I realized this idea long, long ago, when Rare made Banjo-Tooie.
Banjo-Kazooie was a fun game. You unlock worlds, go to the world, collect 100% of all there is to collect, then continue.
Banjo-Tooie, its sequel, wanted to be bigger and better in every way. Sprawling open world hub, much larger worlds with more sub-zones, interconnectivity between worlds, more things to unlock, more things to do, etc. etc.
And I think, despite having so much more, it was a worse game for it. You go to a new world but find there’s a lot you can’t do yet because you didn’t unlock an ability that comes later on. You push a button in one world and then something happens in another, but now you have to backtrack through the sprawling overworld and large world maps to get there.
And this was just a pair of games made for the Nintendo 64, before the concept of “open world” had really even taken off.
But it demonstrated to me that bigger was not always better, and having more to do did not make it a better game if it wasn’t as enjoyable.
Early open world games were fairly small, and the natural desire for people who have seen everything becomes “I wish there was more,” but in practice it ends up typically being that they take the same amount of stuff and divide it up over a larger area, or they fill the world with tedium just for the sake of having something to do.
When looking at the collectibles and activities on a world map like Genshin Impact, it’s basically sensory overload with how much there is to do.
But almost all of that is garbage. And this is just a fraction of one region among several. Go here, do this time trial, shoot these balloons, follow this spirit, solve this logic puzzle, and then loot your pittance of gatcha currency so you can try to win your next waifu or husbando before time runs out.
And don’t forget to do your dailies!
If a game has a large world, it needs to act in service to its design. It needs to be fun to exist in and travel through, not tedious. It needs to have enough stuff to do that keep it from feeling empty, but not so much stuff that it makes it hard to find anything worthwhile. And it needs to give enough ability for the player to make their own fun, to act as the balance on that tightrope walk between not-enough and too-much.
Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom are the most recent games that seemed to properly scratch an open world itch for me. While they weren’t perfect, the way they managed to really incorporate the open world as its own sort of puzzle to solve, in ways that Genshin Impact failed to properly emulate, made them more enjoyable as an open world than most other games in that genre I’ve played in recent memory.
It’s a useful place to find out if something totally sucks though. That’s how I use it. 60+? Probably good, at least for some audiences. Less than that? Only if you’re already hyped or a fan of whatever thing it’s related to.
Yeah I mean ratings are giving you an idea of whether there’s a chance you like that game. The higher the rating, the higher the chance. But there’s always a bit of chance involved.
I tend to buy highly rated games much more often, but if I really am hyped for a game with an OK rating, I still might give it a go. You never know if it will hit your specific niche.
It has an engine that permits recording and “rewinding” gameplay, with a lot of interesting quirks, like elements that don’t rewind. Puzzle platformer based on that.
It was a fascinating thing technically, and the creator did a lot with that capability. But IMHO it’s not otherwise exceptional, like graphically or such.
I’d like to imagine this is analogous to autocomplete on a keyboard, like if I mash “A” a few times to get to the title screen and game’s like “Did you mean A A A A A Start Start Down Start A A B Right Right…”
The game shut down after the play test. There was nothing they had the opportunity to change.
If you’re talking about systemic issues with the games design, that I will agree with. From my understanding it’s a 5 team of three PvP/E heisting game in space.
That means that there’s zero gravity sections, maps large enough to have heists, and, again, 5 teams of 3. It’s not so much that the game itself has any specific issue, the issue the game has was sheerly its scope and ambition. It seems like it could have had a lot of potential if it just weren’t so many systems being combined.
The tests went on for quite a long time is what i mean, i kept getting emails even after i stopped.
Idk about the scope being so crazy, there are similar games executing such concepts well. It was simply the execution of the systems and overall game and level design. That and the terrible technical issues that really held back whatever they had managed this far.
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