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 tired of broken games and at this point I’m not even mad at the publishers/devs anymore. I’m mad at the gamers. Like it’s really not Bethesda’s fault they keep releasing unfinished garbage. Why actually spend time making a decent game when the brain dead consumers will buy it anyways.
I recently played the Little Nightmares DLC. It came out in 2017, and there were game breaking bugs still left in. I think people have just been burned so many times by unfinished products at this point
See, in a lot of games generas I could look past performance issues, but with city builders? Yah, nah, good performance is kind of core. It’s basically impossible to make cities of much more than 40,000 unless you have a monstrosity of a CPU, and even then your game will be chugging. Scale of city is fundamentally limited by the performance, you can just make a larger, more interesting city in cities skylines at the moment. There are some interesting game play changes from from the first, but not interesting enough to make up for the limitations to scale.
Victoria 3 also has some big performance issues. Like paradox games have always been known to slow down in the late game, but you basically can’t get through the end game in Victoria 3 unless you’re willing to run the game in the background. Again, this is even on good, modern, mid range CPUs.
I was looking forward to cities 2. When I heard it had crippling performance issues, I decided to wait. Still haven’t gotten back around to it. There are just too many other games that already work for me to put up with broken new releases.
It was the sheer quantity of dlc stuff along with the second one having potential performance issues that kept me way and away from it for now. I’ll check back in at a 50-90% off sale.
QA is part of the game development process and its supposed to happen before it reaches end users. They’ve made some good games but they can’t act all surprised that selling a game and letting users be free QA doesn’t cut it.
If only steam had a way to mark games as “hey, this game is in beta, expect issues”. I don’t know, making it clear that we were accessing it early or something…
I can’t speak for everyone, but I know I’d be willing to tolerate games being a bit buggy if they up front said “we know this game has issues. You can try it now or you can wait until we fix them”.
Realistically early access launches are just launches. Some games get a boost and surge when they go 1.0, but the vast majority don’t. Using the ea tag may put more people off than the buggyness, and people forget about the game 3 years later when it hits 1.0. I think paradox knew about it and just decided it would reduce sales more then the bug reports would.
Don’t get me wrong I don’t think games with major bugs should be released as a 1.0 product if they are asking a high price. There are great games that started ea and became great, but it was a risk for them when they did that.
I wish the tagging system was expanded to include more details.
While I think it’s helpful to know if a game is “souls like”, i also want to know if the game has a ending, or will be in continual development, or if it’s good as a pick up and put down game…
Problem is when things like Kerbal Space Program 2 happen, and they release a buggy mess and charge full price for it and then abandon the project.
I feel like established publishers (Take 2, Codemasters come to mind) should be specifically excluded from the Early Access program, or perhaps price limits should be imposed on games in the program…
I’m also interested to know whether you think Paradox should make another Sims-style life sim, after nuking Life By You
I’d personally like a “The Sims”-like game.
But while I like the sandbox aspect of that series, I was never that into the actual gameplay.
Being able to make your own structures and interact with them is neat. I like games like that a lot. Dwarf Fortress. Rimworld. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.
But the actual gameplay in The Sims in that sandbox world doesn’t really excite me all that much. There’s not a lot of strategy or planning or mechanics to explore the interactions of. Watching your Sims do their thing is neat, and I’d enjoy having that go on while I play a game.
I can imagine a world where I have a lot of control over structures, with NPCs that are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree.
But I don’t have specific ideas as to how to gamify it well. I just know that The Sims hasn’t gotten there.
If what one wants is Sim Dollhouse, I guess it’s okay. I know one woman who really liked one entry in the series, bought a computer just to play it. I guess it’s a neat tool for letting people sorta role-play a life. There may be a solid market for that. But for myself, I’d like to have more mechanics to analyze and play around with. Think Kerbal Space Program or something.
Honestly, I think the bar for games these days is totally warped. People expect these cinematic masterpieces with ultra-realistic graphics in gigantic 3d landscapes with massive autonomy, extensive character creation options, full voice acting, juiced up complex mechanics, and zero bugs, and they want it yesterday. If it costs more than a full tank of gas they’ll say it’s too expensive, and if it isn’t fully patched on day 1 they’ll call it unfinished.
It seems almost obvious that simpler 2D games are a better and more satisfying alternative in this landscape. No wonder AAA studios seem like they’re racing to the bottom.
How are you supposed to get all that and also have a decent story or a sense of cohesion? We need to simplify.
Paradox's games don't really do storytelling in a traditional sense. They're strategy and managememt games. Some of them are pretty damn good at creating stories dynamically through gameplay, or providing a frame upon which you can create your own stories, but they were never intended to be narrative experiences
What’s that meme? Hold on… I can dust it off since it’s still applicable. Oh, right! “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, and I mean it!”
I don’t need it to be super epic in scope and graphically mind blowing. I just want a tight, focused, well thought out game that isn’t buggy af. And it doesn’t have to be flawless day 1, but there should be some pretty good communication and patches in the first month.
“We need to simplify” indie games are doing just fine. It’s almost like super massive studios take much more money to make games with less replay value.
And who expects cinematic masterpieces? Most gamers skip the cutscenes and all dialog lol
Studios make the games pretty for pre sale hype. Getting people interested without game play.
Agree. The thing with realistic graphics is that it brings in soooo much complexity on a systems level that it becomes the center point everything else revolves around.
Imaging a 2d game vs a 3d game. Alone trough that you have a complete third dimension wich you have to account for.
A whole book full of new bugs are possible now.
And with realistic graphics the brain now expects the rules of the world to be realistic too.
My character looks photorealistic so, of course, the environment needs to look photorealistic too otherwise we go into uncanny valley territory.
So next thing the interaction needs to look realistic too. Think walking trough a forrest and the player character pushing leaves out of his way.
That is just to fucking much you need to test and invest time in to be flexible anymore.
The simple answer here is better art direction. Photorealism is neat but not needed.
With simpler graphics it becomes cheaper to change stuff in development so it becomes more viable to experiment with creative ideas.
You can have more diverse assets because they are, potentially, cheaper/less time consuming to make and they don’t take as much space.
Like 1 photorealistic tree needs as much discspace as 2 trees with half the polygons.
In the and gaming has become a business and people got involved that don’t play games.
For them it is just an investment and no different to a car or a garden hose. And for those people the only viable way to solve a problem is to trow money at it.
Which worked but only for making things grander not making it more interesting. For that you need people that solve problems with creativity.
And you get people who solve problems with creativity when there is less money because you have no other choice but to solve it like that.
That is clearly not the whole picture but a part of it IMHO.
I think at this point, if you are a gaming enthusiasts and are informed about the “scene” there is just no reason to buy AAA(AAAAAAA) games anymore.
And also no need to be angry about it. Just ignore them and talk about the indies that made a change. It is more productive to have that dominate the conversation than what sucks.
Because talking about shit is still advertisement for shit.
the recent avatar game is a great example of actually hitting the mark visually and superficially (probably one of the better looking games I’ve ever played) and the physics and gameplay in the world are pretty damn good. but people complain the story is boring. and yeah it’s not amazing. I don’t think it’s terrible, and it’s a game really built to explore the environment rather than complete missions.
it’s near impossible to get that perfect game that hits every single button possible. I truly think we gamers need to settle down a bit as a whole. Sure buggy messes that are unplayable are not something we should tolerate, but I think we need to stop treating everything that isn’t perfect as a pile of shit
They are part of the studios… point was “the bar” is “fun/interesting”. The vast majority of people that purchase games don’t have a bar as defined by the content I originally replied to.
I completely agree that business ghouls doing business ghoul things make studios make worse games… doesn’t really affect my point though… studios are not making games based on a “bar” set by the consumers as described in the original post…
we’re tired of being sold a shit sandwich that may someday become edible? wow who would have ever predicted this utterly unprecedented turn of events except absolutely fucking everybody.
Ah Paradox is finding their model of releasing unfinished games and getting around to solving it later less appealing!
That is a little disappointing, actually, as Paradox made some damn good games this way. Crusader Kings 2, Hearts of Iron 4 and Stellaris were all made like that.
Look, I get it, but the state of DLC in Paradox games has moved beyond even the memes. I think they took those as inspiration. There’s a fucking monthly pass now!
I deeply enjoy their games, but the DLC bloat confounds me.
I feel guilty about it, but I appreciate the monthly pass. I played EUIV for exactly one month, at a total cost of like $7 (got the base game for free at some point) with all the bells and whistles. It seemed like a good compromise because you’d have to pay it for years at this point to cover the DLC out right, but it is a disgusting level of rent seeking behavior.
Now it bothers me that I’d need to put another $7-$10 into the machine to access those saves, but not as much as if I’d throw down hundreds of dollars on it to own the content for a 10 year old game.
It’s been nice if they had a “perpetual fallback license” approach where you are granted everything you’ve subscribed to for at least 12 months even if you cancel subscription.
That may be true but with that kind of success behind them, one would assume they have the budget to finish their games without needing the support of the crutch that is the Early Access model.
Stellaris is one of my all time favorite games, but the late game really becomes unplayable from lag. I have over 1000 hours in it because I love it’s modding and the immersion possible with it, but the performance is a real problem.
They have tried to address this too, with minor success, but that doesn’t help when the start of each month from 2350 onwards takes seconds to load.
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