I get it. I’ve seen some on here that make no sense to me as metroidvanias. But I think it might be generational. To me a metroidvania has to be 2D, because those are the kinds of metroid and castlevania games I grew up on.
Seeing suggestions for Batman Arkham games or Supraland (love both series) is a weird suggestion to me because I see those as action and puzzle platformer respectively. But for people growing up with 3D Metroid etc. I can see why they’d classify it that way, even though I think the series changed away from the classic metroidvania genre at that point and into more action or action platformer.
I was scrolling looking for this one too! Really excellent game. I’ve been enjoying it and it scratches my metroid itch better than what most people are listing off.
Ayyyy plus one on both Carrion and Supraland! Loved both of those. I can’t wait to get the latest Surpaland game (Supraworld iirc?). Such a fun puzzle platformer.
I think that all comes down to how the travel, visual appeal, and POIs are handled. As well as a personal interest in the gameplay loop. The following are my general opinions on a few games for why I think they do or do not work.
Daggerfall would be way too big, because the POIs are few and far between and there is no visual interest between, but it worked because it had fast travel.
Each of the successive TES games had more visual interest to them and wel spaced POIs and I spent a lot of time walking on first playthroughs without fast traveling anywhere.
Similarly No Man’s Sky could seem too big at first blush, but if you like the gameplay loop it’s infinitely fascinating. For anyone wanting to move further in it’s also helpful that there are gates to help make large jumps, without them being a requirement to enjoy things.
Cyberpunk 2077 was very visually interesting and had a ton of POIs and was fun to traverse on foot and in a vehicle. I thought the size was fantastic on my first two playthroughs. The third time the badlands areas got a little frustrating though.
Stalker and Stalker 2, are very fun to traverse by foot for me despite being very large. They are visually very interesting, especially 2. There are plenty of things you can stumble on and explore. In fact on my first playthrough of Stalker 2, I didn’t even realize it had a fast travel option for over 60 hours because I didn’t feel the need to look for one to use. Loved the huge size of those.
WoW was horribly oversized, as are many MMOs. WoW was(and imo still is despite many upgrades since I played, just not a fan of toony looking games) completely uninteresting visually, had no “on the way” POIs and had no motivation to look around. Long travel was a chore on top of a burdensome gameplay loop. I hated WoWs size. It felt big just because it would take people longer to play. I can’t express how fucking boring it was to me. And exploring had zero reward. I remember wandering into the water and swimming for like 30 minites to get behind some massive tree or something (all I remember was it was a brown gradient that’s how dull the visuals were) and I get behind it and there was fuckall. That was the last time I played I think. More brown gradient and uninteresting light blue water gradient stretched off into a foggy white gradient. Fucking hated WoW but especially its size. MMOs like that are the equivalent of having a rail shooter that’s more train ride simulator than shooter. It works for other people, I just couldn’t stand it.
Outward is a fantastic game but it’s world feels a little too big sometimes. I don’t really enjoy wandering it that much even though I enjoyed the game on the whole. Just felt I got to the point of sprinting from one objective to the next because I was tired of traversing the map.
So it’s really game dependant imo. If they nail some key aspects, size doesn’t seem to matter.
You aren’t alone on that. One of my friends got it with his new gpu. He tried it not knowing it had PVP and was really enjoying it. Then another player made his life miserable. He quit and won’t play again.
It’s too bad too because me and 3 other friends were also on board with the idea of buying it when he was talking about it. But then we found out it was PVP only and that completely killed it for all of us. So they lost out on about 5 players and 4 purchases from our group just because there wasn’t a no PVP option. And I mean it really doesn’t seem like it’d be hard. Just turn off the connection to other players. If they wanted to go above and beyond, make it so you can play with a small group of friends. But at the very least being able to turn off PVP would’ve been a good idea.
Almost all their art in the game was stolen from one artist. They didn’t even do a good job at covering up the blatant theft. Not sure if they’ve fixed anything, but that was a major lawsuit just itching to come out.
Because Linux is open source and each group has a different idea on the direction it should go. They are all linux at their core, but they all have different use cases.
Bazzite and Zorin are both great options for leaving Windows for the first time. Bazzite is generally more gaming focused but Zorin is a better desktop in my limited experience of both. Bazzite for example is more locked up on OS files, so it’s harder to break in some regards. But it also bakes drivers into the image and they only get updated on the next release. Afaik you can’t tinker with the drivers much but I’m not experienced enough to say 100%.