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.
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.
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.
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 would like that if it’s like Skyrim. Actually it would have to be better. A big world and everytime I play it would be a completely different experience.
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.
Only if the interesting content scales with size.
I am honestly excited to what GTA6 can bring to the content map. Considering how dense some parts of GTA 5 already are.GTA V dense? I found it incredibly bare, especially coming from GTA SA.
Didn’t play it so I can’t comment on the SA part.
At least they have loads of little details in obscure placesThat describes pretty much all GTA games though. The difference with V is that it has a much bigger map, so there are a lot more areas with uninteresting details.
Maybe it’s just me but I felt like the space was for the better. Maybe it’s just the fidelity of the game that helps it vs the older gen.
Yeah V has the most lifeless map of any GTA since 3. Even NPC detail was missing like umbrellas when it rains.
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.
Honestly, I love open worlds that are meaningful, rather than just big for the sake of being big. Yakuza games have very small world, but they dense as hell. They are filled with wacky side quests and many distractions.
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
It’s not an open world, but Mirror’s Edge is a great game.
Wasn’t the second game open world tho? But that might be the reason it lost its charm for me.
Yes, it was. But EA ruined it with their launcher, so you can’t play it on Linux.
Agreed, to an extent.
I do think advancements in AI will eventually give us open world games with infinite procedurally generated engaging quests and NPC interactions. That’ll be cool. In the meantime, I don’t need a team of humans to burn themselves out to produce a large amount of bleh content.
Ehh, I think it’ll be a looong time before machine learning can make meaningful character interactions.
It may be able to make maps faster, slightly better versions of something like No Man’s Sky or Minecraft (both already sporting functionally “infinite” procedural generation), or fill a city like Cyberpunk 2077’s with slightly less mindless wandering NPCs, but I don’t think it’ll help make story-based RPGs bigger in a useful way
The NPCs that stand out in an RPG do so because they typically have a well-crafted, and finite, story arch which is incredibly difficult to do with machine learning and trying to make things more procedurally generated.
I think we’re nearly there as is. There’s already mods that integrate ChatGPT with Skyrim NPC’s. There’s definitely room for improvement, but just these fan projects have achieved some impressive results.
Pair that with the developers’ eagerness to eventually fire most of their writing staff, and they’ve got a lot of incentive to dump money into improving what already exists.
My concern is that this will lead to more abandonware. Star Trek: Bridge Crew had integrated voice commands using some IBM service to process. Once their agreement with IBM ended, they shut down the feature in the game. So what happens when a developer integrates AI as a cornerstone to a game’s storylines, using remote servers to do all of the processing, and then decide to end support for the game?
I do think advancements in AI will eventually give us open world games with infinite procedurally generated engaging quests and NPC interactions.
If you want to believe in fairy tales that is fine, but the problem is when CEOs believe in those fairy tales and use them to fire their artists and developers which is already happening.
…and there will be no market correction back to actually hiring humans and paying them a living wage and treating them humanely once your only option for AAA games is AI slop…
What fairy tale? You can run models right now that people have trained to work as DnD DM’s. I guess you’re not keeping up with developments, but it’s already happening.
I agree. They won’t want to hire humans back. Capitalism will not continue to function in an AI driven economy. It’s going to be feudalism or communism. And if we don’t do something about it, I know which one the capitalists will choose.
It is crap, I mean AI can be fun at providing raw grist for the creative mill of a human artist, but it is a grist used to compose a plywood of human art that was violently shredded apart and stamped back into the vague impression of a wholistically shaped entity with a grain and texture that contains nothing of the fluid mark of a living being recording an individual history throughout the artistic process of creation.
Is plywood cool and useful? Sure.
Am I glad plywood was invented? Absolutely!!!
Am I exhausted by techbros holding up plywood next to beautiful wood boards and not only trying to gaslight people into thinking they are identical but also trying to argue that we no longer need trees because any day now we will be able to make magic synthetic woodchips and go straight to plywood? To the point that I want to throw up every time I hear it and also why do we even desire to do that in the context of human art?.
But you’re taking it to the extreme, to the point of dishonesty. You’re so incensed about the overuse and overselling of AI, that you’re now lying about what it can do to diminish it.
To build on your example, you’re so upset about the sales pitch for plywood, that you’re now trying to claim it’s a fairy tale fabrication and shouldn’t & couldn’t be used to build with at all.
That’s not what they said. There is a difference between using AI in a short sighted effort to cut costs and using it to enhance content created by people. AI is a broad term, and just because a bunch of rich asshole morons are misusing a version of it that does have use does not make it automatically bad. AI, Generative or not, is just a tool.
There have been games that have procedural generation for decades in one form or another to create practically infinite content for players, but they are always limited in other ways. Minecraft can generate an “infinite” world, but what you do in the world is limited to what has been ready built. Hell, Games like Skyrim randomly generate NPCs all the time, but they are shallow and don’t really add much to the game.
Having people build out the mechanics, the spells, the world, and other features with a basic foundation of game play and then having AI implemented to combine those features in a way based on player interaction, or create NPCs that are doing similar things the player can that can make the world feel more alive is likely the next real advancement that games will have.
Sure, you could have people make hundreds, if not thousands, of NPCs, but they are going to be very derivative and you’ll see the usual “copy paste” people that aimlessly wonder around or do one or two things and making that many NPCs that aren’t story driven would be mind numbing work.
Sure, you could have people make hundreds, if not thousands, of NPCs, but they are going to be very derivative and you’ll see the usual “copy paste” people that aimlessly wonder around or do one or two things and making that many NPCs that aren’t story driven would be mind numbing work.
If you think “damn I need to make a bunch of fluff here to fill up space but I find the process excruciatingly boring and unfulfilling” please for the love of all that is good and beautiful please stop making art, it isn’t making anybody’s life better including yours. Make art because you desire to create the thing you are actively making in your hands, and if your heart tells you that it isn’t worth it, that means you aren’t making art that is worthwhile.
Procedural generation is a staple of many gaming genres already, but the difference between procedural generation and AI is that a human can ensure that procedural generation will reliably reproduce interesting content, AI has no such proven ability and you can’t just assume that it will attain that ability at some point. Crucially in all the critically successful games that leverage procedural generation the motivation is not to provide endless content but rather to “shuffle” the deck of a carefully hand selected array of cards to create a specific experience that never repeats quite identically which is a crucial element of mechanically challenging roguelike game design.
Enter The Gungeon wouldn’t be made better by swapping out the careful level design considerations for AI generated slop, it would ruin the precisely crafted balance and gamefeel that has lead to it being considered a modern classic.
Procedural generation is not AI, it is in fact philosophically the opposite of AI in that procedural generation procedurally creates and mixes content instead of machine learning which just learns to bullshit pattern match from material that is 9 times out of 10 stolen from exploited artists. One of those things you can tweak to reliably provide fun, challenging and interesting level design that remixes human created elements in ways that don’t undermine the humane element of them and the other is a bullshitting machine. I am sure the bullshitting machine will get better, but it will never not be a bullshitting machine and the success of procedurally generated design in gaming really has NOTHING to do with what we now define as “AI” whatsoever. Rather, on the contrary procedural generated design has far more in common with the now largely forgotten attempts in AI research to create procedural intelligence by explicitly defining thinking and logic routines that could then be modified and built upon by a logical agent operating in a human defined architecture.
If you want to talk about AI in the context of how people used to define AI before the explosive growth and hype of machine learning basically erased an entire branch of research from the public consciousness, well yes that older style of AI design has actually shown itself to be continually relevant to game design…
Prey 2017 is one of my favorite games. Fantastic replay value. 5 hour long runs with each play through rewarding with a different experience for doings differently or out of order. Wish more games were like that.
Honestly, I feel like games have been getting too big. The ends of RPGs always feel like a slog these days.
Maybe it’s because every game thinks it needs a 3 act denouement. Maybe it’s because there’s 100x the games coming out now compared to when I was young and the feeling of wanting to get to the next one is rushing me. Or maybe I’m just plain getting old.
In any case, I’m ok with shorter games.
I actually might like a game that big… If it were actually a game that big. Starfield is a perfect example of pointlessly big but full of nothing. A game with the depth and complexity of some of the best cities in Bethesda games but EVERYWHERE instead of just a few select cities with barren wastes in between like a real world has might be incredible and be the last game I play for the rest of my life.
But that’s not currently possible and all we can do right now is the fake BS where everything is empty but the map is BIG.
Yeah, I guess, but as long as the challenge is still achievable I can dig a large field.
It’s easier to place and organize finished assets than to create new ones, though, so after a while a lot of it starts to feel copy-pasted. I’m sure that noticeable lack of effort will only be exasperated by modern automation.
*exacerbated
My spelling is accepted when I search the word.
Yes, it close enough to a homonym that I can see your confusion. Exasperated is being fed up with something, exacerbated is something making a problem worse.
Edit - Oh, if you notice in your screenshot ddg got the definition you showed from wiktionary, so I wouldn’t treat that as an authoritative source.
You never had anything to gain by choosing a different word in this discussion, your goal is to prove my chosen word wrong, and you’ve failed so far.
Bro I was just trying to be helpful. I wasn’t trying to prove shit, I didn’t have any fucking goal or ulterior motive. Tell yourself whatever you need to get through the day though.
Dictionaries frequently show common usages, even when they are misnomers. Recommend taking this one onboard.
Yes, because that is a completely different word.
Not according to a simple search, no.
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.
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.
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.
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.
