Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Anything from run & guns to modern RPGs, what else do you play?
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XoPachi
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Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by XoPachi »

I hate em.

It's hard for me to articulate things from my head to text, but that's the short of it. I just don't like them. But I don't dislike them in concept. The original Zelda is great and that was open world. Who doesn't like the idea of a game that continually evolves in a massive environment? The term has meant different things as time went on. Like all genres it's vague and subject to contemporary standards, but I think you know what I mean when I refer to the modern open world AAA romp.
The first time I played something like this was Oblivion and as a kid it blew my head off. The next one I really played was FarCry 3 and I loved it. But it sort of went downhill from there for me and I feel like if I went back to those, I would just have my memories tainted due to fatigue of what's released now.

Every game became the same formula. Large post apocalyptic map with nothing really interesting to do. Raise the same fucking radio tower, sheikah tower, tallneck to get the next thematically identical biome with nothing to do. A lot of look-but-don't-touch walking sim design where you discover something that looks mildly interesting but find it isn't meaningfully interactive. It's pretty but it doesn't *do* anything. You might be able to enter it but it's just like the last "cocoon" or "shrine" or "domain" or "cauldron" or wherever you go to put another round peg in a hole for a shiny blob with little significance. Environments always feel so flat and randomly placed with no real sense of progression. You finish the tutorial and then the adventure just sort of plateaus as it stops introducing new ideas. Rather it just barely rearranges what you learned on that confined 3 hour space. Obviously these are generalizations and not every game has literally every moment doing the exact same thing. Yes sometimes I do something cool, but the overwhelming majority of my time is rife with monotony and tedium. And walking.

You kill animals that all behave the same or enemies too stupid to pose a threat and barely interact with the copy pasted chunk of environment they're inorganically plodding in. Get materials flooding your horribly laid out inventory to craft some shit to make bigger damage numbers pop out. And since the games have to be every trendy genre under the sun at once, of course you're crafting to get incremental damage ups to keep you alive for the next hour of walking. How you fight doesn't fundamentally change. You get a bit more damage for the next spongey recolored humanoid you fight. RPG's but none of the strategic specialization that's implied with role playing. Even the actual RPG ones sometimes, FALLOUT 4.
I'm not even asking for them to do more with this formula to evolve it. In fact, I'm going headlong in the stark opposite. I literally want -less-. What's that meme? "I want smaller games with worse graphics and I'm not even kidding."

For a while it was quite difficult to find just a normal 3D adventure game that wasn't...any of this. It was ALL open world survival craft sandbox shit that felt like AAA execs ticking checkboxes. Conceptually cynical, 5000 hour games that don't have any right to be. Thankfully there seems to be a bit more variety to action adventure coming back with Rift Apart, Kena, and Solar Ash. I'm not asking for the genre to vanish because I know people clearly love these games and I'm not shunning people who do. They should exist because they're at least technically impressive and their advancements only make new tech to broaden possibilities in game development. But damn did they dominate single player adventures for a few years. Swallowed up some series I love myself.

(And I know I threw shade at Horizon, but that's one of the only games in the genre I like a bit. It just falls into the same tropes. I just think it does it better than most despite still not being a preferred. And DokeV looks ok. Ubisoft and Nintendo open world can fuck off.)

Anyway, that's all I got. :[
SuperDeadite
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by SuperDeadite »

Go play Evil Within 2 if you haven't. Personally I much prefer the original highly focused design of the first game. But 2's semi-open world design is fun to explore in its own way.
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by To Far Away Times »

I enjoyed it when it was novel with the PS2 GTA games, and I still love the Elder Scrolls games but for the most part open world is a turn off these days. Open world design makes it so much harder to have good, tight level design.

See how DICE tossed away a potentially great Mirror's Edge sequel with a totally unnecessary and bloated open world. Oh well, there's always the first game to go back to.

The last open world game that I really enjoyed was Breath of the Wild (which I loved, by the way) three and a half years ago because it was the first open world game that really asked why we have these big empty open worlds and checklists and was a totally different take on what everyone else was doing. BotW's gameplay experimentation and sandbox approach along with frequent but unmarked points of interest was a huge breath of fresh air in a super stale genre. It felt like it was entirely a generation ahead of what everyone else was doing. And then the game ends as soon as you want it to. Just head to the castle and beat Gannon whenever you want.
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by BulletMagnet »

To Far Away Times wrote:See how DICE tossed away a potentially great Mirror's Edge sequel with a totally unnecessary and bloated open world.
I always felt kinda bad for the devs when it comes to that series; when the first one came out everyone said "they totally should have let you openly roam the rooftops, the level structure feels so limited!", then when they gave everyone what they said they wanted with the sequel the reaction basically mirrored yours. They never could quite catch a break.

Can't really add much to the topic at hand since the only proper open-world game I've played to any extent is Horizon Zero Dawn, which I did enjoy, though a good deal of that probably came from how much I liked the overall aesthetic. Guess we'll see how that sequel turns out.
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by Vanguard »

Semi-open worlds like Zelda 1 and Dark Souls are good. Games made up of hand-made areas with encounters set up by real level designers, but you have some choice in which order to clear each area, and there's some strategy involved in trying to get resources in one area to help you clear another. Fully open worlds like The Elder Scrolls are bad, where you've got a giant expanse of nothing and you can run around wherever you want but it'll play exactly the same no matter where you go, and bad guys are just kind of sprinkled around at random with no thought whatsoever going into encounter design.
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drauch
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by drauch »

XoPachi wrote:Large post apocalyptic map
Other than Fallout, what are all these games?
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

To Far Away Times wrote:I enjoyed it when it was novel with the PS2 GTA games
Same, San Andreas is fun because it's amusing to just drive around like a maniac in it, and the environment is interesting and interactive enough that it's fun hunting down the collectables.
The last open world game that I really enjoyed was Breath of the Wild (which I loved, by the way) three and a half years ago because it was the first open world game that really asked why we have these big empty open worlds and checklists and was a totally different take on what everyone else was doing.
I haven't played it yet but I've heard this from a lot of folks.
BulletMagnet wrote:I always felt kinda bad for the [Mirror's Edge] devs when it comes to that series; when the first one came out everyone said "they totally should have let you openly roam the rooftops, the level structure feels so limited!", then when they gave everyone what they said they wanted with the sequel the reaction basically mirrored yours. They never could quite catch a break.
There's a joke in here about focus groups being useless and not knowing what they want. I think one of the keys to making a good game is not only to take feedback, but also to recognize when you're receiving bad or unhelpful feedback that'd make the game worse. It's really tricky pleasing everyone.

As a side note, I loved the surreal aesthetic of Mirror's Edge's floating cubes time trials levels. It really clicked with me.
Vanguard wrote:Fully open worlds like The Elder Scrolls are bad, where you've got a giant expanse of nothing and you can run around wherever you want but it'll play exactly the same no matter where you go, and bad guys are just kind of sprinkled around at random with no thought whatsoever going into encounter design.
Procedural, randomized encounters are often sloppier than thought out encounters, it's so true. I think it also makes a big difference when the game communicates to the player what areas are easy, and what areas are hard, teasing the player and encouraging them to prepare to explore these new, dangerous areas. The Elder Scrolls' level scaling shenanigans, particularly Oblivion, makes it definitely all feel very same-y and makes it hard to judge your own character's strength and progression, since enemies constantly keep up. From Software was always great at making exploration feel open and engaging without being true open world/sandbox games, even as early as the King's Field games.

Ultima IV I think does it well by making the enemies on the world map scale with your level, but making the actual dungeons consist mainly of fixed encounters. The focus is on the exploration and puzzle solving rather than the combat anyways, and this way allows you to explore towns and such without a preset order as to which you're supposed to visit. And it still encourages progression in terms of gaining new equipment and learning spells so as to prepare for when you're higher level or ready to tackle the dungeons.
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by Vanguard »

BareKnuckleRoo wrote:There's a joke in here about focus groups being useless and not knowing what they want. I think one of the keys to making a good game is not only to take feedback, but also to recognize when you're receiving bad or unhelpful feedback that'd make the game worse. It's really tricky pleasing everyone.
I think the best way to make a good game or any other piece of art is to know what you want to do and understand how you should go about doing it and then do it. Feedback should be a tool for sanding off some rough edges you've overlooked and little more than that.
BareKnuckleRoo wrote:Procedural, randomized encounters are often sloppier than thought out encounters, it's so true. I think it also makes a big difference when the game communicates to the player what areas are easy, and what areas are hard, teasing the player and encouraging them to prepare to explore these new, dangerous areas. The Elder Scrolls' level scaling shenanigans, particularly Oblivion, makes it definitely all feel very same-y and makes it hard to judge your own character's strength and progression, since enemies constantly keep up. From Software was always great at making exploration feel open and engaging without being true open world/sandbox games, even as early as the King's Field games.

Ultima IV I think does it well by making the enemies on the world map scale with your level, but making the actual dungeons consist mainly of fixed encounters. The focus is on the exploration and puzzle solving rather than the combat anyways, and this way allows you to explore towns and such without a preset order as to which you're supposed to visit. And it still encourages progression in terms of gaining new equipment and learning spells so as to prepare for when you're higher level or ready to tackle the dungeons.
I once played an Oblivion total conversion mod called Nehrim and it was a colossal improvement over the original largely because 1) different areas covered different level ranges rather than using level scaling, and 2) there was an attempt to incorporate some degree of level design into the dungeons, even though enemies were still mostly sprinkled around at random. There's a world of difference between leveling up for the pure sake of making your numbers bigger and leveling up so that you have the power to take on that monster that's been blocking your path.

I didn't like Ultima 4 and 5 and a big part of why is because powering up and arming your characters is only particularly relevant at the very beginning and the end of the games. Once you have basic equipment all of the overworld encounters are just speed bumps, and that's all the combat you'll deal with until you're ready to finish the game. You can go into the dungeons early if you want, but there's no point in doing so. Only once you've interviewed all the NPCs and got all the hints and done all the quests do you have a reason to go. I felt like the developers mostly just wanted to make a puzzle adventure game, and they put a bunch of combat into their games without really thinking about what it was there for. Fighting is busywork, gathering food and reagents is busywork. Even the puzzles are more about asking every NPC every keyword you know until someone spills it rather than any worthwhile applications of logic or intuition.
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by Sima Tuna »

Vanguard wrote:Semi-open worlds like Zelda 1 and Dark Souls are good. Games made up of hand-made areas with encounters set up by real level designers, but you have some choice in which order to clear each area, and there's some strategy involved in trying to get resources in one area to help you clear another. Fully open worlds like The Elder Scrolls are bad, where you've got a giant expanse of nothing and you can run around wherever you want but it'll play exactly the same no matter where you go, and bad guys are just kind of sprinkled around at random with no thought whatsoever going into encounter design.
Especially bad when the game has level-scaled content. So not only will the game play the same no matter where you go, but the difficulty will be the same from the beginning of the game to the end. And that's IF they playtested the scaling. More often, what I find is that content that always scales to your level in open-world games provides hilariously uneven and broken difficulty. At certain levels, the game will be pathetically easy. At others, even a generic bandit will carry legendary gear and be capable of bodying you.

Oblivion and Skyrim have level-scaled game worlds. New Vegas utilizes a level range for enemies instead of pure scaling and it works MUCH better as a result.
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by guigui »

Sima Tuna wrote:
Vanguard wrote:Semi-open worlds like Zelda 1 and Dark Souls are good. Games made up of hand-made areas with encounters set up by real level designers, but you have some choice in which order to clear each area, and there's some strategy involved in trying to get resources in one area to help you clear another. Fully open worlds like The Elder Scrolls are bad, where you've got a giant expanse of nothing and you can run around wherever you want but it'll play exactly the same no matter where you go, and bad guys are just kind of sprinkled around at random with no thought whatsoever going into encounter design.
Especially bad when the game has level-scaled content. So not only will the game play the same no matter where you go, but the difficulty will be the same from the beginning of the game to the end. And that's IF they playtested the scaling. More often, what I find is that content that always scales to your level in open-world games provides hilariously uneven and broken difficulty. At certain levels, the game will be pathetically easy. At others, even a generic bandit will carry legendary gear and be capable of bodying you.

Oblivion and Skyrim have level-scaled game worlds. New Vegas utilizes a level range for enemies instead of pure scaling and it works MUCH better as a result.
Yay, Dark Souls and Fallout New Vegas in the same message inside open-world games discussion. Cannot think of 2 better games in this kind of setting.

I remember playing a lot of Daggerfall (Elder Scrolls II, wayyy before Morrowind), and I fell for the whole "huge world" thing then. But launching it after all these years, you certainly understand that all those square miles of void are not necessary at all.

Oh, and I guess it is worth mentionning Subnautica there : underwater open world, with some areas becoming more easily accessible after some progress, but always a pleasure to travel through just for contemplation.
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by Sima Tuna »

Survival games tend to handle their open worlds in different ways, with more curated and designed content. Even in randomized games, ironically. The Long Dark and Don't Starve both utilize randomization. They're both survival games. They're both "open world." But what they do is they incorporate a biome system that uses standard crafted level design. Item spawns in The Long Dark are randomized, but the locations are crafted. So you will always find certain structures in the same locations, certain high-value spawn locations are the same every run, enemy spawns are fixed (along with when they respawn.) Don't Starve has randomized maps, but every map will always have the same structures for its crafted content. Every world will have a teleporter, a dark door, most worlds have a pig king/pig village, almost every world has Chester and Glommer, every world will have some amount of every biome type (and therefore every resource type.) It's very, very rare in Don't Starve to get a world spawn that doesn't have the resources you want somewhere in it. Even if you get super unlucky, the teleporter lets you essentially reroll your world without ending the run.

It's notable too that Don't Starve, The Long Dark and Subnautica (all of which I'd consider "good" open world survival games) don't use leveling at all. You can have an open world game where you make incremental progress without resorting to level ups and xp grinding.

Skyrim is just... The epitome of everything I hate about modern gaming. I've written novels about how bad I think Skyrim is and I could do so again. I played it for hundreds of hours when I was in college. I'd come back from classes, turn off my brain and play "follow the pointy map indicator" for hours. So I can speak from experience in saying I regret ever putting time into that game and I think it's one of the worst "rpg" experiences around. Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle is a fair criticism of Oblivion and level scaling in general, but Skyrim carries things a step further by removing all depth and providing the most generic dungeons I've ever seen. A lot of the really shit open-world rpgs around today take inspiration from Skyrim's design. The Ubisoft stuff in particular.

A good example of an open world modern rpg (imo) would be Dishonored. Semi-open level design, crafted zones, no leveling system/level scaling and a strong focus on stealth for high score/high skill play.
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by drauch »

The Forest also doesn't have any sort of leveling either. I've put plenty more hours into other survival/crafting games, but I think this one is still my favorite. It's terrifying, the AI is intelligent with how it slowly approaches and assesses you, before the inevitable sending out more cannibals to check out your base and eventually make contact. Certain 'tribes' you can even communicate with and create a sort of alliance, all without actually 'speaking'. And it has a static map and endgame. You can build aplenty, but it's not necessary, and much more entertaining to live nomadically.

I think a lot of these big, aforementioned RPGs just have a damned hard time tuning everything. Like I hatttttte Dishonored with a passion for its modern obsession with cramming horrible exposition down your throat, and despite New Vegas having a much better traditional RPG experience, the world is so flat and boring, with copy/pate Oblivion caves with Oblivion assets and just endless stretches of desert. And agree with Daggerfall too; the spritework and world is (potentially) great, but the moment you get into the first town you really understand what this game is about: filling an absurdly gigantic world with empty, random garbage. I don't see how anyone doesn't get overwhelmed the moment you look at the map with a billion dots for randomly generated locations, or see a large crowd of wandering villagers who all have the same things to say.

I've put plenty of time into all of the modern Bethesda stuff and pretty much agree with all the negatives, but still enjoy them to an extent, primarily because said randomness can lead to ridiculous results in encounters; which, of course, is hardly the intent when so much writing is present. Skyrim especially just left me so fucking cold, like they didn't even try to do a basic RPG of building up a character. Hey, don't worry about that whole prisoner with nothing thing--now you're a cool dragonslayer right from the get-go! Neat, huh?
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by Vanguard »

The Forest sounds cool.
drauch wrote:And agree with Daggerfall too; the spritework and world is (potentially) great, but the moment you get into the first town you really understand what this game is about: filling an absurdly gigantic world with empty, random garbage. I don't see how anyone doesn't get overwhelmed the moment you look at the map with a billion dots for randomly generated locations, or see a large crowd of wandering villagers who all have the same things to say.
I thought Daggerfall seemed like coolest game in the world up until I played through it. Those gigantic dungeons are not fun and the city life part of the game isn't quite developed enough to work on its own. Fortunately we have Elona which realizes Daggerfall's initial promise.
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by Mischief Maker »

Open World games are just mediocre action games with a commute.
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by Blinge »

Only this place would have a thread about the modern plague of open world games..

.. and have people answer by talking about Ultima IV :lol: :lol: :lol:
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Sima Tuna
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by Sima Tuna »

drauch wrote:
I've put plenty of time into all of the modern Bethesda stuff and pretty much agree with all the negatives, but still enjoy them to an extent, primarily because said randomness can lead to ridiculous results in encounters; which, of course, is hardly the intent when so much writing is present. Skyrim especially just left me so fucking cold, like they didn't even try to do a basic RPG of building up a character. Hey, don't worry about that whole prisoner with nothing thing--now you're a cool dragonslayer right from the get-go! Neat, huh?
I will say one thing for Bugthesda games: they have a certain amount of charm. Not Skyrim. But the other ones. Oblivion, Morrowind, Fallout 3... They're not great games (except maybe morrowind is ok.) But they're charming. They're silly. You walk down a road in morrowind and a dude falls out of the sky and dies instantly in front of you. He drops a scroll of flying. If you use it, you fly up in the air and then fall to the ground and die. Womp womp. It doesn't hurt that Morrowind is an exotic island rather than a generic medieval countryside. You ride on a giant flea instead of taking the bus.

Fallout 3 has giant naked molerats and guys who dress like 1950s greasers. Oblivion has the Dark Brotherhood quests, one of which is a murder mystery in which you are the murderer.

Like I said, the games are still full of open world (tm) sludge. Go here fetch this, come back get reward. Do it again and again. But the older bugthesda games, pre-skyrim, are a little silly. Skyrim though... Do you like Draugr? Good. Here's an entire game with Draugr, giant spiders, wolves and bandits. Enjoy. You'll have even more fun when you download Dawnguard and every NPC in your town is fucking killed by invading vampires who spawn randomly.
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by Immryr »

i have to say i am slightly concerned about the open world-ness of elden ring. i only watched a couple of mins of the recent gameplay, and i was a little put off by the idea of lights telling you where you shoud go and crafting. the only reason you have crafting in open world games like this is, what else are you going to fill your barren open world with other than thousands of crafting items?!? And, while in BotW I enjoyed plodding around in that game world, collecting items, and jumping off mountains, this is not exactly what i want out of a from soft game.

i'm sure it will still be a good game, and i will enjoy it. it just hope it's not needlessly bloated with this stuff.
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by BryanM »

All things being equal it improves verisimilitude. I agree with the comment "in Bard's Tale you could go into rooms even if they were empty. But now everything's a mickey mouse facade. Games lost something when they stopped doing that."

Thankfully due to having zero interest in these kinds of games, I was able to derive some enjoyment from Genshin Impact. Stand on mountains and look down at the clouds, watch sunrises and sunsets over the beach, climb around picking up wall fungus and flowers, it was great. The fantasy of going outside without the horrible real life reality of going outside. (Cheaper, as well... god we live in a horror game.)

Combat in these games just ruins them to hell, kills the vibe right in its tracks. You're trying to chill in a Pokemon game and a mutha' fuckin' zoobat jumps out of nowhere and screams: "Hey kid? Want to trade 25 seconds of your life for 5 exp?? You know you want to!!!" Literally unplayable without a fastforward button.

I thought maybe the new direction in Breath of the Wild might have addressed my antipathy for the 3d Zelda titles... I tried it out at kiosk, and about 10 seconds into the first combat lost all interest. Auto aim, again. 2d Zelda games have 2d combat. 3d Zelda games have 1d combat. I don't like it.

The human brain only has two primary functions:

* The ancient modules there since we were fish: To navigate the environment around us.

* To navigate social interactions.

Atlus has two franchises that focus on particularly on one of them that serve as a good example of this: Megami Tensei tends to be about environments and mood. Terse dialogue, broad thoughtful themes about power and politics, very introspective. While modern Persona is about tickling that tribal part of our brain. Pack of wolves, and all that.

Pretty much no AAA designer cares or understands this, and just produces copies of whatever has sold in the past. Just like with blockbuster movies, weirdos who can get bored of things need weirdo avant-garde crap to be satisfied, and that by definition alienates those easily satisfied by the rote. I think a good movie or game is blueprint for a boring mediocre game, since if you want to play the original game just play the original game. All great things often lie between the line of the proven and kusoge.

.. or at least somewhere in the uncertain haze of the unproven or forgotten.
1) different areas covered different level ranges rather than using level scaling
A bedrock design aspect older than the open world game... Dragon Warrior 1....

I have no idea why anyone would have unbounded universal level scaling in their game. Besides the game development industry being full of perverts.
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by Licorice »

Combat in these games just ruins them to hell, kills the vibe right in its tracks. You're trying to chill in a Pokemon game and a mutha' fuckin' zoobat jumps out of nowhere and screams: "Hey kid? Want to trade 25 seconds of your life for 5 exp?? You know you want to!!!" Literally unplayable without a fastforward button.
In this case, it's not so much a clash between "open world" and combat as much as it is combat just done inexplicably badly. Pokemon with more snappy combat would just make it infinitely better in a way removing combat from the game would not (as the whole team building and even some of the execution around combat is quite good or at least serviceable). I'll never understand why they didn't just give players the option to turn off health bar animation lol.
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by BryanM »

It's strictly an interruption of adventuring/chillin' out, but most importantly of freedom and doing what you feel like doing. I'll happily frolic around a forest and pick a hundred flowers on my own, and seethe and loathe the game designers if they felt it necessary to designate to me that I must pick up one flower. It transforms a voluntary activity I may or may not feel like doing, into a hollow meaningless chore. A checkbox to check. An experience everyone else has had.

Rune Factory games are kind of good at permitting the player freedom - you can farm, you can fight monsters and clear the dungeons to progress the narrative, or you can say nuts to all that and spend all your time fishing or hitting on the butler guy. It's about offering a choice of different activities to do, as all things become stale with repetition.

I assume they've already removed non-voluntary/non-gym battles from the latest Pokemon game anyway, maybe? So it's kind of a moot point, if you don't have to deal with zoobats of the sea while cruising on some waves or whatever. I think they've replaced that version of being in videogame prison, with looooooooooooooooong nagging dialogue sequences instead?
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by Steamflogger Boss »

Immryr wrote:i have to say i am slightly concerned about the open world-ness of elden ring. i only watched a couple of mins of the recent gameplay, and i was a little put off by the idea of lights telling you where you shoud go and crafting. the only reason you have crafting in open world games like this is, what else are you going to fill your barren open world with other than thousands of crafting items?!? And, while in BotW I enjoyed plodding around in that game world, collecting items, and jumping off mountains, this is not exactly what i want out of a from soft game.

i'm sure it will still be a good game, and i will enjoy it. it just hope it's not needlessly bloated with this stuff.
That was my first concern watching the trailer. I was like...this world looks way too big, there are random animals to kill etc... Parts of it looked like a From game but other parts looked like generic open world crap. They might lose me on this one tbh.
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by Sima Tuna »

BryanM wrote:
1) different areas covered different level ranges rather than using level scaling
A bedrock design aspect older than the open world game... Dragon Warrior 1....

I have no idea why anyone would have unbounded universal level scaling in their game. Besides the game development industry being full of perverts.
I think it's laziness. They set each enemy's equipment at x level and then scale the level to the player. Bam, done. Every zone in every area in the entire gameworld is the fucking same now. Super easy to program, I bet. The big downside is difficulty ends up fluctuating wildly because certain level tiers of enemies are harder as they scale, while others are easier (because their equipment doesn't upgrade as much.) So you end up with Skyrim, where you have to constantly tweak the difficulty slider as it blasts between "cakewalk" and "omg how much health does this fucker have" at the speed of level.

Oblivion was criticized for this exact thing, but it didn't have the problem as bad as Skyrim does. Oblivion also isn't as heavily reliant on goddamn crafting. You can largely ignore crafting entirely in Oblivion and just use what you pick up. The game still sucks, but it's a lesser suck.

I still remember the first time I played Far Cry 3. I had played Far Cry on the original xbox, back when the game was a semi-linear shooter rather than open world skinner box. So I saw all these amazing reviews and I figured it would be great. Fuuuuuuuck! It was the most boring trash I'd ever tried. The crafting in those games are unbearable.
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Blinge
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by Blinge »

Oblivion's scaling and levelling is totally busted for different reasons though.
I'd say this in particular is worse than Skyrim once you're fucked.
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by Sima Tuna »

I was trying to think of some examples of open world games that do it well. I think fallout 1 is pretty good. Same for Westerado, New Vegas, River City Ransom. Those games all have their own wildly different and completely tailored ways of handling open world gameplay. The main point of commonality is that all of them, except for NV, are small. The open worlds are small but dense.

I don't expect people on an arcade game genre forum to necessarily agree, but I've never minded levels in River City Ransom. If you just take the fights along the way, you'll naturally get money you can spend, you'll find bosses and you'll progress the game. It's pretty short for an open world game, so it's endlessly replayable. The GBA version added even more customizable options and character selection.

Westerado is an indie example I discovered recently. Really small open world, but very dense. The game's goal is to get revenge. Once you get revenge, the game ends. You can go from the start of the game to end in probably 10 minutes if you know what you're doing. Or you could spend a couple hours doing things.

In all of these games, your choices matter. What you do ends up shaping the game world. Maybe in RCR a little less than the others, on account of how old that game is. Fallout 1 is quite short for an open-world game.

New Vegas is the one that most plays like conventional open world sludge. But it gives you meaningful choices, factions, interesting quests, decent writing, better level scaling systems, mechanics like damage threshold (which further rank enemy strength outside of pure scaling) and a wealth of character-building options.

As for Elden Ring, it looks like somebody at From decided to cut and paste Dark Souls 3 with a little bit of tacked-on Sekiro stealth system. I'm also quite sick of From exploring the same setting over and over. Bloodborne is often touted as the best From game, and aside from the level design, I would say the setting is a big part of why. Even before Bloodborne came out, other game companies were copying its look for their own stuff. It was instantly iconic. What is this Elden Ring? It looks exactly the fucking same as every other dark souls game. Visuals of dark souls and character movement from sekiro. I skipped Sekiro entirely because it didn't look like something for me. I like Tenchu and I like Souls but I don't want to mix them. Nor am I fond of being required to learn the parry timings for every single boss and enemy in a game. Bloodborne never required that.

I've noticed a trend of From making their games faster and faster. Which is fine when it's done well, like Bloodborne, but there were large sections of Dark Souls 3 I hated because they felt so fucking jank due to the higher speed of all damage sources compared to DS1 and DS2. And I've played every souls game for hundreds of hours, including DS3, so this wasn't some snap judgement.
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by Blinge »

Tired of From exploring the same thing? you may aswell rant at grass for being green.
Also you skipped the time they went for something different with Sekiro.
so, uh..

Anyway I wouldn't consider any of their existing output as open world
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by BryanM »

Sima Tuna wrote:I think it's laziness. They set each enemy's equipment at x level and then scale the level to the player. Bam, done. Every zone in every area in the entire gameworld is the fucking same now. Super easy to program, I bet.
Wat~ Laziness is a heavenly virtue, a core part of our religion. The whole endgame, the final dream, is to render humanity obsolete and have a computer do everything. Only then will we be free to do important stuff. Like ping-pong.

It's those perverted weirdos I tell you. The unnatural creature created by the industry called a game designer.

It's trivial to have a zone have a set level and then for each spawn to have an adjusted level for each specific spawn (defaulting to a +0 in the level editor). Just have to designate it in the spec requirements. A couple of text boxes in the editor, another integer variable for each spawning entity, ez pz.

Honestly I do have some sympathy for the designer: leveling has a wonderful way of rendering old areas obsolete. (The haunted castle in Mother 3 is the best example: when you get there during the plot, everything's exciting. The ghosts are throwing a party, the music's jamming, it's great. Come back later, the music's run down, almost everyone is gone, there's still a boozehood still going at it. It's sad. A memorial for all the jRPG towns that get used up and forgotten after three seconds.) True freedom extends that to most of the world, and these guys can't let go and let a random zubat found in the woods be a useless encounter. Or deny the player the fantasy of murderating a thousand enemies at once as one person.

See, this is the problem with combat. Everything's always about who has bigger numbers unless it's an action game. Love Nikki-Dress UP Queen spinoffs will always be superior to these games, as you solve murder mysteries and try to acquire the coolest dress. "Let's create a crafting system." "Is it to create pretty dresses or an army of monsters?" "Nope, it's about getting a +1 to stabbing people." "Wat."

Pfft, open world games that aren't about looking at scenery. Could you even imagine? LSD Dream Emulator with a gun? Bird watching with a sword????
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XoPachi
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by XoPachi »

I forgot I made this thread so long ago. I think I got damn near drunk after making it and just forgot. But I was coming to gush about Tunic because that's technically open world and it does it in exactly the way I've dreamt about for years. At least in the building blocks anyway. I would adore a full third person game that does what it does.

(I like how I expressed excitement for Solar Ash and ended up completely disliking it and forgetting it until reading this thread again.)
drauch wrote:Other than Fallout, what are all these games?
Off the top of my head, Breath of the Wild, Rage 2, Dying Light/2, Days Gone, Horizon ZD/Forbidden West, that Mad Max game, Death Stranding, Far Cry New Dawn, Nier Automata, and I think there's some others I'm forgetting. The only ones of these I liked to some degree were Nier and Zero Dawn. But I'm in no hurry to finish them.

(The Sonic Frontiers reveal made me want to put my head in the dirt and scream.)
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by Ed Oscuro »

The original Gothic series is semi-open world. Elex is its open world spiritual sequel (almost immediately hated it but I might give it another shot someday). The Arkham Asylum series is semi-open world (I had lots of fun playing around with all the Riddler challenges when I first loaded into the Arkham City map proper) with linear story segments. Dragon's Dogma is mostly open world. With the possible exception of Elex these are all well-loved games.

I would guess the modern Open World game paradigm's roots are firmly set in the development of Ultima Online and System Shock 2, both released in 1999. Ultima Online's devs wanted to make the world more lifelike so they added wildlife with a food chain (plants, herbivores, carnivores). Players just treated the fuzzies like an ancient uncoordinated horde would, and hunted everything to unsustainable levels. Other people had the basic ideas before this, but the realization that players would happily take a break to interact with any systems in the game whenever they got bored of the quest made designers realize they had uncovered another classic trick in the book of ways to extend a game's lifespan relatively cheaply.

Emergent gameplay is an aspirational design philosophy aiming to create a set of effects and systems for the player to freely use and mix. With some sane boundaries and a few checks by the developer, players could potentially create a huge number of unforeseen situations and tactics without requiring developer attention. So long as it didn't crash the game or lead to undesired sequence breaks, it was all good. It's easy to get trapped in development hell, though, as the PS3/X360 era Alone In The Dark devs found out.

These are interesting developments when you consider that the previous year's breakout classics were titles like Tenchu, which struggled to show more than a few meters of ground around the player, and Ocarina of Time, whose idea of things to do in a persistent world was basically collecting shinies. It's an open question whether today's open world games are more like Tenchu or Ocarina of Time, or more ambitious like Ultima Online and System Shock 2. Of course, ambition doesn't necessarily track with quality, which in turn doesn't necessarily track fun.
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XoPachi
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Re: Screeching Nerd Rant: Open World Gaming

Post by XoPachi »

I swear to god, if Metroid Prime 4 is open world, I'm going to.....spend my money on something else, I guess.

Maybe cry in this thread and be a big b i t c h about it like I was with BotW.
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