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> I'm also not a huge fan of open world games in general and to this date In theory they sound great. In reality it seems to work against every open-world game

> I'm also not a huge fan of open world games in general and to this date In theory they sound great. In reality it seems to work against every open-world game I've played. Elden Ring is almost an exception, but the side quests are completely broken in this format without following a guide. I hated the Witcher 3. Much like RDR 2 it has great presentation, writing and VA - and everything else suffers. But it seems the new generation of gamers have spoken, and they like glorified interactive television with a low bar for gameplay.

jprete 3y ago
Based on some of my recent YT watching: Open world games need the open world to work with how players explore and interact. Interesting sites should be visually distinct from each other and the environment, and frequent. They should not all be visible at once, to avoid players being overwhelmed with unclear choices. They should all be rewarding so players are confident they aren’t wasting their time visiting. There shouldn’t be important content hidden from visibility because then the game is teaching the player that looking at the world is futile. And the world should be navigable without the UI, i.e. the players are focused on the world and not the UI.
- cubefox 3y ago
  That point about the UI is really important. I played a bit of BotW, and then at some point I had a dialogue with an NPC which slightly (not in am obvious way) hinted at some reward if I do something special. But then that immersion was immediately broken as this interaction was added to a "quest log". Instantly the feeling of being smart in the virtual world went away, and it was just a videogamey checklist with nice GUI. No need to remember what the person wanted you to do, or to recognize it as a quest in the first place. Apparently such quest logs are normal in games now. Similar things hold about minimaps and teleportation. They make things easier, but also less immersive, and therefore probably less fun for most players.
  - slothtrop 3y ago
    > Apparently such quest logs are normal in games now. Not in FromSoftware games. They relented somewhat in Elden Ring by adding NPC markers for last-known-location, but otherwise there is zero hand-holding for quests. In the other games it's more trivial since you tend to come across everything if you explore enough anyway, but Elden Ring is so absurdly huge that it's easy to miss a lot of content.
    - cubefox 3y ago
      Well that seems part of the explanation why their games are so well-regarded. If you obviously can't miss things, you also can't get excited about discovering things.

jprete 3y ago

Based on some of my recent YT watching: Open world games need the open world to work with how players explore and interact. Interesting sites should be visually distinct from each other and the environment, and frequent. They should not all be visible at once, to avoid players being overwhelmed with unclear choices. They should all be rewarding so players are confident they aren’t wasting their time visiting. There shouldn’t be important content hidden from visibility because then the game is teaching the player that looking at the world is futile. And the world should be navigable without the UI, i.e. the players are focused on the world and not the UI.

cubefox 3y ago
That point about the UI is really important. I played a bit of BotW, and then at some point I had a dialogue with an NPC which slightly (not in am obvious way) hinted at some reward if I do something special. But then that immersion was immediately broken as this interaction was added to a "quest log". Instantly the feeling of being smart in the virtual world went away, and it was just a videogamey checklist with nice GUI. No need to remember what the person wanted you to do, or to recognize it as a quest in the first place. Apparently such quest logs are normal in games now. Similar things hold about minimaps and teleportation. They make things easier, but also less immersive, and therefore probably less fun for most players.
- slothtrop 3y ago
  > Apparently such quest logs are normal in games now. Not in FromSoftware games. They relented somewhat in Elden Ring by adding NPC markers for last-known-location, but otherwise there is zero hand-holding for quests. In the other games it's more trivial since you tend to come across everything if you explore enough anyway, but Elden Ring is so absurdly huge that it's easy to miss a lot of content.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    Well that seems part of the explanation why their games are so well-regarded. If you obviously can't miss things, you also can't get excited about discovering things.