Travel is gonna become boring if you have to travel the same road multiple times in the course of the game even if you have a bunch of cool stuff along that road. Eventually, I won’t give a shit about that stuff since I’ve seen it a million times. So I would hope there is still some kind of fast travel to go between places I have already been if the world is super big. Otherwise it’s just gonna feel like you’re padding the game for time to inflate a 10 hour story to take 40 hours to finish.
I think the better way to help fix this issue is random encounters, spawns, and a world that changes as the game moves along.
Moving along the same road can be made interesting if different things are happening every so often as you come through. New friendly encounters, new fights with different enemies, maybe randomly spawning treasure or scripted puzzle sequences that can appear dynamically around the whole world. Add to that a world that becomes modified by story events, maybe that road gets blocked and a different passage opens up that takes you to the same end destination, but with a new path and things to explore.
It's not an unsolvable problem, but it is something that goes by the wayside often.
One thing to consider too is scheduled events. Imagine a couple towns get together and throw a fair along a route that connects them, and you get to see celebrations and games and vendors who might sell trinkets that are hard to track down otherwise. Perhaps the local monarch goes on a hunt with the massive party of servants and knights that might entail, with different practices for different cultures. A band of cultists clears an area for several days leading up to their yearly ritual. It’s migration season for a certain species of animal/monster. There are so many possibilities!
Even just vendors passing through can be made more interesting. Do they carry their wares via backpack or cart? Are they being attacked by bandits? Wild animals? Are they trying to smuggle goods or services somewhere?
It all has to be programmed of course, which is the main holdup on what makes it so hard to flesh out those parts of the world.
I do also see weight in the idea that, past a certain point, traveling is just boring, especially if the only thing of importance is the Main Story Quest. Travel is also often boring in real life too but we can tune it out, or find little ways to pass the time and entertain ourselves during the more mundane moments. We’re not frequently afforded that luxury in games. When you’re playing a game and dealing with the downtime going from point A to B, often there is literally nothing to do except hold down the movement keys and deal with the occasional path change/obstacle.
The point of games is to be engaging, and if there’s nothing to do while traveling but look at the scenery and surroundings it will eventually get boring. Even if the travel gets interrupted occasionally for an encounter, I think it’s arguable to say that the content is literally not travel anymore and in fact papering over a bad travel system (if the only thing interesting is the stuff you find that you have to stop and take care of). Adding more unique/transient stuff along routes is only half of the battle; work has to be put in to make traveling enjoyable in and of itself for players to want to do it instead of skip it.
But as always, the best solution to our problem is to simply add more trains.
To add to this, DD1 has quite a number of NPC's that travel between regions and you can come across them. As you progress through the game their patterns and locations change.
I actually am ambivalent on the latter mechanic as it really makes it a pain sometimes, but it still has lots of ways that it can work well.
Depends on the reason for traveling. If you are headed down the road to a goal and keep getting sidetracked by random encounters in a way that is distracting you from the thing you want to do then they just make travel tedious.
It all comes down to why am I traveling and why are encounters on the road more engaging than the reason for being on the road in the first place.
And for the record, Itsuno does say that he thinks fast travel is “convenient” and “good” when done right.
Based on Dragon’s Dogma 1’s use of Ferrystones, as well as this mechanic returning along with oxcarts in the sequel, I think this director understands that there needs to be a balance. It’s good when it’s both properly implemented and has a purpose. You’re right that nobody wants to run up and down the same roads countless times, but it’s up to the devs implementing limited fast travel to make sure you won’t have to. Then it’s up to the player to decide whether fast travel is worth it for any given situation. Knowing when to use your fast travel and how to maximize it is a skill that you develop and should be rewarded for mastering.
But it also needs to have a purpose. In more arcadey games, I don’t like worrying about resources like that. But in more grueling games like Dragon’s Dogma, where the journey is often a very intentional part of the gameplay loop if not the main challenge itself, it fits right at home.
So the CEO makes a shit decision, quits and leaves with his millions of dollars and now a bunch of employees get to lose their job. Capitalism is so disgusting.
I watched two of the three, and really enjoyed them. Sure, I'd much rather see more gameplay, and they didn't do anything to sell me on the game itself, but they were enjoyable nonetheless
I’m sure you’ve all heard the rumors that Steam doesn’t allow NSFW games to release free updates, only paid DLCs.
This is simply not true.
Since our game’s release, we’ve rolled out numerous free updates, with the latest major content update dropping just three days ago.
Steam hasn’t officially changed its policies, and there’s no rule in the Terms of Service supporting this claim.
These rumors stem from a handful of vague NSFW game developer announcements with no solid backing.
We will continue to release free updates in the future.
Have a great day!
(I can’t view the link myself, because of a regional block, so I’m trusting another comment, that the quote I copied is correct.)
The article talks about games that are marked adult-only with warnings, but apparently the problem is only with games that don’t have any NSFW content yet, so they are technically SFW, and they want to add it through updates or patches. Games that already have NSFW content will be able to receive patches as normal, and add more.
Maybe. We’ll see. I didn’t see it on the community, I through, considering how active the subject was at first, that it would be of interest to the community.
Nope. There is an overarching story happening if you want to pay attention but they just recorded a bunch of absurdist content and charge you to watch it in their own software.
Its like a streaming platform where you literally have to watch the previous episode to get the next.
It’s not the team that made Thank Goodness You’re Here. It’s the same publisher that also published Thank Goodness You’re Here. That’s the equivalent of two different streaming shows that are both exclusive to the same service.
If it’s anything like the game Immortality, there’s an underlying story you can figure out. The gameplay in Immortality involves clicking elements in the video to link to elements from videos from other times and in-universe media. You can fast-forward and reverse, and there’s a hidden element you can discover.
Lots of nudity and a fair amount of blood, though.
I enjoyed FH5, but FH4 was better. 5 is the onky one I don’t actually own yet, I basically did everything at launch during a Gamepass trial. I plaued FH4 almost daily for like a year or more.
Seeing the series’ progression so far, I just know microsoft will stuff it full of FOMO crap and monetization, as well as a lot of AI generated stuff ( which, admittedly, may not be all bad ). But still, I’m pretty excited for it.
FH5 was fun at first but agreed, the unending FOMO event system just kind of sucked the joy out of it awhile. Just let people play the game.
More importantly, though, just fuck the whole XBox/Microsoft gaming system in general. I was dumb enough to FH5 through the Microsoft store back when I had Windows, so I can’t install it on Linux.
And even if you buy it on another platform like Steam and sign in with the same account, it considers a “separate purchase/subscription” so none of your dlc or cars carry over. Just anti-consumer as fuck.
To make it worse, I found out the hard way that FH4 on Steam doesn’t have wheel support, so if I wanted to use a wheel (with full FFB support, not just a wheel pretending to be an Xbox controller), I had to re-buy on the Microsoft store.
Really, for most people, there’s not much reason to buy the new ones, except that they keep de-listing the old ones and making them impossible to buy.
They also delist previous titles from stores. Forza 4 disappeared a while ago, 5 will be gone soon. Wouldn’t want anyone buying the older, cheaper, maybe better titles instead of the latest one.
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