Nay. Too many distractions or boring tropes of open world games.
I am on a mission to go from a to b. I pick up all items or resources I can along the way. I encounter enemy x often and enemy y not so often. It’s ok for certain types of games but can become tedious after repetition.
Huh, end of an era for Larry -games? Some of the games are pretty good and goofy adventure games.
Haven’t really played the text-parser ones, they were a bit before my gaming era, and I really don’t enjoy the brutal difficulty of older adventure games - they went out of their way to kill or softlock the player character if you didn’t know exactly what to do.
I do like Larry 6 and 7 quite a bit, they’re later games of the Sierra -catalogue and have evolved past the “hehe, lets kill the player on every possible situation because fuck you”.
While conservation of games is important, it’s not like the games are going to vanish even if they’re not actively sold (on steam) anymore. Archive.org and abandonware sites have carried them for ages anyway.
edit: oh, apparently the rights to Leisure Suit Larry are owned by Codemasters - and they’re owned by EA now, afaik. Might have something to do with the delisting.
Will the Larry games still be up on GOG I wonder? I’ve played the (remake of the) first one and have been curious about Love For Sail as well as it’s apparently the best one (?). For better or worse they are iconic games that are part of the cultural landscape of gaming.
well, they’re up for now. The games aren’t too expensive either, so get on it if you’re at all interested. :)
The gog version might come prepackaged with an older version of scummvm (basically an app to run older adventure games), you might want to get the latest version from scummvm.org and add the game manually into it, there’s been some advancement with graphics scaling etc.
But, yea, I’d say the LSL7 is the best of the older games, doesn’t have any player deaths / gameover -nonsense, but there’s a casino section (staple of the series, kinda) where you have to win in gambling to proceed - but you can savescumm through it if you can’t be bothered to play it for realsies (essentially just save every time you win, check what opponent has and then reload & play accordingly. slam dunk).
Other than the forced “gambling minigame” the puzzles aren’t “moon logic” per se, but do involve some creative/jokes thinkywork.
Along with the regular point&click verb-menu, there’s a free text-input for some dialogue/item manipulation/etc. IIRC there’s like 2-3 things you need to do with it to beat the game (they’re fairly obvious), otherwise it’s for eastereggs.
FFXV really benefits from the open world and never felt copy pasted like most others.
Outer Wilds (if that counts) could obviously only exist with a continuous map.
While I dislike most open world games, I don’t think it’s an issue with the open world itself, but with how shallow the games end up being as they all copy the same formula and they all seem afraid to hide “content” from you, so exploration gets trivialized.
at least to unova generation and a little 6th generation. not after MASUDA went all “i dont like pokemon anymore, so im going to create a half-assed game” aftER SWSH, and i have heard nothing but bad reviews from every game since, glad i dint get a switch.
they still have triple battles? and special and physical are not seperate anymore?
i mostly play card game LIVE, which is barely a functioning game.
As a frequent traveler to Spain, I always look for calm, beautiful areas away from the tourist rush. The Gardens of Seville are the kind of place where you can sit for hours and just soak in the atmosphere.
Anything of Soldak - store.steampowered.com/franchise/soldak/ : 2 series - space shooters Drox and hack n slash Dins - Super coarse graphics, action, fighting, but their living worlds, like nowhere else. No other game where worlds freely grow based on player actions. Did You ever left main quest for exploration, lvling up or side games, oh well, here, world will not allow You to, as enemies won’t stay idle or wait for You, they do their business.
Orb of Creation - store.steampowered.com/app/…/Orb_of_Creation/Semi-clicker (intense clicker, not much of idle) and immersive mage simulator, where You don’t make Your mage-avatar, but are the mage. Still beta, but already big.
Also that PS2 is stunning. I kinda miss all the colourful and/or transparent consoles stuff as it used to be a reasonable option but now it comes with a “special edition” price tag.
I love an open world game that is done well - Horizon: Zero Dawn, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. But so often it is just done because thats what they think is the hot thing, and it does not work
It’s a bit awkward, because I liked HZD, I completed it, DLC and all, but I don’t consider it a good open world. I learned after a few hours that exploring is almost never rewarded, and you’d way better follow the few very obvious threads the game is setting up for you.
Going into a hidden path before you’re sent there by a quest is just wasting time, you’re going to struggle a lot, you’ll get nothing at the end and you’ll often even have to go back the way you came. Going outright off-road, even a little, spams you with “turn back now or I reload your save” messages. Which is baffling, I’ve never seen a game trying such a bad way to keep you inside the playing area. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game border that’s such a mess to begin with.
Great story, great characters, fun battle mechanics. But as an open-world game, I don’t think it works.
Yeah, Horizon’s big issue is that it only rewarded exploration with materials. The only reason to actually explore was to gather more crafting materials. Which is fine in a game like Minecraft or Terraria, where the game is heavily focused on crafting… Materials unlock new things to craft. But HZD isn’t heavily focused on crafting; You simply need to find increasingly obscure parts to be able to make stronger end-game weapons, which largely do the exact same thing as your current weapons, but slightly better. And once you have the better weapon, there’s no reason to continue gathering those materials. Which means there’s no reason to continue exploring.
There were only a few quests which could actually be discovered through exploration… And even those were just short fetch quests, kill quests, or were close enough to the main story’s locations that you reasonably would have stumbled across them during normal gameplay anyways.
The issue with HZD is that virtually all of your exploration-related unlockables happen via the main story. It means you can unlock every single new shiny exploration aid without actually exploring.
If an open world is just there for collectibles/unlocks or just feels otherwise unnecessary to the primary selling feature of the game (like story), then yeah its a hard pass.
Otherwise, if the open world is actually a core part of the game like in most MMO’s such as Old School Runescape, then it can be quite enjoyable.
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