To be able to say “our map is 100x100km!” The only games where it is worth it to have a huge map like that, is army simulators and RTS. Anything else could probably be better off with polish in some other place, rather than a huge map.
One of the notorious examples in PS3 gen era that’s now can’t be purchased at all. It’s a derpy offroad racing game in what looks like a procedurally generated world emptier than ash deserts in Morrowind.
Games / game engines use units which correspond to size IRL. It’s needed to keep scale consistent. The characters are usually around 1.8m tall for instance
Infinite Wealth was deffo a bigger map and set thereof then its predecessors (Like a Dragon was also substantially larger, as was Lost Judgment in comparison to its predecessor), but it did absolute numbers, so I dunno about that.
I think it comes down more to if it feels appropriately sized and filled. Prior Yakuzas were bursting at the seems with shit to do everywhere in their smaller maps. Breath of the Wild had new and interesting shit going on everywhere too.
I’ve gotta disagree on BotW. I love Zelda games and the mechanics of that game were an amazing shift in the franchise. But that open world was so boring. The same like 4-5 enemies, even the harder variants didn’t have different movesets. TotK was even worse with the depths and a majority of sky islands being empty and devoid of content.
But the e gameplay is so fun it’s a lot easier to forgive them than say AC Odyssey.
I’ve been saying this since it released. Cool mechanics, but boring world and gameplay. I’m still a bit salty about the loss of real dungeons, nothing in BOTW or TOTK feel as memorable as the previous games.
Here’s hoping! Not only has it ruined a lot of once-smaller games, but it’s also largely responsible for ballooning development budgets, so let’s get that down to something sustainable.
One of the most egregious cases for me was Assassin's Creed Odyssey. There was stuff for 40 hours aplenty, yet I spent most of those 40 hours killing the same goons over and over but with a different number over their heads, which meant I needed to spent more time in doing so.
If they had just aimed at making a memorable 30 or so hours, it would have been way better. This experience made me stop playing any Assassin's whatever games.
Opposite to this, there was "Still Wakes the Deep", which is a rather short but plentiful game.
"Indika, a nun looking to adjust to a monastic life. The twist in the tale comes in the form of her companion: she has a connection with the Devil himself"
That said, I never got bored of odyssey. It was was just a beautiful place to hang out. The game engine was amazing. With NPCs going about their business etc.
I wish someone would just use that engine for more stuff .
I meant it that I really enjoyed the setting, the characters and some game mechanisms. I just hated this need of making the game seemingly endless by repetition, and I wished I didn't have to be level X to be able to do Y, because the only way to level up was churning (for me that's a no bueno).
God of war and Jedi have done great jobs of finally showing AAA they can make a smaller game and still have a great following. I’m so sick of giant Ubisoft worlds that have nothing to do in them. They’re boring.
I haven’t played the Jedi games, but it’s crazy that the new God of War games are somehow a demonstration of restraint, as that one from 2018 is probably twice as long as I would have liked, and Ragnarok is longer still, according to How Long to Beat.
I know this is a cynical critique of capitalism, but even so, capitalists love lowering budgets and charging the same amount. Quite frankly, I’d happily pay the same or more to get a game with less bloat in a lot of cases.
Weird. In the West, we’ve been welcoming small(er) but interesting, unique or otherwise impactful games regardless of its size. Complaining about Warzone taking up 250GB on your hard drive and stuff. And that was 2020.
mine as well, mine was off so long I needed to manually update it via flash drive to connect to the internet for some reason, I just haven’t felt the need to use it
No, I meant to reply to you. “A lot of player freedom” is not at odds with a great story-driven game, and I gave an example of a game that fits both criteria, so I think it’s unfortunate that the perception is that you can only have one or the other.
I wish TLoU 1 gave you the option to sacrifice Ellie. Have an alternate ending where they find a vaccine and everyone lives happily ever after (except Ellie).
I’m reminded of the techniques Valve used for this type of thing in the Half-Life episodes.
Say, for instance, they have a bit of destruction physics that they think looks memorable and they want people to see. They’ll have a Combine soldier shoot at you from that direction, to force your attention that way. They may also set the event on a “Look Trigger” so that it will only happen while the player is looking at it.
Naughty Dog did some solid storytelling in TLoU. It would be great if they could figure out how to apply that well to a game that isn’t on rails.
“I think some of the best storytelling in The Last of Us – yes, a lot of it is in the cinematics – but a lot of it is in the gameplay, and moving around a space, and understanding a history of a space by just looking at it and examining it.
I do appreciate this in game worlds, although this alone is not a substitute for storytelling, and not enough to make an open world fun. The world has to be interesting and diverse, full of unique things, characters, places, and situations to discover, so players will want to spend their time exploring it. Evidence of the world’s history is great for adding background depth, but I’ll be bored quickly if that’s all there is.
Here’s hoping Naughty Dog makes something brilliant in this genre that they aren’t known for (have they ever done an open world?) rather than repeating the mistake other studios have made by churning out another open world of monotony.
Alright, can’t really get hyped without anything else to go on.
I was pretty fine with the way Last of Us 1 and 2 were handled, did a pretty good job at telling a story, without making it feeling like a linear corridor game. More freedom in a similar type of game would be nice, but generally it just seems to mean more downtime traveling between objectives occasionally interrupted by random encounters. If that is what they mean with more freedom, and not something else like character creation or branching storylines or whatever.
Reading the article, he refers to Elden Ring. I personally hate that kind of story telling though. I know a lot of people are absolutely lyrical about the game, but that’s probably more thanks to the gameplay. The story in that game is just being dripfed without much context and they are being intentionally vague about so many things. It’s more like a passive way of revealing little bits of the world without ever fully explaining anything.
There are certainly people that specifically like that kind of storytelling that puts the onus on the audience to do some digging. It’s why Malazan Book of the Fallen is popular, for example.
It didn’t do as much for me in Elden Ring, but I enjoyed it in Dark Souls 3 and it’s why Demon’s Souls has one of my favorite moments in gaming. Wouldn’t have worked with more explicit narrative.
videogameschronicle.com
Najnowsze