climb anything, takes away the idea of exploration and discovering new things.
I much prefer the modern solutions over elevators and loading screens. Nothing is stopping anyone from just hitting pause and stretch their fingers if you feel like you need a break lol
God of War always struck me as the wrong game for that gimmick. Sure, there are no camera cuts, but you need to pull up your menu constantly to check the map, change gear, etc. It ends up feeling like there are hundreds of cuts.
I’ve been playing God Of War Ragnarok and haven’t felt the need really to use the map much at all.
I do find the armor system to be annoying and basically decided to ignore all the gear I pick up, sell it, and upgrade the base items all the way instead because of the buffs the beginning gear gets if you upgrade all the way. All that to say I wish they just had a more robust leveling system instead.
Otherwise minus my deaths (playing on God Of War difficulty ) I’ve been feeling pretty immersed in it.
The games that sit at the top of the player counts are almost always multiplayer competitive games. In a lot of ways, there’s been nearly 0 movement in the space at all since covid. The same games are still right there at the top because no new massively multiplayer game has released to top them. FPS players play CoD, Apex, Fortnite and Pubg, Dota is massive in Asian countries, GTA V has a huge cult following (check out its twitch category).
Satisfactory being top 10 is an outlier rather than the norm, being a single player game.
I agree with the other commenter who said that players of these games consider themselves players of Apex/CoD/Pubg before they consider themselves overall gamers. That’s the case with me now, and I rarely launch anything outside of CoD or Apex as I have little to no interest in single player games.
It depends on the game. I wouldn’t remove the open world from Elden Ring at all, since sightlines are so important to you figuring out how to get somewhere. Horizon: Zero Dawn and Ghost Recon: Wildlands are two games that I love, but both would have been better if you just selected missions from a menu. In Metal Gear Solid V, they basically give you the option to play the game that way, which is nice, since there are open world systems, but you don’t really interact with them constantly. If you can get away with the Uncharted thing though, where you’re seamlessly moving from one thing to the next, it can be great for pacing and presentation. Especially since Bandai-Namco had the patent on loading screen mini games, a lot of developers ended up inventing “load bearing walls”, where tight spaces that you have to crawl through will mask a load screen between two scenes.
I love Diablo. However, I think a big part of it is the atmosphere and also me being young and never having seen anything like it. That’s pretty hard to recreate. I heard the game Halls of Torment nailed the Diablo atmosphere, but as a Vampire Survivors-like. Basically it’s focused on the grind and progression. Maybe, that’s something for you? Personally, I haven’t found anything that is as fun as Diablo, so every now and then I play Diablo 1 with a new mod, like the new The Hell 3 Mod. It brings back the wonder of the unknown, because there is lots of new stuff in there. I also loved Book of Demons, which is basically a streamlined version of Diablo 1 with a dark comedic twist.
I think you underestimate the satisfaction that comes from clearing levels in Diablo. Yes, it could be a different theme and still work, but isn’t that proof of how potent it is? So the question is, why does it feel like a grind to you? I wager it’s because the magic Diablo had for you got lost over time. You know how they work now, you’ve seen behind the curtain and thus don’t feel the danger, the intrigue like you used to. Maybe you will find it in games like Elden Ring that you don’t see through right away?
About the stats progression: I think a very big part of the fun of progressing your character comes from doing it the way you want. It’s a form of expression. You want to be a Necromancer that only uses Golems or a Mage focused on ice. I think what a lot of Diablo-likes miss is finding a good way to allow lots of expression in character development. Too often I feel boxed in by the class and it doesn’t feel like it’s my Tinkerer, but the Tinkerer instead. A good Diablo-like has abilities that define the character instead of just simple stat increases and cooldown reductions and all that.
Lastly, if you haven’t seen it there is a great Diablo 4 Critique on YouTube that might give some more food for thought!
Lol stardew vally in doom clothing killed me. Quite the write up but all I can really say is an unhelpful “everyone likes different stuff”. i like twitch and boomer shooters. I had to wait ages for them to come around again. I had to wade through slow shooters like halo, milshooters, milsims, coverbased shooters, and other stuff that I genuinely don’t enjoy as much until the type I liked most started to resurface with Doom 2016 and the now regrettably named “boomer shooters”. Fast, arcadey, dark themed, with health and ammo drops. I’m not big on some of them but overall I’m in an oasis compared to the drought I endured.
My best advice is patience for it to come around again or to make it yourself if you don’t want to wait.
Your desire to dumb down diablo-likes is your own and I hate it. PoE and Grim Dawn are about the only games like this that I have truly enjoyed in a long time. Blizzard ruined Diablo and WoW with this bullshit take.
As I said, if you just took away all those mechanics, you’d be left with a boring empty game.
What I said was that it would be nice if you could make the combat feel more like hunting than gathering, so you wouldn’t have to make up for it with a:) number-go-up and b:) np-hard - then you could then go for much more enriching forms of complexity.
For instance, making mobs fight a lot more tactically as their level increases instead of just stacking on the HP and damage - and instead of your perks just driving stat inflation, they unlocked new tactical options on your part, giving you a series of new stops to pull out as the battles got more fraught.
Ok, I see where you’re going now, but I’m still not sure I agree with you here overall for the genre.
I think the “add tactics” thing is already done to a degree in these games as early enemies in these games tend to be dead simple since players like likely still acclimating to the game, but I suspect that there is only so much you can do before you end up turning later enemies into some sort of frustrating puzzle. Diablo-likes, for better or worse, aren’t generally mind bending affairs, high skill ceiling affairs.
There is definitely room in the genre for more tactical, skill dependent entries, but I not sure the end result would be as fun for most people as that would be a fundamentally different type game. Hey, maybe I am wrong and this would lead to some sort of souls-like Diablo game where skill and learning are all that matters and items and character building are far less important. Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like Hades in a way.
Yeah at that point it kind of morphs genre from dungeon grinder to isometric action. That being said I think isometric action is a way better game type due to the level of involvement and a challenge that’s skill based; whereas I find dungeon grinders to boring from overly simplistic controls and gameplay loops.
That being said I am tired of so many game just giving you 3 real buttons, but this is the problem with making games to make money, if you want to market broad you have to keep it simple.
Behind every problem in life lies capitalisms ugly asshole.
Alive and well in the indie scene. HoMM specifically has two spiritual successors I’m keeping an eye on in Hero’s Hour (fun and absurd, but doesn’t work on linux), and Songs of Conquest (haven’t played it yet, looks very promising).
If you like startcraft like RTS, StormGate its on beta right now. RPGs they are ton, just not AAA anymore. All the posterchilds of gaming are FPS, if is not one, you will not know of them if you dont search for yourself.
I get bored of games were you have to make your character better and better and that’s it. Now I’m playing games were I have to get better and more knowledge of the game, like shmups.
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