/v/ - Video Games

The inherent mechanics that make an open world game an open world game are also the mechanics that Pisa autists off

The open world genre is either something you like or you hate. Take it or leave it

>>14661638

this reads like a high school thesis on what happened in the gaming industry ten years ago. what the fuck is the point?

>>14661638

It's a meme. Open world is still never going to be as good as games which have parts that are carefully crafted from beginning to end. Play any massive open-world "sandbox" game, especially those procedural generated ones, and you'll find that, after a while, without good gameplay they become mundane, not matter how large your map is.

>>14661638

Not making it with "open world" in mind.

Open world is a medium, not a mechanic, that's why open world modern games feel empty, because they are.

What do we mean when we say 'Open World'? Has it become a genre defining term now, or does it still refer loosely to a game in a large playable space?

If I was a game designer, I wouldn't make games in the "Open World" genre (if such a thing exists), even if I made a large playable space comparable to that of an open world. Namely being, I'm really about narrative driven experiences, and games haven't tapped their potential in this area. Instead of working on tightly knit interactive games, where the story is forged by the person playing, most developers have taken the cheap way out going after narrative cinematic experiences.

What I've never understood about this is that a "cinematic experience" is a cheap way of pushing the medium forward and actually contributes to the shallow market which has most successful games fall in the "Open World" or "Cinematic" camp. My understanding as to what the reasoning is lies within the fact that cinematic games don't have to allocate processing power to maintaining game systems, since every "level" is designed as an illusion to an interactive experience. If I know exactly where a player is going to be, I'm not going to render the area shown in the last level, and I can hide load times behind cutscenes (even when not pre rendered) for example. Cinematic games give developers the opportunity to pretend that a living breathing world is being generated, and the fact that games keep getting high praise for those cheap tricks is a bit ridiculous imo.

Open world has pretty much been "perfected" (if you want to call it that) by Ubisoft, so every game that has the OW system riffs off the Ubi formula heavily. Even BotW riffs off Ubi, which is pretty much the latest OW darling in the public eye. The only mainstream game that doesn't is GTA, and that is debatable whether that's actually OW or not. Plus, Rockstar have been crafting "OW" games for a long time, before it was really mainstream.

I digress, OW is a rather uninspiring gaming genre (if it counts as one). Make a massive land mass, and fill it with drivel pretending to be content. Not interesting in my opinion. A much more engaging and interesting game creates a world out of it's mechanics and instead of having to restrict the player, you challenge them instead. It is a game and you want your players to have something to play, right? What if you were playing as a civilian in a city currently under martial law, and you have a 9pm curfew? However, the game didn't stop you from going outside with a game over screen. Instead, you aren't restricted by the game itself, but rather your own playing ability. So for instance, the game features a fully featured A.I. policing system, alongside a separate A.I. system. You can sneak out, stay in, cause a ruckus: the game reacts to your actions. How about you take it one step further and have the game A.I. directly force you to act. For example, you've been trying to play as a law abiding citizen during your playthrough, yet all of a sudden, there's a bounty on your head. Now the game is directly challenging you: not only are the police of the state after you, but so are the citizens: the very same you spent the majority of your play-through not minding. There are a few gaming titles that do this, under the "immersive sim" category.

However, how many (if any) go one step further and have the A.I. react to itself? Instead of the player doing anything, the citizen A.I. causes an NPC to incite a riot, randomly in game. Now you, a law abiding citizen, has suddenly been present during a riot. Despite the game not giving you any cues or instructions, you've decided on what you need to do. Depending on what's happened in your playthrough and your own personal objectives, you as a player would react differently to this situation. With such a title, the developer has created multiple opportunities for player stories, without having to write a single scenario. Imagine the replayability for games with advanced A.I. mechanics holding the game together, instead of trying to wrestle the player into experiencing your story and vastly shortening the game's opportunity to provide an interesting experience and replacing that with the vapid entertainment below what you get at a cinema for around 3 times the price.

Minecraft is the only "good" open world game and that is only because it lacks a real objective. Objectives and open worlds inherently contradict each other. An open world game needs to convince players to set their own goals, and those goals can't just be exploration, because exploration can be exhausted, and the game will feel shallow when everything is explored (like Skyrim). Of course, Minecraft's lack of objectives is also one of its major downfalls, the game can easily become boring when your patience or imagination wears thin. Thus, open worlds are a lose-lose situation. You either sacrifice the cohesiveness of your game, or you sacrifice any point the game has.

Content. A good amount of content.

You know, I miss when games weren't needlessly expensive to make and the PS2 was filled with GTA clones - many of them were shit but we got some good ones too and they were sure as hell better than present meme open world games that just have you in an empty wilderness that's easier to make than a whole city crammed with details and filled with traffic.

<make a linear game with multiple levels

<glue them together and hope your code doesn't try to load everything haha xd if you don't want loading screens

In order of importance

>fun movement mechanics

>content that is diverse enough to not bore a player but not to the point where everything is halfbaked and halfassed

>the ability to approach shit in various ways

>>14661829

You getting fatigued by a game because it no longer gives you a dopamine rush isn't a mark against the game. It is impossible to have enough content to never get bored of something.

>>14661829

It's entirely possible to restrict the open world and slowly open it up before letting the player loose on the larger world once they get past a certain point in the progression.

My biggest thing is scale.

Not the physical size of the world itself, but the scale of any specific area in it. It's more about density of objects, structures, and making them inserted organically then about the actual size of anything.

Like, in Minecraft, when you walk around, I get a sense of an actual organic world because there's enough fideality in the landscape, trees, caves, etc, to where any giiven spot feels like a unique part of a world and not a designed space that somebody made. Skyrrim, as dumbed down as it is, also does a good job of having any given spot in nature feel like an actual natural location with enough trees, shrubs, variation the terrain's elevation, etc, that it feels like a real place.

>>14661638

Stuff to do. If you just make a giant world with nothing to do when going from point A to point B then you're just padding the game. Might as well put all the areas in the game directly next to each other at that point.

>>14661638

The real question OP is what's the difference between a sandbox game and an open world game?

>>14662449

Bait elsewhere.

>>14662504

This is also why open world games tend to fail. You need to make a really GOOD side activity like fishing to not be grindy or poorly implemented while also working along with the hundreds of other activities you put into a game. Match that with the hundreds of other shit you need to do just right along while also working with everything else to not make the game broken or a buggy mess is pretty nearly outside of the realm of possibility.

>>14662449

I can't think of a better open-world game than BotW, and that's really sad because it's really boring and mediocre. There has never been a good open-world game in the first place, but I still have hope that I'll see one.

>>14662544

>BOTW is the cream of the crop for garbage games

Sounds about right. It has potential, but it's so fucking shit I can barely tolerate it.

>>14662595

>Does Runescape count as an "open world" game?

I'd think that almost any MMO counts as an open world game. But to answer your question, yes. The only thing the game lacks is a "lived in" feeling, which is wrongly supposed to be filled by other players when it should be filled by NPCs going about their daily lives.

>>14662629

I think on a scale that big designing interesting or unique NPCS would be impossible.

>>14661638

The world needs to feel alive and give the player plenty of freedom to do what he wants.

Look at Daggerfall for an example. You have cities on an actual city-scale, filled with citizens that you can talk to (not much more than ask for the next tavern, but that's no different from RL).

You can be anything, from a vampire to a knight in shining armor and it'll actually show in your interactions with the world. You can climb walls, you can fly, etc.

>>14662641

They don't need to be interesting or unique, just so long as the streets aren't empty. More Man/Woman/Child NPCs going from their houses to random shops/bars in town would be enough.

>>14662661

They did that in Oblivion and it didn't work because it meant NPC's had to have dialog with other NPC's and it was always terrible. It's usually just to make NPC's more static as it's more headache than it's worth to make them seem alive.

>>14662673

>It's usually just to make NPC's more static

usually just best*

>>14662595

>Does Runescape count as an "open world" game?

Yes

>>14661671

Damn moonman nailed it.

>>14661638

Open world is a meme. Skyrim is a meme game. Bethesda gives you "freedom" by removing consequences… and also by limiting what you can do.

>>14662641

If I got decent plot context, a map, and twenty dollars a work-hour, I could pump out a hundred unique NPCs to populate it within a day's time, along with quest lines and dynamic prompts. That's a pretty little chunk of the map elevated from 'semipopulated for utility' to 'over-populated for interest', although crunching the whole game would take months and the time that would have to go into cleaning and prep would be fatal.

Point being, on the long list of things that require manpower, 'good writing' is somewhere near the bottom, and the fact that so many companies struggle with it speaks to either a dearth of decent writers or misplaced priorities.

In a more general sense, you could consider voice acting to be an aggravating factor. It was a great success for videogames, delivering early titles like Alpha Centauri or Starcraft mainly, but in the long run, it's blown chunks of worldbuilding out of the water. Finding decent actors is too damn hard and their work is really expensive, so the more they have to say, the more the bill racks up.

>Make game world extremely small but highly detailed and dense fulk of relevant goodies instead of recycled empty terrain

>Make landmarks and signposts plus ingame clues instead of fucking objective markers

That's all it needs

>>14668872

I shall support this statement as I am also a time-sinking autist that likes open world games.

Also, minimaps are absolute cancer.

>>14668872

>Zelda BOTW is a great game.

It's a game of wasted potential.

>>14661638

You don't.