Can we add a cheaper non-portable option to the wishlist? I don’t like paying for a screen or battery or junky mobile controllers that I will never use.
Knowing how to do the work is most of the value here. Yes, it’s easy for those of us with the knowhow, but most people do not have that.
Think of an artist who can whip up a cool drawing in about 10 minutes. It was “easy” in the moment, but only because they spent years learning and practicing the skills to make it so. You aren’t entitled to that artists labor for free just because it only took them a few minutes.
Sit your average gamer down with a copy of Starfield and nvngx_dlss.dll and they won’t be able to do anything useful with it.
It’s great that most modders and some artists like to share their work for free with the rest of the world, but the rest of us aren’t entitled to any of it.
How Morrowind and other open world games work has very little in common with the approaches used in R&C or Titanfall 2.
This approach has its own unique limitations. In Morrowind, you cannot instantly teleport from one side of the map to the other, in theory that would only be possible between adjacent cells. Otherwise, fast traveling would be instantaneous.
The beauty of what R&C does is that there are no limitations at all. You can almost instantly teleport between any maps the game has. No hacks or trickery beyond the brief animation concealing the 1-2 seconds it takes to shuttle the data from the SSD to VRAM. This is unique, and simply wasn’t possible on spinning rust without radically simplifying your level design and visual package to fit within the limited bandwith.
TF2 and Dishonored accomplished this by having all the other level data loaded in memory simultaneously all as part of the same map. The instant transitions are accomplished by teleporting the player to another part of the map that is already in memory.
This is not the same trick R&C pulled, and it has far more limitations. For example, TF2’s Effect and Cause necessitates a smaller overall map than the other missions because they had to fit two different versions of the same map in memory all at once. If they wanted to let you transition between three different time periods, they would have had to make it even smaller to fit in the same memory budget.
Ratchet & Clank’s approach has no such limitations. They could let you switch between 8 different time periods and not worry about having to fit all of them in memory at once.