The problem is when games go for size is that they don’t populate the world
The modern Assassin Creed games were a prime example of this - big world, completely barren
He’s right. We don’t need maps bigger than Skyrim, we just need content and good core gameplay loops. Being hugely moddable like Skyrim really helps too.
Mods definitely help. Same reason why I think Fallout 4 is such a big hit.
Exactly. GTA V’s biggest selling point was the worst part for me: giant map. The only way a giant map is good is if it has a ton more fun stuff to do, and even then, I’d honestly rather have a sequel/series instead of throwing everything in one game.
I still prefer gta 4, the city was worn out, lived in, cramped and dense.
Same. I mentioned SA mostly because both are in Los Santos.
I look at the RPGs I enjoyed and the ones I didn’t and I think what I want more than anything in RPGs is for them to be fleshed out and well fitting.
If the world is too big for the story it feels empty and the side quests don’t feel connected. If it’s too small, it feel cluttered. It’s a fine balance.
A lot of quests in games have a specified start and an end, and are unimaginative. It’s 2025. I’m not bringing somebody 20 orc horns for a slightly better sword. Well, I will, but I don’t want to. It just feels lazy.
I’d rather stumble across a thread woven into the world and follow it both ways to it’s logical conclusion, choosing any branches along the way.
Honestly, I think “big” works against developers if they’re trying to make something that just fits. When you look at something like BG3, the world isn’t that huge. But once you start filling out all the blanks, it takes you a long time to get through.
If it’s good it’s good. I bought the witcher 3 DLC and would have bought more. I stopped playing Assassins Creed altogether. People just want good, crafted content.
What game developers should do is add more “jump back in” modes. I get busy with work so I might leave for a few months midway through a long game and forget some plot and controls.
I would super appreciate “Jump Back In” mode…
I’d love the option in a tutorial that for “I’ve played plenty of this kind of game - tell me what’s specifically different in this game”.
Oh hell yes! We need this!!
Honestly one of the best games I’ve played recently is the Stanley Parable and that game is a couple of hours of poking around a quirky but literal office. Would happily buy that 60 times over one massively mediocre rpg.
Skyrim is huge. I played it last year, going to all locations and doing main and side quests. That takes 100 hours or so.
Now I’m playing Elden Ring with SOTE, doing the same thing. I’m around 180h in and honestly I kind of want to finish by now.
So yeah, I don’t see 600 hours of playtime as a positive goal. Unless they mean expand the map but don’t keep up the content ratio. In that case, why the fuck would that be good? More travelling isn’t worth anything.
Honestly, my limit is about 80 hours, and that’s only if the store and side content is really good. An average story/RPG game should target 20-40 hours IMO.
I feel like how big I want the game to be is a weird quantum unstable value. When I’m interested in the game I want it to keep going. But at some point I lose interest, and I want it to wrap up. But usually I don’t want to skip content that’s at least okay, especially if it affects endings and other choices.
Like I enjoyed Veilguard, but there were bits near the end where I was losing focus and kind of wanted it to pick up the pace. There have been other games where I finished all the side quests but was like “that’s it? I want more”
Not sure how to square this circle. I don’t think procedural generated or AI content is quite up to the task yet.
I do think we’ll see a game that has AI content in the critical path in the next couple years though. You’ll go to camp and talk to Shadowheart, and it’ll try to just make up new dialogue. I don’t know if it’ll be good. There will probably be at some weird ass hallucinations that’ll become memes.
Same happened to me with Zelda: ToTK. I did everything I came across, collected a lot of things I found, did a lot of questing, got so good in combat I could defeat everything without getting hit, but then I was like “it’s time to stop now” and I defeated the final boss and put the game down. It was amazing.
I do think Botw and Totk would have benefited from having the map 50% smaller to condense the content. The underworld in Totk basically ended up just being collecting DLC armor from the previous game.
Which is weird, because I totally spent like 40 hours in there lol
Oh, I spent a lot of time in there, thinking I’d find more than another mini abandoned mine site or yiga lair. The most interesting thing was the yoga boss fight. The underworld portion could have probably been turned into a really great post game idea if they had spent more time on it.
I feel like how big I want the game to be is a weird quantum unstable value. When I’m interested in the game I want it to keep going. But at some point I lose interest, and I want it to wrap up. But usually I don’t want to skip content that’s at least okay, especially if it affects endings and other choices.
I’m kind of at this spot right now with Pathfinder: Kingmaker. If I had realised it was a 200h+ game I might not have undertaken it. I’ve had a good time with it all things considered, but at this point I really kind of want to move on to the next game in my backlog.
I think the issue is that most game’s core gameplay loops are not endlessly replayable. Lots of single player RPGs fall into the trap of being alright to progress through for maybe 20 hours, but you can quickly become so powerful that the rest of the game falls into busywork. It’s really hard to meaningfully introduce new and interesting gameplay after the 30 hour mark, but without it things become same-y.
I’d argue this is just a fault of poor game design though. There are RPGs with really well iterated gameplay loops, with a wide array of variety, that I’m happy to put 400+ hours in. Games like Baldur’s Gate 3, or Elden Ring, have a lot of freedom and variety in the way you can approach a playthrough, even allowing you to dramatically change things mid-playthrough, while still feeling mechanically satisfying to play. A 10/10 game will feel good to play forever, but a 7/10 might get boring after 15.
I want worlds big enough that I can suspend disbelief. True scale is too much (True Crime: Streets of LA was awful to traverse, for example) but too small and it feels like being in one of those play parks for small children. It’s a problem I’ve had with Fallout 3+, where the scale makes no sense. I don’t necessarily need the additional space to be dense with content (if it’s supposed to be a barren waste, why is it full of stuff?!).
I want to buy into these worlds, but I struggle when things feel ridiculous. Oh are you struggling for supplies? Even though there’s supplies 50m away from your settlement? Come on!
The first Red Dead Redemption hit the spot for me, as did the native settlement in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. The scale isn’t actually realistic, but it’s large enough that I feel like it could be. GTA IV wasn’t bad either, but GTA V was too compact in many places for my tastes.
I suppose it’s much like the theatre. If a scene is well written it feels fine, but if the play calls attention to the limitations of the medium too much then it starts to become a bit silly.
Good point. If you look at the Yakuza games, they’re typically set in a little entertainment district. The map isn’t huge but it’s not supposed to be. It feels the correct size for a busy little part of town.
Meanwhile, yeah, Fallout 3 gave me the impression that even before the war the DC metropolitan area was home to maybe a thousand people.
I recently rewatched Rango and the size of the main settlement in that is about the size of those in RDR. Reflecting on that, I suppose I want the map to reflect the kind of scale and focus seen in other media. A film or TV show doesn’t show us every street (usually) but it gives a sense of the scale of the place. If a game map couldn’t be used for an establishing shot without looking daft then it doesn’t really work for me, I reckon.
It’s something I like about the overhead perspective used by games like Fallout and Wasteland - I perceive what’s on screen as the area of the settlement that’s relevant to me but with the understanding that there’s more off screen. A character might mention going somewhere, much like in a play, and then reappear. Perhaps the player can go there, perhaps they can’t even see it, but it makes the world feel larger.
I suppose, much like in reality, we rarely visit every location of a place, but it needs to feel like it might enter our narrative in some way.
The advantage of putting those supplies 50m away though is that it makes a better video game. Playing The Outer Worlds right after Starfield made me a-okay with every way they shrunk the Bethesda experience.
How are we defining “better”? For me it makes the experience worse because I lose all immersion. I’m trying to be immersed and my brain can let a lot slip (realism is not required!) but for me the limit is when it strains even basic credulity. Yes, 50m makes the quest less hassle, but if I don’t care about the quest due to the scope of the world then there’s a more fundamental issue.
In games where immersion isn’t a factor (e.g. The Binding of Isaac) that stuff doesn’t matter. In an explorable open world I content that it’s rather crucial.
All the immersion Bethesda could muster couldn’t make Starfield a better game than The Outer Worlds. The criticism was frequently that they made 1000 planets but that it would have been better if they’d focused on making 5 good ones, which is basically what Outer Worlds did. Putting the metaphorical supplies 50m away is what they found led to the best pacing, so suspend your disbelief a bit, and have a better time than if they’d put them further away. This isn’t prescriptive, btw. If it’s not your preference, it’s not your preference, but I think most people would prefer the compromise to immersion when it makes the game more fun.
The criticism was frequently that they made 1000 planets but that it would have been better if they’d focused on making 5 good ones
I take zero issue with this! I think you’re misunderstanding my point.
Putting the metaphorical supplies 50m away is what they found led to the best pacing
I’m not talking about a metaphorical 50m, I’m talking in the game world 50m. It’s not an analogy for game design, I mean in a very literal sense that the worlds are a bit too small for my tastes.
I’m not talking about density of content or the number of locations in a game. I am talking about the level of size scaling that has been applied. Too small and I cannot get immersed, too large and it makes for a tedious play experience (that’s why I cited True Crime: Streets of LA, that uses 1:1 scaling for LA and as a result has a lousy overworld).
For my tastes the balance currently leans too heavily towards ludicrously small in many games. I quite liked the scale of the Watch_Dogs games, as a counter example.
Hell, it’d be cool if there was an engine that used something like content-aware scaling to adjust the distances to player preferences. Some people want a slog (that seems to be Death Stranding’s deal) and others want Wannado City.
so suspend your disbelief a bit
If this was advice I was able to act on then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. If this was an option, I’d do it! Do you think I enjoy being frustrated at this?! No! I wish it didn’t bother me! It’s a nuisance and gets in the way of fun!
I’m not talking about a metaphorical 50m, I’m talking in the game world 50m. It’s not an analogy for game design, I mean in a very literal sense that the worlds are a bit too small for my tastes.
But the size of the world is a part of the game design. What’s too big for The Outer Worlds might be just fine for Mad Max simply because one of those games lets you drive a car. The distance that those supplies can be away from where you start is dictated by what mechanics you have at your disposal to get there. It’s metaphorical because we’re talking about any time a game makes a decision like this with relation to how they scale their game world, not just that one time that you measured it out to be 50m.
I do think it’s worth examining why this is harder for you to suspend disbelief than other things in video games. You suspend disbelief every time your character loses or gains hit points rather than suffering actual injuries that need time to heal. You suspend disbelief any time you play a game in a real world city that isn’t represented in 1:1 scale (that’s basically all of them) like The Division or Spider-Man. So to the same end, I’ll take those supplies that are 50m away and it’s somehow too far for the quest giver to go get them, because it’s best for the design of the game, just like the scale of the world that they built.
It’s metaphorical because we’re talking about any time a game makes a decision like this with relation to how they scale their game world, not just that one time that you measured it out to be 50m.
That might be what you’re choosing to talk about, but it is categorically not what I was talking about.
But the size of the world is a part of the game design. What’s too big for The Outer Worlds might be just fine for Mad Max simply because one of those games lets you drive a car.
I know! I understand!
That’s why I picked a specific example of where I feel the balance in some popular games is poorly implemented for my tastes. Some games manage this well, some do not, and I feel that this often errs on the side of “50m outside the settlement”. Based on your comments, that doesn’t bother you.
Great, I wish I was as lucky.
For me, an open world game that gets the scaling wrong is not very fun to explore. Whether that’s too big or too small. It seems lots of gamers aren’t fussed about this. Arguing with me that my preferences are wrong doesn’t seem worthwhile. I understand the game design principles, that was never the issue.
I posted this because I think it’s interesting to compare notes on the parameters of this element of game design. What sort of scaling is too big? Why? How many people should be visible in a settlement to feel right? That sort of thing.
I do think it’s worth examining why this is harder for you to suspend disbelief than other things in video games. You suspend disbelief every time your character loses or gains hit points rather than suffering actual injuries that need time to heal. You suspend disbelief any time you play a game in a real world city that isn’t represented in 1:1 scale (that’s basically all of them) like The Division or Spider-Man. So to the same end, I’ll take those supplies that are 50m away and it’s somehow too far for the quest giver to go get them, because it’s best for the design of the game, just like the scale of the world that they built.
I’m not sure what your point here is? That my brain is broken? As I said, if I was able to overlook it, I would. I’m pretty sure I also said that I wasn’t looking for 1:1 as it actively hampers game design.
There’s more options than 1:1 or Wannado.
Games like Skyrim always bugged me a bit as I couldn’t walk for more than half a minute before I tripped over a quest or encounter of some sort. I feel like the devs were scared players would get bored if they didn’t see something exciting every few seconds. Sure I want to do stuff, but I also want to breath and look at the scenery and think about what I’m doing.
The real world is way more open; you travel for a good while between cities, and I really like when games do that as well. I’ll have to try Red Dead, but I thought Kingdom Come Deliverance struck a good balance. Even at top speed on a good horse, it takes minutes to ride between the major settlements, with only rare encounters coming up now and again.
I’m glad to hear it’s not just me (I mean, statistically that seems unlikely, but still!). It’s a little like modern cinema compared to '70s film making - let the story breathe, folks. Given that the tooling to make the world larger (but with the same amount of content) isn’t all that complex, I wish it was done more. The amount of content is fine - often excessive. But give me a chance to feel like I’m actually travelling.
I felt the scaling of Assassin’s Creed Origins and Odyssey worked quite well in that respect. There was actual travel!
I do care about finishing games but not completing them. I will play the main story and some of the side quests. I am happy with games being 20-100 hours long.
I will play the main story
hisss!
The only thing that I hate from open world is emptiness, you can have big or massive world but if it’s seems so empty why bother to make it. Like Fallout & Skyrim we always use mods to fill that emptiness to make it feel alive.
I rather have game with small world but filled with many NPC like old Dragon AgeBig reason I don’t understand the obsession with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. The game world is empty and just feels like so much wasted space, and a ton of it looks like PS2 worldbuilding.
I didn’t play Tears of the Kingdom, but if you found large swaths of the map to be empty in Breath of the Wild, it means there’s something hidden there that you didn’t find.
It’s just about density. BotW/TotK were eerily empty and dead. But something like Elden Ring? I would play a game 10x the size of Elden Ring for the rest of my life.
This is my biggest complaint about No Man’s Sky. There are literally over a billion billion worlds, but they’re all mostly empty, not to mention all the space in between.
I played NMS ~2 years ago and thought for a huge procedurally generated game it was pretty good. The planets had lots of POIs and trading posts and stuff to go to. I quit mostly because the flight mechanics were too “on rails” compared to something like Elite Dangerous or X4. I just didn’t get the rush I was looking for from dogfighting and stuff. I had constructed a series of bases that let me craft a ton of tradable items that gave me plenty of money but there was just nothing to spend it on because my ship was already plenty strong enough for everything I encountered…
Don’t get me wrong, I love the game. But especially in the beginning before you start getting some upgrades, everything is sooooo far away and there’s so much emptiness.
Can I ask when you played it? I didn’t have that perception at all. There was some kind of “hub” you could jump to and plenty of stuff around wherever you were at. It was mostly about finding a planet that had whatever combo of resources you needed but that didn’t take very long either. I only played for a couple weeks but my understanding is there were quite a lot of quality of life updates between launch and when I played. Maybe you just tried it before I did. Either way you’re entitled to your opinion.
I don’t need bigger game I just want Shakespearian spectacular quest and events, gripping storylines, and endearing character.
You could have a tiny map full of passion and I would love the game.
Skyrim size was just about right. I just want a deeper stat sytem that promotes more build diversity than stealth archer (but keeping the skill tree system intact - never want to go back to the Morrowind/Oblivion systems), enemies and items that don’t level with me, more monster variety (so sick of draugr), and bring back levitation and modifiable acrobatics!
Morrowind still has the best skill system concept. “Do what you think is fun and you will level up and get better at it” is great game design.
Things that are the kernel of bad game design: Fetch quests in quantity, especially over large maps with limited fast travel points (fuck you Witcher, cyberpunk), having eleventy billion containers which just might be good to open (fuck you baldur3/divine divinity/Morrowind), or having an inventory system that makes you crave death every time you use it (same), or having an inventory system that makes you do endless, constant field checks to figure out which weapon or armor is best because you don’t have space for more than 3 things (sooo many games, but cyberpunk, deus ex, and borderlands get a big old fuck you from me).
I agree with pretty much all of your points, especially about limited inventories. In isometric arpgs in particular it drives me crazy that half the gameplay is essentially a gambling system of explosions of massive amounts of items - yet they give you virtually no room to carry it? Terrible.
But on Morrowind, I love the game with mods like MULE, but the vanilla level up system makes the stat system self-defeating. The purpose of skill-based progression is to let me play the character I want to play, and do the things I want to do, and trust that my character is going to grow accordingly. But the level up stat multiplier system forces the player to do all sorts of things other than what they want, in order to get the most out of the stat system.
It’s even worse in Oblivion because everything levels with you much more in that game, which means if you don’t do these ridiculous things to min/max, your enemies can actually become too powerful to beat!
Oh I won’t disagree that they tuned it weird…same thing for the enemies. Being defeated by an overleveled mud crab is…demeaning. and more generally I still recall putting my character in a corner, hitting q, and leaving for the day so she’d be a good runner when I got back…which is just downright dumb. But the concept at it’s core is beautiful, and I wish more games would investigate that concept until we find a really good solution.
I forgot, there’s one other super shit rpg thing that always pisses me off even though it’s literally everywhere: why do I have to pick skills before I even start playing and understand the rules? SPECIAL, stat points, attributes…whatever a game wants to call it, I want to play first before I do all the math on what is the best skill to use.
Todd Howard better be on Lemmy. Would be the best thing to happen to fallout
if they get rid of the special picking at the start of the game the new vegas fanboy crowd will literally crucify todd howard
The thing about not finishing games is very true. Simply look at achievement stats. Most games have a huge drop off in achievements earned after the first 25-50% of the game, with any achievement for completing the story of the game having a super small number of players who earned it. Even games that are easy as fuck and practically play themselves!
I absolutely want a game that I can sink 1000s of hours into. I do not want a game where I get bored half way tough because the dev clearly gave up or only the first 10 are fun.
Same. That’s why I don’t really like The Witcher 3, but I keep coming back to Cyberpunk 2077. The Witcher 3 has a great story; but the game gets super boring and repetitive super quickly. Cyberpunk is setup more or less the same; tons of filler content that is ignorable, great main story, but I like the action more. I can skip through the story and still have fun blowing away gang bangers in a ton of different ways, as opposed to Witcher where there’s not much variety in the action and every battle is just swinging swords and using the right spells on the appropriate enemy types.
Sounds like the same issue I had with the Witcher, 2 hours of build up and fetch quest for a 10 minute fight get a a little old 40 hours in. I didn’t even get to play the cool looking vampire DLC because I would have to keep grinding more boring stuff to level up.
only the first 10 are fun.
Or worse, a game where everyone keeps telling you that you need to put in 100 hours before it is fun.
Not to mention if you do the 100 hours and it turns out the culture is more toxic than Warcraft raiding.
Bg3 acts after 1?
To be fair, I got bored at the start of act 3.
Oof for me act 2 was the worst. I mean act 3 also kinda phoned it in but there’s a lot more stuff to do that isn’t gray.
Horizontally I’m fine with how big games are. They should grow vertically, and I wouldn’t mind 6 times the depth.
What do I mean by that? I have no idea. Maybe you people have
A cyberpunk game that takes place entirely in a replica of the Kowloon walled city would be cool as fuck. Just as much map “area” as fallout 4 but packed into a 1 mile cube.
I’ve thought a lot about this. It would have to be a game with no combat. Too cramped. It’d be a nice puzzle game like Myst, tho.
Edit: Stray 2: Kowloon
Wait I had a similar idea once! Youre right that would be cool af, but very difficult to get right. In open world games you usually get away with “isolated” side quests, in a dense cube this is difficult – which might be a good thing, it forces interconnectivity.
I’d interpret vertical content growth as content per area, deep story lines, stuff like that. It’s a common enough comment, see e.g. MMO players complaining about “content drought”.
I was nodding along in agreement but now that you mention it I also didn’t really know what you were saying
No, no he has a good point, let him finish
