this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
264 points (99.3% liked)

Games

32643 readers
918 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

  1. Submissions have to be related to games

  2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

  3. No excessive self-promotion

  4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

  5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

  6. No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

(By game size he means scope of the game and huge open world maps, not game install size)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] kalr@meinreddit.com 21 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I'm burnt out on open world games. Some are good with dense rich areas that are interesting and make you want to explore but most these days are just bland, overly large and filled with generic quests.

Games need to stop being open world for the stake of being open world. I think for a lot of games, having multiple open-ended areas can work much better.

[–] thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I’ve been mulling over this the past few years, having finally kicked the WoW habit in the second year of Shadowlands (approaching ~3 years now)..

..but how often are quests/missions/objectives etc. just a combination of go to x, collect x of y, kill x of y? At a certain point, all of these become generic - right?

[–] kalr@meinreddit.com 2 points 1 week ago

Yep pretty much. All games boil down to what you mentioned above but the execution can vastly differ. I guess the low end is the Ubisoft approach where everything is just a generic world and its go climb this tower/ capture this outpost etc and the high end is the Rockstar approach where it might be drive there, do this but things could be different in between that keeps it engaging. I guess it feels more like a living world.

[–] AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

Definitely one of the reasons I absolutely love the original Borderlands. Large world, but broken into a lot smaller chunks/maps. More games doing stuff like that would be absolutely perfect.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

There's a whole different angle to game fun which is exploring game mechanics and the complexity that emerges from their combinations and interaction with the game space and the behaviour of independent game entities.

For example (and highly simplified), in Terraria the player has to balance the location of resources, their search and extraction of them, the actual movement, location and needs of the game monsters and NPCs, and their own progression up the "research ladder" (only in Terraria the "research ladder" is implicit and based on which resources have you managed to get your hands on and what have you built with them).

Whilst some of the fun in that game is in exploring a procedurally generated world, the drive to do so and the main fun in the game is to solve the complex problems that emerge from the interaction of those things: you explore to find resources that let you make equipment that allows you to explore more dangerous or harder to reach places to find more complex resources to make more complex equipment and so on and meanwhile the more advanced equipment also lets you do no stuff (IMHO, just merelly "shovel +1 level" equipment improvements are nowhere as satisfying as getting access to new kinds of stuff that let you do new stuff).

Examine games like for example Factorio, Minecraft or Rimworld and you find the same kind of global game loop: do stuff to get stuff to be able do more difficult stuff to get more advanced stuff and so on and all the while the complexity of your choices increases because the combination of options you have goes up as, often, also does the complexity of the World you now have de facto access to.

The AAA world however went down the path of story-like games which have one core linear story (the main quest) and then a bunch of mini-stories (side quests) and were game progression comes from advancing the core story and gaining levels (which themselves are generally just the mathematical result of doing stuff and advancing the core store and doing side stories) that let you do the same things only better and maybe a few news things, ultimatelly to help story progression. Stories "officially" drive the player's exploration (though some players also self driven to just explore just because of liking to explore) and it seems to be impossible to get good stories working well in procedurally generated worlds (as No Man's Sky has proven, IMHO). There is often some amount of the same mechanics as I describe above for open world indie games, but they're not the core of the game and what drives the player.

And yeah, if your game is story driven and you can't procedurally generate the game space with good stories, you're going to hit limits in the size of the thing, either on the size of the game space that has to be handcrafted to work well with the stories or in the amount of stories being insufficient for the game space leading to lots of boring game space that feels empty like it's just filler.

[–] Pilferjinx@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A building out rather than filling in approach?

[–] kalr@meinreddit.com 1 points 1 week ago

Yeah I guess so. Less like a look here's a world that I designed, how do we fill it approach and more like a what story do we want to tell and what does the world look like kind of approach if that makes sense.