yeah - it’s kind of a bummer that battle royale games became the big thing for multiplayer because if you want to play with your friends you’re essentially monopolizing everyone’s time with a single game and unless you have a friend group that’s receptive to that it doesn’t really work that well
I kind of miss when horde modes were the big thing! like we were at the point where even mass effect was doing a horde mode but I guess people just got tired of making them
I wonder how much of this is a lack of confidence in how it feels to just move around these spaces? I might be oversimplifying to a dumb degree but it feels to me that if you make simple movement enjoyable then you’ve already handled a lot of the problems that will come up in your level/encounter design
I think Cradle is this design philosophy taken to an extreme. The game is ostensibly open-world but there’s nothing to do outside and your little tent is densely packed with interactivity.
I absolutely adore wide-open spaces with nothing in them and was delighted with AC: Origins just having a fucking huge desert with nothing in it.
SB has often picked up the common shout, ‘make traversal fun!’ I think it’s too simple to be useful, actually. Watching players run through the world, they operate towards efficiency most of the time: shortest, simplest path. A frictive input (the Ocarina of Time roll) doesn’t indicate that the player would be doing interesting movement if they had the opportunity, but that they’ve already chosen the straightline path and are bumping inside their self-imposed restrictions.
We can point to some of our super-hero games as exemplars: Spider-Man and Hulk were well-served by their movement. Grand Theft Auto has wavered back and forth on how involved simple driving should be (4 being a high point in treating cars as machines to be respected and engaged with). Those require very specific narrative blends and I think they have very little engagement with the world itself – super hero games are generally city-bound, with a few interesting landmarks (GTA, alone of the city-crime games, avoids a dull city through sheer expenditure of world art budget).
For me, the biggest bang comes from a well-observed world that’s thoughtful and interesting. Witcher 3 and Red Dead 2 fill their world with thoughtful interpretations of natural features; it’s a world away from the careless procedural generation of the modern Assassin’s Creed games. Shadow of the Colossus is the pre-eminent example of a world interesting because its emptiness forces the player to examine the meaning invested into the very intentional world, and it’s plenty engaging.
Naturalism is expensive and subtle, though. Much simpler is to treat open worlds more like pre-designed levels. Dragon’s Dogma, Breath of the Wild, and Death Stranding are all great examples of a level-centric approach. Typically, they use tighter funnels to direct the players through ‘stages’ that can have more cohesive encounters. The downside is that content gets repeated, but the typical western approach that seems derived from Elite and other procedural worlds is a heritage that asks the player not to look at the world. I don’t think it’s coincidental that these tight, pre-planned approaches come from Japanese studios.
I feel like procedural generation promised this kind of Empty But Interesting World, and unfortunately nobody seems to have done a good job at this since…Minecraft? Noctis IV? Excitebike 64?
This is one of the biggest issues with No Man’s Sky. It’s a very thoughtfully generated universe (other than the wildlife). And it’s a game about being a lonely traveller in an empty world. AND throughout the patches it’s gotten ever louder. Even traveling at high speeds, which used to be uninterruptible, you’ll suddenly get a notification of anomalies and stuff. Like, it’s constant notifications all the time, no downtime at all just to contemplate the (frankly gorgeous) natural and unnatural scenery. That game doesn’t have fun movement at all, but honestly you could cut out like 75% of the notifications and make the game 200% better IMO.
Just shut up, games!!!
I don’t know if any fully procedural game has ever been successful at communicating what’s cool about it in the way its developers think it’s cool. No Man’s Sky is an astounding procedural engine and it’s engaging just looking at it the way we play with AI generation tools, but in a game experience full procedural generation has only really succeeded when the game is leaning on scope to such an extent that the details don’t matter (or strategy games which aren’t about traversal).
In a lot of ways, I think procedural + hand tuned like most modern open worlds (in which a base sculpt is married to a bunch of rules so a Houdini script can fill it out with vegation) is the worst of worlds, because it fools the developers into thinking the world will be more interesting than it is. Horizon: Zero Dawn is a good example of this: it’s almost thoughtful and interestingly laid out but there’s a fundamental disregard for level spaces that renders the world much shallower than they intend or projected.
wait wait i’ve got it, the best example of procedural generation is desert golfing. and golfing on mars, of course
Totally – an aesthetic focused on the meaninglessness and emptiness of the world plays to the strengths of procedural generation
yeah I thought I added an edit to my post talking about this but I guess I didn’t!
it definitely feels like a chicken/egg thing where you can’t really design interesting traversal without interesting worlds, but you can’t design interesting worlds if you don’t know how you’re going to traverse through them, etc.
robert yang had a thing on this a while ago where he says ludonarrative dissonance doesn’t exist because both players and devs are already approaching these spaces in a way that presupposes the idea of weird logical leaps that you have to do in order to play the game at all, so there’s no dissonance because you’re already primed to make those leaps of logic
and I feel like that fits in pretty well with the way devs think of players’ ability to not be bored while running through environments, where they’re already primed to imagine the players’ boredom as they run through yet another grayboxed environment on the way to test some other encounter that they’re designing
but then I think about games like skate and like, the idea of a player operating towards efficiency in that game doesn’t really at all mesh with the way people think about skateboarding? or at least the idea of “efficiency” isn’t used for point-to-point traversal at all, it’s more for like, being able to get the most speed so you can ollie off the planter and get up onto the rail, etc.
I thought this and then thought “well that’s an example that already has a real world analogue” but like, what about zineth or something? so I dunno, I do think that my previously-stated approach is definitely too simple but I also feel like if traversal is designed in a way that doesn’t automatically prime players to think of point to point traversal as “I point the stick in a direction and wait until I get there”, there are lots of interesting spaces that just naturally pop up from that
Skate is a really good case to look at. The world only exists to further the main game mechanic, not as a backdrop to play, and it requires intense level design. JSRF and the open-world Tony Hawk games probably function the same way. Zineth is probably a good counterexample, because as much as I love it and as good as the movement (conceptually) is, I think they’d run into the same open-world issues if the game needed to extend longer than an hour, if the player had more and more delivery runs to make.
I played XIII this year and I didn’t really do anything in the more open area. XIII rules.
I remember kinda being hype to get to the open area, and then just blowing right past it.
Maybe I wouldn’t have thought this if the whole “hallway” conversation hadn’t happened 10 years ago, but I kinda think the “hallway” slam was reinforced by the minimap. The game mostly doesn’t need one because there are very few areas that are tricky to navigate, so you mostly watch your little triangle moving through slightly varying widths of walls. It lays bare the simple moving-forward structure. The game ultimately isn’t more linear than FFX, which I just finish and need to go post in Rude’s thread about.
I did think the Crystarium felt a little frustrating in that its upgrades were tied to big boss fights rather than experience. I rarely felt like I was making a lot of choices until the very end, because I was frequently almost maxed out with AP on every character’s core roles by the time that came.
Still really liked all that tho
If nothing else, you’re like 20 hours into this game that’s been nothing but forward narrative momentum with optional elements roughly amounting to little corners you can look behind to see a chest. The game’s not trained you to roam around in it. It’s not what FFXIII is.
Oh yeah. It doesn’t hurt that so much of the open area is built around basically post-game level fights that you can just ignore, as I recall.
I wonder where this kind of anxiety was when Bioware shipped a game like this (which btw I am very fond of for the emotional experience of traversing these massive barren spaces very slowly)
i think being based in the vast prairies of edmonton it is understandable that bioware does not comprehend how to make verticality interesting in a game
Well, given that they cut it from the much more ‘design correct’ sequel,
I love the Mako sequences in that first game and the consistency with which it aims to represent space as large and unfathomable. By the second game, they’re focused on it like it’s an urban space - it’s dense and they are helping you efficiently separate the environments you’re interested in from the noise around it.
Even the way they present planets shows an enormous shift, from minimizing your perspective against them
to presenting them as objects to catalog, learn, and know entire
In making more things known, they’ve eliminated a lot of imaginative space for players to inhabit
yes, I 100% agree with this post. the Mako didn’t exactly work but it did convey the sense of ‘exploring alien planets’ that the sequels squashed into a sort of quasi-urban shopping-mall aesthetic where exploration is impossible and there are no uncharted frontiers; just tunnels and advertisements
yall are exploring some intersting stuff and im over here revisiting rollercoaster tycoon 2 as an adult. its a fun thing to do while your s/o watches a show. getting better at designing coasters to min/maxing throughput and guest enjoyment. i didnt do much scenario play as akid but its really where the fun isoutside of just having a digital antfarm. its a time dissapearing machine tho. the quality of life upgrades in open rct2 are fantastic.
