I’m burnt out on open world games. Some are good with dense rich areas that are interesting and make you want to explore but most these days are just bland, overly large and filled with generic quests.
Games need to stop being open world for the stake of being open world. I think for a lot of games, having multiple open-ended areas can work much better.
Definitely one of the reasons I absolutely love the original Borderlands. Large world, but broken into a lot smaller chunks/maps. More games doing stuff like that would be absolutely perfect.
I’ve been mulling over this the past few years, having finally kicked the WoW habit in the second year of Shadowlands (approaching ~3 years now)…
…but how often are quests/missions/objectives etc. just a combination of go to x, collect x of y, kill x of y? At a certain point, all of these become generic - right?
Yep pretty much. All games boil down to what you mentioned above but the execution can vastly differ. I guess the low end is the Ubisoft approach where everything is just a generic world and its go climb this tower/ capture this outpost etc and the high end is the Rockstar approach where it might be drive there, do this but things could be different in between that keeps it engaging. I guess it feels more like a living world.
Yeah I guess so. Less like a look here’s a world that I designed, how do we fill it approach and more like a what story do we want to tell and what does the world look like kind of approach if that makes sense.
There’s a whole different angle to game fun which is exploring game mechanics and the complexity that emerges from their combinations and interaction with the game space and the behaviour of independent game entities.
For example (and highly simplified), in Terraria the player has to balance the location of resources, their search and extraction of them, the actual movement, location and needs of the game monsters and NPCs, and their own progression up the “research ladder” (only in Terraria the “research ladder” is implicit and based on which resources have you managed to get your hands on and what have you built with them).
Whilst some of the fun in that game is in exploring a procedurally generated world, the drive to do so and the main fun in the game is to solve the complex problems that emerge from the interaction of those things: you explore to find resources that let you make equipment that allows you to explore more dangerous or harder to reach places to find more complex resources to make more complex equipment and so on and meanwhile the more advanced equipment also lets you do no stuff (IMHO, just merelly “shovel +1 level” equipment improvements are nowhere as satisfying as getting access to new kinds of stuff that let you do new stuff).
Examine games like for example Factorio, Minecraft or Rimworld and you find the same kind of global game loop: do stuff to get stuff to be able do more difficult stuff to get more advanced stuff and so on and all the while the complexity of your choices increases because the combination of options you have goes up as, often, also does the complexity of the World you now have de facto access to.
The AAA world however went down the path of story-like games which have one core linear story (the main quest) and then a bunch of mini-stories (side quests) and were game progression comes from advancing the core story and gaining levels (which themselves are generally just the mathematical result of doing stuff and advancing the core store and doing side stories) that let you do the same things only better and maybe a few news things, ultimatelly to help story progression. Stories “officially” drive the player’s exploration (though some players also self driven to just explore just because of liking to explore) and it seems to be impossible to get good stories working well in procedurally generated worlds (as No Man’s Sky has proven, IMHO). There is often some amount of the same mechanics as I describe above for open world indie games, but they’re not the core of the game and what drives the player.
And yeah, if your game is story driven and you can’t procedurally generate the game space with good stories, you’re going to hit limits in the size of the thing, either on the size of the game space that has to be handcrafted to work well with the stories or in the amount of stories being insufficient for the game space leading to lots of boring game space that feels empty like it’s just filler.
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.
I have a very feminist outlook on things, but I enjoy some problematic things. I know it’s not very progressive of me, but it is what it is. I acknowledge they are problematic.
Which is just to say, I don’t like this. I understand, but I’m not a fan.
Same, though interested is an understatement. Prey is one of the greatest games I’ve ever played. I enjoyed Weird West, but it left me feeling more like a POC of what the studio wants to do than anything up to the actual standards of Arkane’s best.
If WolfEye fills the void of Arkane’s deplorable closure, they’ll get all the support I can give.
So long and thanks for the early lockdown memories! Warzone was never more enjoyable than in those first few months, when everyone was just messing around, wins meant something and the ‘meta’ wasn’t something that everyone looked up on YouTube after every patch.
This article is almost entirely non-news. ES6 is a long ways off, was likely announced prematurely, and they have nothing new to say.
The only nugget in the article that seemed relevant to me was that in the engine work for Starfield, Bethesda was mindful of including future engine requirements from ES6.
The rest was just what you’d expect the ES6 project lead to say: “We want it to be amazing, of course!”
It was only announced because people were foaming at the mouth for any info at all, so they said “Yes, it is coming.” and people got bent out of shape that it isn’t already out even though they never hinted that it was soon.
Don’t forget the games that were already pulled. This includes every Valve game that isn’t Portal: Still Alive (which is arguably a better version of the game than the version that came with the now-delisted Orange Box but whatever) and Portal 2, as well as other major titles like Skate 2 and Jet Set Radio.
Microsoft has the money to figure this out, they just don’t actually care enough to. I mean for fuck’s sake, they own Bethesda and we still can’t even play Quake 4 on modern Xboxes. What’s the excuse there, Phil?
After years of dealing with his PR statements one after another, I just switched back to PlayStation for the first time since around 2015 since they don’t yank my chain about features. I still think they’ve put less effort and freedom into their platform, but they never say something positive like this and then just forget about it.
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