yeah, there are assorted encounter types you can be interrupted by, not all are bad but many are. some start unique quests.
The encounter often times is related to where you are, so if there is a bandits hideout in the woods near a place you’re fast traveling past they might hop out and try to rob you.
Or you might run into a weird person near a village.
Or you might just run into some dudes that wanna wrestle.
These people are in the world otherwise and you could run into them while not fast traveling too, but when fast traveling you’re not like to avoid “bad” situations
I like KCD for hardcore’s fast travel. There isn’t any. You have to learn the map and move your horse the old fashioned way with no compass and no map marker for Henry. It really immerses you and forces you to learn the map.
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!
I’ve been hooked on Dragon’s Dogma 2 for a bit now.
I haven’t even used a fast-travel item because world traversal and exploration is so much fun. It’s a game that actually uses it’s open world as something other than an overworld to move to the next quest.
I’m currently playing The Outer Worlds on the hardest difficulty which, among other things, disallowes fast-travel. For the most part, the worlds have been small and it hadn’t been a problem, but yesterday I had to go back and forth to 3 locations several times in a row in different corners of the map. It only took a five minutes each time, but ugh. It got old.
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 played Fantasy Life I: The Girl Who Steals Time when I was sick. It’s a very chill game where you can run around and do different “jobs” like fishing, woodcutting, mining, various crafting, and combat.
Along with Hello Kitty Island Adventure which is similar to Animal Crossing in some ways but heavier on quests and befriending the characters. There’s a lot of reading though but I skim through most of it.
I’m practically allergic to fast travel, no matter the game. I don’t play games to “get through them”. If I’m playing something where I’m that bored with traveling in an alternate universe, I should probably just pick another game.
I take transit in Cyberpunk and it makes the world feel way more alive. Downtime is something some games are entirely built around so the moments of action have that much more impact. I admit some games do this poorly, but those are ones I typically just avoid in the first place.
I like when my games feel more like roleplay and less like an action movie.
bin.pol.social
Gorące