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.
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.
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.
Exactly. GTA V’s biggest selling point was the worst part for me: giant map. The only way a giant map is good is if it has a ton more fun stuff to do, and even then, I’d honestly rather have a sequel/series instead of throwing everything in one game.
I still prefer gta 4, the city was worn out, lived in, cramped and dense.
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 look at the RPGs I enjoyed and the ones I didn’t and I think what I want more than anything in RPGs is for them to be fleshed out and well fitting.
If the world is too big for the story it feels empty and the side quests don’t feel connected. If it’s too small, it feel cluttered. It’s a fine balance.
A lot of quests in games have a specified start and an end, and are unimaginative. It’s 2025. I’m not bringing somebody 20 orc horns for a slightly better sword. Well, I will, but I don’t want to. It just feels lazy.
I’d rather stumble across a thread woven into the world and follow it both ways to it’s logical conclusion, choosing any branches along the way.
Honestly, I think “big” works against developers if they’re trying to make something that just fits. When you look at something like BG3, the world isn’t that huge. But once you start filling out all the blanks, it takes you a long time to get through.
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.
If we’re copying Witcher 3 levels of content anywhere, can we leave behind like 95% of the ocean based points of interest? That was the absolute lowest point of the game for me by a mile.
I would be happy if they never touched wayer again. Swimming and boating were awful in The Witcher series.
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.
Slightly OT, but I want to give a shout out to Witcher 3 as my favorite fantasy RPG.
Early on in the game I kind of struggled with it. I found the UI and especially combat, to be ‘clunky’.
After I mastered the combat UI enough to survive, I started to wander and explore. In this wandering I found some old cave filled with some decent (but not overpowered) gear. As far as I know, there was no quest that would have sent me to this cave. Also, if I hadn’t been pointed in the exact direction I was going, I never would have seen the cave entrance. These little details made the world feel ‘real’ and lived in.
Later in the game, when I was much more experienced, I was following a faint path, in the snow, over a mountain and I see another cave entrance. I go inside the cave and I hear voices. I sneak closer and I hear a fart, Then I hear a voice complaining about the smell of a rotten onion. (it was 2 trolls cooking something). This was totally unexpected and I literally LOL’d. Once again, this little bit made the world feel more real.
In summation, I don’t need games to be ‘bigger’. They just need to be ‘good’.
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.
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 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.
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.
And I really don’t like sandbox games, so I need a really good story or really compelling gameplay, and neither needs a huge map or tons of hours.
Don’t try to please everyone. A good sandbox game doesn’t need a story, a good story game doesn’t need sandbox elements, and good gameplay can be really short.
Yeah a lot of these games that try and do a bit of everything seem to often fail to entertain anyone.
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 do care about finishing games but not completing them. I will play the main story and some of the side quests. I am happy with games being 20-100 hours long.
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.
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.
I would super appreciate “Jump Back In” mode…
I’d love the option in a tutorial that for “I’ve played plenty of this kind of game - tell me what’s specifically different in this game”.
Oh hell yes! We need this!!
I would never finish a game 8 times longer than Witcher 3+exansions. I started once, got burned out and had to restart a year later to get to the end. Enjoyed it a lot but yeah. I don’t need like 1600 hours of anything.
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, because that is a completely different word.
Not according to a simple search, no.
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.