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Post by moran on Dec 16, 2014 18:48:54 GMT -5
There is far too much open space in Skyrim. I believe that there is still a whole region and city I haven't been to yet. I found that Oblivion made much better use of map. Fast travel worked well enough and walking didn't seem like a chore.
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Post by X-pert74 on Dec 16, 2014 18:52:38 GMT -5
I forgot about Panau in Just Cause 2. I love that game, in part because of its massive size. I ended up stopping around 75% completion if I recall correctly, but I had a lot of fun with what I played. I'm not particularly a fan of collecting shit just for the sake of collecting it, but when the simple act of moving/fighting through the world is as enjoyable as it is in Just Cause 2, I think it's worth playing even if just for that. It helps that the game itself is pretty fun too. Someday I should replay it, as well as give the first Just Cause a try.
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Post by kaoru on Dec 16, 2014 21:13:14 GMT -5
I honestly really like fast travel. It's one of the things that actually makes me be able to stomach big, open worlds. I don't mind finding stuff in it on my own the first time around, even if there is not much to find after all, as long as the scenic vistas are nice to look at while doing so... but I can't stand to have to backtrack through already known locations at all, so quickly warping between cities and landmarks becomes a godsend.
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Post by X-pert74 on Dec 16, 2014 22:04:36 GMT -5
I agree; fast-travel really makes worlds much more convenient and fun to explore. I can roam around the long way if I feel so inclined, or if I'm tired of it and just want to move on to the next main part of the game, I can fast-travel there easily, which is nice. It really helped in games such as Fallout 3 and New Vegas; Just Cause 2 has it as well if I recall correctly.
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Post by Gentlegamer on Dec 16, 2014 23:06:32 GMT -5
Fast travel itself is fine, the problem is when it turns the game figuratively into a hub with a level select, like Mega Man. Morrowind had the right balance of fast travel, usually between cities. Additional fast travel locations were a reward for finding the Dwemer ruins and the correct Propylon Index. Essentially, ubiquitous fast travel turns most of the map into "fly over country" that the player never has to navigate more than once. I prefer the ability to fast travel to certain hubs and then plan my path of exploration or travel from there.
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Post by bakudon on Dec 16, 2014 23:43:19 GMT -5
Yeah, fast travel kinda makes distance and the size of the world meaningless, even more so when every area is pretty much interchangable, as in Skyrim. I generally dislike sandbox-type games anyway. In Elder Scrolls, this is excarberated by the lax writing, uninteresting characters (and how even main storyline caracters only ever feel like puppets going throug stock animations) and the fact that the games haven't really progressed at all (except for the graphics) since Arena.
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Post by kaoru on Dec 17, 2014 10:35:57 GMT -5
It's funny that Skyrim came up a couple of times by now, since I never had a problem there. Maybe just because I like the snowy mountain views and aurora borealis. But when I think harder back, I'm not sure anymore I did actually go out of my way to discover stuff in that game at all. Instead I might have just gone from one quest marker to the next, and doing a lot of sidequesting made me explore much of the surroundings by default.
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Post by shelverton on Dec 17, 2014 10:50:05 GMT -5
They're all too big!
No but seriously, the novelty of big open worlds has kinda worn off. As a kid it was my dream, but now I rarely find any reason to explore. Some sandbox worlds feel very lifeless, more so than even linear, smaller games, which is the exact opposite of what the developers had in mind.
I am still really excited for stuff like Witcher 3, but I know already that I won't see every nook and cranny cause it will most likely exhaust and overwhelm me without really being worth it. I wanna follow the story and do a couple of sidequests, but that's it for me.
On topic: One game that isn't even "open world" but still felt way too big was Castlevania: Curse of Darkness. They should've shrunk it by 30-40%. Those levels goes on FOREVER and are mindnumbingly dull and empty.
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Post by thoothan on Dec 17, 2014 11:21:09 GMT -5
hector is also slow as shit which doesn't help
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Post by Dee Liteyears on Dec 17, 2014 11:49:32 GMT -5
One thing about some TES games is, they are sprawling with details, but always the same ten ;D Even though its graphics weren't nearly as good as Oblivion or Skyrim, Morrowind's landscape seemed to vary much more and was way more interesting. Also it didn't felt as much like you could just walk from one place to another in a mostly straight line. In case of Zelda, I trust Nintendo that they know how to make such a huge landscape interesting. The previous Zelda's should have shown that they know how to make places distinctive
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Post by Elvin Atombender on Dec 17, 2014 13:55:00 GMT -5
Yeah, fast travel kinda makes distance and the size of the world meaningless, even more so when every area is pretty much interchangable, as in Skyrim. I generally dislike sandbox-type games anyway. In Elder Scrolls, this is excarberated by the lax writing, uninteresting characters (and how even main storyline caracters only ever feel like puppets going throug stock animations) and the fact that the games haven't really progressed at all (except for the graphics) since Arena. True that. Seriously,I bought and tried every Elder Scrolls game,but at some point I got bored and stopped playing it because it simply wasn't interested enough in completing the game. I think the problem is that Bethesda still hasn't learned that a large game world isn't enough to compel the player to search every nook and cranny; it should be also interesting, with different location being actually different.
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Post by elektrolurch on Dec 17, 2014 14:12:27 GMT -5
Daggerfall. Everyone praises how big Daggerfall is and how its superior to sequels because its the 10 times the size of Britain or whatever, but in reality most of the map is just barren wasteland. It was all machine-generated. Same goes to dungeons and cities. Funny, i think this is the example that came to most people's minds. To mine, definetily. It shows that a randomly generated world is inferior to one designed by human beings with care when you compare it to morrowind, which i still adore to this day, but can't stomach daggerfall for too long, albeit liking many rpgs of this time period. thinking about it, couldnt you argue the same thing for GTA san andreas vs bully? not that san andreas is randomly generated, but its so large at times it feels lifeless and loveless, esp in the details....... in general i would argue that 3d open world games tend to suffer more from too big worlds than 2d games. think about big rpgs like baldurs gate 2, the divine divinity series... did you ever feel the world COULD be too big in one of those?
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Post by Deleted on Dec 17, 2014 20:57:08 GMT -5
No one's mentioned Dragon Age: Inquisition? I love the game, but goddamn the world is too big. You certainly get your money's worth, but the majority of things you can do simply aren't interesting.
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Post by Feynman on Dec 17, 2014 22:12:50 GMT -5
Yeah, the more I've played the game, the more I feel like DA: I would have been better with less content. Everything about the game is extremely MMO-like, from the interface to the quest design to the world design. It reminds me a lot of that BioWare Star Wars MMO, actually.
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Post by shelverton on Dec 18, 2014 1:29:18 GMT -5
I may try Inquistion one day, but I feel very intimidated just looking at gameplay videos, simply because DAT WURLD.
My favorite big game world is still Dragon Quest 8. It's nowhere near the scale of some games mentioned here but it's still pretty huge. There's not much to do except searching for treasure chests, but still very immersive and nice to explore. The game also does a great job of introducing you to smaller parts at a time so when you finally get to explore I felt pretty at home and less overwhelmed. Had the game been less scripted and less linear I may not have liked it as much.
I hear that Final Fantasy XV is very large and open. Unless they drop you in the middle of it and say: "GO ANYWHERE YOU WANT" (which is very unlikely since it's FF after all) I think it could be pretty cool.
Yes, I am hyped for FF. Never thought I'd see the day again.
Oh, another thing about open world games that bothers me: NPCs. Walking through a Tamriel town and EVERYONE starts talking random crap to me while I pass them by is really hard for me to stomach. My OCD tells me to listen to them all when I should probably ignore most of it. I can't seem to filter it out. It takes forever to get from point A to B when I'm afraid to miss something important. It's not like it makes the game feel more real cause people in general don't walk around talking out loud, at least not where I'm from. Heck, they barely answer if you ask them for directions.
I actually have a problem with talking NPCs in all modern games, especially companion characters that talk 50% rubbish and 50% valuable instructions in the heat of battle. Is it there to make things more difficult?
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