4 ms·

A problem I have with a lot of modern games is the fake sense of scale. In the Mass Effect games the Citadel is supposed to be some vast city floating in space

by knolan 8y ago

A problem I have with a lot of modern games is the fake sense of scale. In the Mass Effect games the Citadel is supposed to be some vast city floating in space but you’re limited to a few rooms with billboard textures to show the rest of it. On the other hand the game Fuel delivered a massive sprawling (mostly empty) wasteland to chew up in your buggy and was non-random per user. I would love to see this kind of procedural generation to deliver an actual Citadel type world where the developers could then sprinkle landmarks across it. You could just ignore it and take your flying car to the waypoint or you could drop down into the streets and trade, craft or just soak up the scale.

smogcutter 8y ago
IMO games like the Witcher 3 and elder scrolls do a much better job of that. Mass Effect tries to trick you into feeling like you're in a big world with freedom to move around, but actually it's a lot more like a Final Fantasy type game: each area is a small "town" zone with the same couple shops, adjacent to a dungeon you need to clear to advance the plot. I like the Witcher style much better. Here's hoping their new game Cyberpunk 2077 lives up to it.
- knolan 8y ago
  The Witcher indeed does a great job, and to a somewhat lesser degree Horizon Zero Dawn does well too. However these are essentially worlds with small villages and towns. Novigrad is pretty impressive but isn’t much bigger than a typical European small town. What I’ve love to experience is getting lost in the sprawl and scale of a metropolis. Oddly enough L.A. Noir did a pretty decent job of this.
setr 8y ago
I think its more an issue with game design than it is with how big it actually is. Like you don't need infinitely generated worlds to produce a sense of scale, you just need it to take time to explore, and a good reason to explore. And this is ME's greatest failure I think: You can't interact with anything. You skip around space instantaneously, so the largest thing in the game is the citadel.. it's the only object that takes any amount of time to actually traverse (that, and planets, which you don't really want to explore). Yet you jump around that too, and are only actually interacting with preset objects. The problem I think is that there's nothing to interact with. And there's no interesting ways to interact with the things you can interact with. Like star control 2 is technically a small game, and a small world; it just feels big, because it actually requires time to traverse, and there's actually things to find. Zelda games tend to be even smaller (primarily a sequence of small rooms), and yet feel much larger. Again, time, secrets and interest play a large role in why it feels that way. people try to use procedural generation as a crutch, to avoid actual game design (see: no man's sky, minecraft; note the latter is popular by accident, adventure mode was intended as the primary, but loses its appeal quickly. Creative mode became the primary appeal by accident.) but its simply not sufficient without giving a compelling reason to actually explore and interact with the map.
- knolan 8y ago
  > people try to use procedural generation as a crutch, to avoid actual game design I agree. I guess what I’m saying is that procedural generation need not be a crutch. It should allow the game designer to treat a procedural world like he were a location scout. They can then build sets within that world where story elements can take place, locations modified as required and the remaining 99% left as a living world that swallows up the player. Perhaps as games slowly evolve out of their ‘save the world’ routine this might make more sense. Instead we get endless collectathons that require scouting every polygon of the world. I’ve also wondered about reduced scale in open world games. Instead of building a hollow and empty city like San Andreas, why not build a fully populated and detailed city block? Every building has detailed stores and accommodation where characters live and work. Your character is perhaps a shut-in (Rear Window) or a beat cop (back to L.A. Noir) where you somehow interact with that compact world. Remember the often limited worlds of the N64? Racing games could only fit a handful tracks on a single cart. Every inch of virtual real estate was utilised. Such games have gone from a hundred MB to almost a hundred GB. It’s probably the only medium where you don’t need to sit through everything to have a full experience. The virtual worlds no longer need to feel like oversized jumgle gyms. I’m probably way off the mark but I think we’re in for interesting times ahead.
  - setr 8y ago
    >I’ve also wondered about reduced scale in open world games This used to be a popular strategy, my favorite being lego island 2. You don’t need anything as grand an excuse as a neet pc or detective to allow for it: just take away the fucking car. >It should allow the game designer to treat a procedural world like he were a location scout. They can then build sets within that world where story elements can take place, locations modified as required and the remaining 99% left as a living world that swallows up the player This is how I believe open world games are usually done now, if not actually generated, then done mentally (imagine a town by a river, add a simple crisis and let things play themselves out. Not necessarily likely events, and certainly not realistic, but sufficient). Most open world games do have a decent number of setpieces to find. The problem, I think, is thats all they are. Oblivion, skyrim, witcher, etc all make the same mistake: “you can climb any mountain” and thats where it stops. They are open only in the sense that you can travel in a non-linear path, in an non-linear order of the story. But they forget that the main interesting facet of games as a medium is interaction. That the player has autonomy. They’re merely open in story, but mechanically they’re extremely linear. They don’t provide open interactions. It doesn’t matter what backdrop you give it, or how well designed and populated things are, if I can’t interact with them. Roguelikes (note the k), simulation-games and dwarf fortress (and from tabletops: adnd and its kin) are my favorite in this regard: you can interact with everything, in a somewhat limited and controlled fashion, with the potential for interesting, unexpected results. They essentially forgo any real plot or story in favor of letting player autonomy act as its own source of interest. The games and its internal interactions are mechanically complex, while the world around it is significantly less so. But thus, my opinion is the opposite of yours: the advancements in technology surrounding games, outside of perhaps AR/VR, currently and in the near-future, offers nothing new. The same style of games have already existed, and will continue on independent of these advancements. The only difference will be their graphical complexity, and more likely than not, each advance in graphics will come at the cost of the game’s design, in general. We’re in for nothing new.

by knolan 8y ago

smogcutter 8y ago

IMO games like the Witcher 3 and elder scrolls do a much better job of that. Mass Effect tries to trick you into feeling like you're in a big world with freedom to move around, but actually it's a lot more like a Final Fantasy type game: each area is a small "town" zone with the same couple shops, adjacent to a dungeon you need to clear to advance the plot. I like the Witcher style much better. Here's hoping their new game Cyberpunk 2077 lives up to it.

knolan 8y ago
The Witcher indeed does a great job, and to a somewhat lesser degree Horizon Zero Dawn does well too. However these are essentially worlds with small villages and towns. Novigrad is pretty impressive but isn’t much bigger than a typical European small town. What I’ve love to experience is getting lost in the sprawl and scale of a metropolis. Oddly enough L.A. Noir did a pretty decent job of this.

setr 8y ago

I think its more an issue with game design than it is with how big it actually is. Like you don't need infinitely generated worlds to produce a sense of scale, you just need it to take time to explore, and a good reason to explore. And this is ME's greatest failure I think: You can't interact with anything. You skip around space instantaneously, so the largest thing in the game is the citadel.. it's the only object that takes any amount of time to actually traverse (that, and planets, which you don't really want to explore). Yet you jump around that too, and are only actually interacting with preset objects. The problem I think is that there's nothing to interact with. And there's no interesting ways to interact with the things you can interact with. Like star control 2 is technically a small game, and a small world; it just feels big, because it actually requires time to traverse, and there's actually things to find. Zelda games tend to be even smaller (primarily a sequence of small rooms), and yet feel much larger. Again, time, secrets and interest play a large role in why it feels that way. people try to use procedural generation as a crutch, to avoid actual game design (see: no man's sky, minecraft; note the latter is popular by accident, adventure mode was intended as the primary, but loses its appeal quickly. Creative mode became the primary appeal by accident.) but its simply not sufficient without giving a compelling reason to actually explore and interact with the map.

knolan 8y ago
> people try to use procedural generation as a crutch, to avoid actual game design I agree. I guess what I’m saying is that procedural generation need not be a crutch. It should allow the game designer to treat a procedural world like he were a location scout. They can then build sets within that world where story elements can take place, locations modified as required and the remaining 99% left as a living world that swallows up the player. Perhaps as games slowly evolve out of their ‘save the world’ routine this might make more sense. Instead we get endless collectathons that require scouting every polygon of the world. I’ve also wondered about reduced scale in open world games. Instead of building a hollow and empty city like San Andreas, why not build a fully populated and detailed city block? Every building has detailed stores and accommodation where characters live and work. Your character is perhaps a shut-in (Rear Window) or a beat cop (back to L.A. Noir) where you somehow interact with that compact world. Remember the often limited worlds of the N64? Racing games could only fit a handful tracks on a single cart. Every inch of virtual real estate was utilised. Such games have gone from a hundred MB to almost a hundred GB. It’s probably the only medium where you don’t need to sit through everything to have a full experience. The virtual worlds no longer need to feel like oversized jumgle gyms. I’m probably way off the mark but I think we’re in for interesting times ahead.
- setr 8y ago
  >I’ve also wondered about reduced scale in open world games This used to be a popular strategy, my favorite being lego island 2. You don’t need anything as grand an excuse as a neet pc or detective to allow for it: just take away the fucking car. >It should allow the game designer to treat a procedural world like he were a location scout. They can then build sets within that world where story elements can take place, locations modified as required and the remaining 99% left as a living world that swallows up the player This is how I believe open world games are usually done now, if not actually generated, then done mentally (imagine a town by a river, add a simple crisis and let things play themselves out. Not necessarily likely events, and certainly not realistic, but sufficient). Most open world games do have a decent number of setpieces to find. The problem, I think, is thats all they are. Oblivion, skyrim, witcher, etc all make the same mistake: “you can climb any mountain” and thats where it stops. They are open only in the sense that you can travel in a non-linear path, in an non-linear order of the story. But they forget that the main interesting facet of games as a medium is interaction. That the player has autonomy. They’re merely open in story, but mechanically they’re extremely linear. They don’t provide open interactions. It doesn’t matter what backdrop you give it, or how well designed and populated things are, if I can’t interact with them. Roguelikes (note the k), simulation-games and dwarf fortress (and from tabletops: adnd and its kin) are my favorite in this regard: you can interact with everything, in a somewhat limited and controlled fashion, with the potential for interesting, unexpected results. They essentially forgo any real plot or story in favor of letting player autonomy act as its own source of interest. The games and its internal interactions are mechanically complex, while the world around it is significantly less so. But thus, my opinion is the opposite of yours: the advancements in technology surrounding games, outside of perhaps AR/VR, currently and in the near-future, offers nothing new. The same style of games have already existed, and will continue on independent of these advancements. The only difference will be their graphical complexity, and more likely than not, each advance in graphics will come at the cost of the game’s design, in general. We’re in for nothing new.