He's right. We don't need maps bigger than Skyrim, we just need content and good core gameplay loops. Being hugely moddable like Skyrim really helps too.
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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Mods definitely help. Same reason why I think Fallout 4 is such a big hit.
I think the issue is that most game's core gameplay loops are not endlessly replayable. Lots of single player RPGs fall into the trap of being alright to progress through for maybe 20 hours, but you can quickly become so powerful that the rest of the game falls into busywork. It's really hard to meaningfully introduce new and interesting gameplay after the 30 hour mark, but without it things become same-y.
I'd argue this is just a fault of poor game design though. There are RPGs with really well iterated gameplay loops, with a wide array of variety, that I'm happy to put 400+ hours in. Games like Baldur's Gate 3, or Elden Ring, have a lot of freedom and variety in the way you can approach a playthrough, even allowing you to dramatically change things mid-playthrough, while still feeling mechanically satisfying to play. A 10/10 game will feel good to play forever, but a 7/10 might get boring after 15.
I quite like sandbox games so in those cases I would like it bigger, but at the same time I have no need for some main storyline to be in the game either. I want to be able to live in the world and either challenge comes just from surviving or things you find while exploring.
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.
I think it really depends on the game.
An MMO or a sandbox game I can sink hours and hours into. I don't know how many hours I've lost to games like Minecraft, Rimworld, etc. Even if those types of games might have "objectives", I'm more likely to just kind of do my own thing.
And I had something like 500 days logged in with my Final Fantasy XI character. It was my default game and I kept playing because I always felt I had something to do and people to meet.
Narrative focused games? Nope. While I might enjoy playing, the narrative can feel more like a chore in a game that has too much stuff to do, especially if mechanics or areas are locked behind it. I will end up ADHD because I hit a block or feel like the game is forcing me to do the main story when I don't want to.
I had that happen in Fallout 3 where I was just wondering around, having fun exploring and stumbling on things, and I end up finding someone I didn't even know I needed to look for connected to my dad and suddenly I felt I was being pulled away from what I found fun.
Might be why I really liked 76 despite the hate it got/gets.
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.
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...
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...
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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Honestly one of the best games I've played recently is the Stanley Parable and that game is a couple of hours of poking around a quirky but literal office. Would happily buy that 60 times over one massively mediocre rpg.
If it's good it's good. I bought the witcher 3 DLC and would have bought more. I stopped playing Assassins Creed altogether. People just want good, crafted content.
What game developers should do is add more "jump back in" modes. I get busy with work so I might leave for a few months midway through a long game and forget some plot and controls.
World size, density, and traversal have to be balanced.
I tend to play without fast travel, and skyrim meets these three pretty well, using the carts and horse for faster travel.
GTA can be bigger, with cars and planes for long distances.
Large worlds are great, if they are packed w content, open barren landscapes are terrible.
Ghost recon wildlands for me is the sweet spot for a big, interesting world with good traversal options.
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8 times bigger than Witcher 3 filled wilth Witcher 3 quality content would be a godsend. 8 times bigger than Witcher 3 filled with procedural generation and AI slop... not so much.
I will argue that Witcher 3 did not have enough content for it's own world. Don't get me wrong, the content was great, but there's large swathes of emptiness inbetween. The devs tried to fill it with map markers that got repetitive very quickly (hello, random floating barrels).
IMO, downscaling the world to 75% size and reducing the amount of non-quest content would have made the game better.
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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.
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 Age
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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.
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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.
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