What do you think of open worlds?

Smegball

GTA3 is the best open world game I've played. I was truly immersed and the perfect sized map let me discover so many nook and crannies. Unbelievable game. Vice City & San Andreas didn't grab me in the same way - although they were great games in their own right.

Aimead

AbusesToilets wrote: »

Take Skyrim as a recent example. I could simultaneously be the head of the Thieves Guild, Nightingales, Assassin's Guild, College of Mages, Dragonborn etc etc. Yet none of that was reflected in the game world, and didn't change in any large part the interactions I had with NPCs. That's the sort of thing that pulled me out of any immersion in the game's world.

The bizarre thing is that Bethesda had done much much better than this in their earlier Morrowind. Often you had missions for one faction that involved fecking over another faction, and it totally changed the dynamics of the game for the better. Little things like how the Ordinators would go ape if you were wearing their armour all added to the feel of the world in which it was set.

I’ve been recent replaying Morrowind and I continued to be surprised with the extent they let the ball drop with Skyrim. In Morrowind you would often be given directions to a location, and the journey trying to find a location felt like a proper bit of exploration. In Skyrim everything is ‘follow-the-compass-arrow’ and generally over-simplistic. The fast travel system in Morrowind was a real part of its charm imo, and added to the feeling of having a whole world to explore. That feeling just isn’t there in Skyrim.

Another example that springs to mind is to compare Thief 2 and Thief 3. Thief 3 was quasi-open-world, and yet the whole thing was a disaster. Even though Thief 2 wasn’t as open, there were levels like when you had to cross the city to get to the mechanists tower that had a real feel of exploring.

For a game like Thief 2 it seems the scripting came first and the world was built around that (maybe, or idle speculation). The set-pieces and overheard conversations in Thief 2 dragged you into that world (the bear fighting and the “your lady was out the back warming up the stable boy” being some favourites). That just didn’t happened with Thief 3. It was almost like they built the Thief 3 world and struggled to try and fill it with meaningful and coherent content.

There is something bizarre with older titles like Morrowind and Thief 2 managing to make a feeling of enjoyable exploration in a way their successors failed at. With both I think the issue was more due to the game being stripped down to appeal to the lowest common denominator with the open-world attempt faltering as a result.

Solitaire

Robert ninja wrote: »

^ Although NV had way less interesting exploration, it was much less scripted.

Allow to post this page-distorting (thanks boards for no auto sizing) picture as an explanation

<snipped due to sheer size>

Aimead wrote: »

The bizarre thing is that Bethesda had done much much better than this in their earlier Morrowind.

I loved Fallout 3 but the many criticisms made here are entirely valid and at times it feels like it, Oblivion and Skyrim are practically the same game with different texture packs on top

But it really does beg the question... did Obsidian ghost-write Morrowind? :eek: It really carries far more of their design DNA than any of its own descendants - I still find it amazing how the much smaller playable area boasted so much more actual content!

Digression aside, though, it really does seem that with clever design less is more, and in the case of fickle triple-As overegging the pudding, more often ends up being less Different games have different objectives and narrative styles and often need different level design and progression techniques in order to make the most of the underlying plot; open-world elements can enhance many games but not all of them, and even then there's many different types of progression system and scales of "open" you needed to choose from, as making the right choices, often very early in a game's development cycle, can make or break the pacing and immersion of the whole title. It depends on what you're trying to achieve, but usually you have to have region unlocks, gear checks and heavily scripted instances to pull a careening player back onto the rails and give their open-world mayhem some context and a frame of reference to work from.

Borderlands 1/2 are about as open-world as any other dungeon crawler (which they are, guns notwithstanding). Sure you can go back to old areas, but only for a very good reason as the regular content is underlevelled compared to you and thus no longer relevant to your phat lewt requirements. Its somehow open-world and linear at the same time, which is rather awesome. As for Just Cause 2... really, this game is basically a slightly more brutal and marginally less ludicrous Goat Simulator. Forget about the objectives, its all about the idiocy that ensues from the mayhem that you get up to. There's a reason why people are reverse-engineering half the game just to hack in multiplayer... its gone down something of a different evolutionary path to the rather more po-faced TES and Far Cry open-worlds.

dreamers75

Open world only really works when the world is interesting and part of the game.

GTA for instance you can stalk people who in places, kill them and then stalk their replacement.

Arma is a good example of a developer making a great open world and not even trying to fill it, heres your map fill it with **** yourself :pac:

Just cause an that New York prototype thing are poor open worlds in that they are soulless but still not bad games.

Open world has to be interesting in its own right, I can see why Skyrim grates because after a while it becomes samey. Witcher 3 avoids this by making each place and item somewhat interesting and different from the last one.