985ef6 No.15627654
So I think most of us can agree games like Fallout 4 and anything Ubisoft has published in years is shit.
My question is thus; can you make that sort of aimless wandering around actually good? Are they doing it wrong, or is it fundamentally bad design?
951c07 No.15627656
4c9001 No.15627663
>>15627654
People aimlessly wander and can't escape /v/ so
985ef6 No.15627665
>>15627656
Sweet, glad it's settled.
c920fb No.15627678
>inb4 some faggot defends slavic Bethesdashit
36cf5c No.15627683
>>15627654
Fallout 4 is good tho. I really enjoyed it no matter how faggots like you try to convince me.
e4edd0 No.15627748
>>15627654
Make the world difficulty persistent, and make it based on items/skills that you find rather than levelups. You shouldn't be able to walze anywhere you want whenever you want and get good loot. You also shouldn't be able to go to certain places without appropriate equipment. Make certain items from one place be relevant in another place so you can actually fire up a braincell or two, aimless wandering is good but brainless wandering is not.
36cf5c No.15627861
>>15627748
>You shouldn't be able to walze anywhere you want whenever you want and get good loot.
Oblivion failed on that because some of the good items are randomized and leveled, but Skyrim and Fallout 4 are like that. In Skyrim the good stuff can't be obtained as random items. They either need to be found in certain places or crafted at high level. The process of leveling in Skyrim is pretty unique too, for example to level up your smithing you need to smith valuable items, and smithing materials can't just be found everywhere. There are places with high concentration of gold or ebony. Discovering certain mines with valuable materials is what makes Skyrim fun. Same with Fallout 4 and it's crafting material locations. Skyrim and FO4 are not MMO style randomized lootfest.
>You also shouldn't be able to go to certain places without appropriate equipment.
True, but doing it in a Metroidvania way would be dumb. It should be done in a more natural way like Arena and Morrowind where certain places can't be reached without wall destruction or levitating magic.
4c9001 No.15627871
>>15627861
>Make 500 iron daggers, sleep and repeat
a69578 No.15627875
Invidious embed. Click thumbnail to play.
>>15627654
>My question is thus; can you make that sort of aimless wandering around actually good?
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Kingdom Come: Deliverance did open world gameplay pretty well.
>Are they doing it wrong, or is it fundamentally bad design?
The main thing that matters most is whether or not a game is left wing propaganda. TLoZ:BotW and KC:D are enjoyable because their developers, Nintendo and Warhorse Studios, are respectively apolitical and right wing. Fallout 4 could have been enjoyable too if Bethesda developers weren't so left wing. Visibly on Twitter all day, they just promote all kinds of degeneracy, promote the outgroup identity groups (the "oppressed"), and attack the ingroup identity groups (the "oppressors"). It's kinda hard to enjoy a game when its devs hate your very existence as a straight white male rightwinger.
985ef6 No.15627877
>>15627861
Almost everything you said is wrong.
b2de2d No.15627878
fo4 had the potential to be a better sex game than skyrim and they nerfed modding because they wanted to control modding and be jews.
36cf5c No.15627881
>>15627871
It's been patched out since v1.5 or .6. Now the speed of your leveling depends on the price of the item you create.
>>15627877
Tell me about it.
>>15627875
This is some pretty good sarcasm. 8.5/10
136794 No.15627884
>>15627654
>can you make that sort of aimless wandering around actually good?
Yes.
1dab4f No.15627886
>>15627875
>The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Kingdom Come: Deliverance did open world gameplay pretty well.
Wait till the Bethesdrones come out of the wood work.
>Fallout 4 could have been enjoyable too if Bethesda developers weren't so left wing.
No, it is bad in its own merit.
f5c76d No.15627903
>>15627884
>new vegas
>aimless
New vegas is the only bethesda game with a clear goal and route
b2de2d No.15627905
>>15627903
new vegas was created by obsidion, it is a total conversion of fallout 3.
f5c76d No.15627908
>>15627905
Ok, the only creation engine game with a clear goal and route
b2de2d No.15627910
>>15627908
fallout 3 had a clear goal and rout too, but you were given the freedom to go anywhere unlike new vegas.
f5c76d No.15627914
>>15627910
You're really gonna do this?
>freedom to go anywhere
>when every location is level scaled
There really was no point to go anywhere since everything would provide no challenge. Fo3 somehow became more linear and more disjointed than oblivion somehow.
d75c0b No.15627928
Here's how to do open world well.
> 1. Have a single over-arching objective that can be tackled from the get-go while under-powered and under-prepared for ultimate challenge and speed-run autism
> 2. Have a variety of secondary quests that offer up rewards for completion that make the primary objective easier (better equipment, new abilities, etc.)
> 3. Have parts of the overworld change depending on player actions, either helping or hindering the player. Helping villagers makes the town prosper, giving you access to new goods, and changes the overworld (and possibly the ending). Not helping them strengthens the monsters in the area, and creates different loot (monster item drops v villager item shops) to be available.
> 4. Include reasons to explore. Treasure maps, local legends from villagers, random caches of supplies from merchants that took a wrong turn and ended up abandoning their cart, etc. Also include genuine local ecosystem variability, so that certain materials are only available in certain locations, forcing players to explore other areas for things that they can both trade for a fortune in distant locales, or use to craft things.
> 5. Include pointless nice things that reward people simply for wandering. Whether it's a nice view, of a distant landscape between the pillars of ancient ruins, or a little bit of unnecessary lore, or whatever. It makes the world feel bigger and older than it is.
> 6. Get rid of level scaling and random loot. They are cancer. Allow monsters to get stronger based on specific in-game events, sure, but do not use arbitrary numbers to determine difficulty, use actual different enemies with different abilities.
BOTW managed to get as much right as it got wrong, which unfortunately makes it above average in JohnOliver.getCurrentYear();
b2de2d No.15627931
>>15627914
sure it was slightly linear but you have to remember this was the first time they ever went 3D.
f5c76d No.15627932
>>15627931
>morrowind
>oblivion
>first time in 3d
Eat shit shill. Fuck off.
86b3d0 No.15627935
>>15627928
All of this shit but I would add make it fun to move about like spider man or batman.
b2de2d No.15627936
>>15627932
ok you braindead retard, the elder scrolls series already had an established 3D formula since redguard, anything prior to fo3 was 2d.
36cf5c No.15627941
>>15627886
Skyrim is better than BoTW for open world due to how exploration affects how fast you level up by collecting the right resources and finding the right trainer NPC's, as I said before. The upgrades in BoTW are just not as good as Skyrim. KCD is honestly pretty boring for aimlesss wandering, there aren't even dungeons or magic items. The best armours in the game could be gotten early.
>>15627905
>>15627910
Both FO3 and New Vegas TECHNICALLY let you go anywhere. The difference is FO3 was designed for a completely open ended map exploration with it's area based level scaling and quests that bring you to every corner of the map. New Vegas punishes the players who want to explore with high level bulletsponge enemies and dungeon design that makes no sense.
>There really was no point to go anywhere
In FO3? Most areas have a powerful unique loot.
>Fo3 somehow became more linear and more disjointed than oblivion somehow
Being disjointed isn't a bad thing in a non linear game. Oblivion's level scaling AND item scaling made it worse than FO3. FO3 might have a bit of level scaling but no item scaling. Also, the level scaling in FO3 is actually not a very huge issue because the power of the enemies depends more on their type rather than their level, their inventory stays the same. Oblivion was terrible because the enemy spawning was scaled.
f5c76d No.15627942
>>15627936
Fo3 is just oblivion with guns unironically
f5c76d No.15627944
>>15627941
>in fo3? Most areas have unique loot
So does fucking NV, but NV has challenges to get this loot. You dont always have to go to every dungeon as you see it. The map was designed for different leveled characters for different areas.
b2de2d No.15627947
>>15627942
on the surface yes but there are hundreds of quests paths and changes that must be made you can't just slap guns in oblivion and call it fallout.
f5c76d No.15627949
>>15627947
Thats what bethesda did :^)
0b7990 No.15627952
>>15627654
You make it good by making exploration rewarding and not just filling a big empty map to the brim with repetious and garbage tier wastes of time. Gothic did it right, Risen did it right, Elex did it right, The Witcher 3 was on the right path, NMS is actually pretty good in making exploration a core part of gameplay. Then you have Morrowind and Daggerfall as good examples of two different approaches.
To make these kind of games work you need to move away from the arcade school of thought and instant gratification, to make it good the entire game must be designed to be slow burn and embrace the traversal and exploration of the game world a central pillar in the game.
36cf5c No.15627958
>>15627928
> 6. Get rid of level scaling and random loot.
While I partially agree, I'm gonna argue that level scaling and random loot shouldn't be an issue when done correctly. If you want to revisit a previously cleared dungeon for example, you'd want it to be populated with different enemies and different loots. It's only an issue when the most powerful unique items can only be obtained randomly and every enemy level with you from the get go.
>>15627935
Yes, but make it as a reward, like in Morrowind.
>>15627942
I wish.
>>15627944
>but NV has challenges to get this loot
Are you implying that FO3 doesn't? It didn't just simply give away Xuanlong rifle and T51 armour. They both involve quests with open choices. In fact, in NV from what I remember, getting the best weapons and armours doesn't even involve any quests, they're just hidden behind high level enemies.
36cf5c No.15627965
>>15627952
>making exploration rewarding
The only bethesda games where exploration isn't really rewarding are Daggerfall and Arena. Even in Oblivion you can explore the map and to kill umbra and obtain her gear anytime you want.
50273a No.15627980
>>15627654
>make that sort of aimless wandering around actually good?
Yes, Morrowind got one aspect right regarding this. You were rewarded by exploring, unique items lay hidden away. Ubisoft put a treasure chest that look like all others in the middle of the street. It is lazy development and corners cut. Unique items and varied environments add mystery and depth to the game. Wandering into a hard area that gets you killed if you are not a high level seems like bad game design, but if you have a poison spell and can take down a really high enemy by being clever, like in FF12, you can get some good gear and some quicker leveling to reduce the grind. This whole multiple studios across the world working on the same game is reason enough never to play it. It can't be done properly this way and it is all to make more money at the expense of reddit-tier gamers .
d6c6c8 No.15628063
>>15627654
at it's core that's basically all skate was: a giant level that wander around & find ways to amuse yourself. the missions & progression were the most barebones way to frame that with any kind of structure but in reality, the moment you start the game you can already do everything it has to offer
bf5bb8 No.15628324
>>15627958
>revisit a previously cleared dungeon
This right here implies that your game design is fundamentally based on grinding random procedurally generated garbage rather than exploring a properly designed world.
e4edd0 No.15628440
>>15627861
>Skyrim and Fallout 4 are like that
Fuck off retard.
Grinding levels and level scaling is exactly what I was telling you not to have. Even most of the unique items in Skyrim are level adjusted when you first find them.
RNG loot is shit even for minor drops like survival items and money, it will never be better than hand placed items unless you're playing a game that's designed from the ground up to be procedurally generated and played many times.
f57920 No.15628828
>>15627683
>Fallout 4 is good tho.
It isn't a good game without all of the DLC. The game would feel incomplete without it.
>>15627881
Some people pick up the console version and never update or play at release and never pick it up again. With Bethesda games, a person needs to wait 2-3 years and pick up all the DLC before playing. That is the point you get something that resembles a finished game.
d25289 No.15628915
New Vegas, Breath of the WIld, and Red Dead Redemption were all good games. I hear the new Spiderman game is also doing the formula better than Ubisoft. The companies who crank this shit out the most seem to be the worst at it.
db3fcd No.15628956
Good Open Worlds have directions and guidelines that make you want to explore and make use of the world around you, not markers, static garbage and shit UI/HUD.
6af4d1 No.15629371
af3d2a No.15629940
>>15627952
>Morrowind and Daggerfall as good examples of two different approaches.
Could you elaborate?
ac6320 No.15629954
>>15629940
Not him, but Daggerfall is fuckhuge and shallow while Morrowind is tiny but deep.
Both games manage to be fun and engaging despite the radically different approaches.
705f1a No.15630030
Really what I want from these kinds of games is shit you do really fucking matters
Feed a dog? Turns out you increased the feral dog population in the region like an idiot and village cattle get killed so places sell dirt and rusty nails. Domesticate a dog? Get a companion. Get the bestiality perk as well? Get access to the dog fucker faction, which turns out they want to become furries and this is the hidden werewolf route. Break the a dog's neck? Hunters admire your dog breaking skills and want to recruit you into the hunters faction.
433482 No.15630060
>>15627654
>can you make that sort of aimless wandering around actually good?
You can do it by giving the player strong narrative intensives to go around and explore or by making the gameplay cycle fun, the best is combining both, however, at that point it can no longer be considered aimless wandering.
>Are they doing it wrong, or is it fundamentally bad design?
Yes they're doing it wrong, especially ubisoft because their open world games are a melting pot of disjointed mechanics with no structure or cohesiveness. Open world games don't have to suck but when companies take a scatter shot approach to design it makes it seem like it's a problem inherent to the genre.
1ba9a8 No.15630073
>>15627980
>exploring copy pasted same shit colored caves to find another same looking weapon or armor but with a glow is a "reward"
Take off your nostalgia cocks
1ac554 No.15630115
>aimless wandering
Are we talking strictly First Person Sandbox games or Sandbox games in general?
Because I dunno about you but I like most of the GTA series.
You do a lot of aimless wandering in Star Control 2 and that's one of the best games ever made.
31ecda No.15630186
What if the game actually forces you to draw a map by hand? As in, you have your usual overworld map, but it only shows an empty grid and the sector you are in. Everything else (safe perhaps for terrain features like cliffs you can't cross or so) would have been drawn onto the map by you by hand.
Was thinking of La-Mulana, where the game is more or less unbeatable without a guide if you do not go out of your way and make a map of each dungeon with tools outside of the game.
56cc75 No.15630435
>>15629954
Daggerfall only seems shallow if you expect it to be about exploring the wilderness, like Morrowind is. As far as RPG mechanics are concerned, Morrowind is the shallower of the two. Good as it was, it still dumbed-down much to make way for the casualization that followed.
e8fdfd No.15630448
>>15627654
The open world is not the issue, it's the gameplay and the story that are shit. Give me any fun or well enough made open world RPG FPS and I'm all in.
ab1c6d No.15633589
>>15627654
>can you make that sort of aimless wandering around actually good?
yes
58b4d7 No.15634096
Besides all the content stuff already named. A diverse array of ways to get through the map is also important.
Movement skills? Allow players to catapult themselves or use whatever shit in their inventory like in BOTW? Speed potions? Fucking jumping across the map by cranking up your Acrobatics and using some equipment/landing site without FD? There's a lot of shit to try.
Not something too direct and easy to access like Fast Travel though, otherwise players are simply going to use that throughout the entire game and skip any content they could miss out on. Vehicles/Mounts could be nice too, but only if theres faster/more powerful upgrades later.
Also, more sea shit would be nice.
Instead of empty rivers with passive fish, they could add ships, alchemy ingredients, expensive loot like pearls/treasure, sharks, underwater caves, ruins and secrets behind waterfalls
29fe25 No.15634137
Fallout New Vegas and even (arguably especially) Fallout 3 were great for aimless wandering, because you would actually find things in the places you visited. Terminals with interesting pre-war lore, faction hideaways where you can learn about them from the point of view of their own, vaults with bizarre stories and experiments behind them which maybe even affected the nearby settlements. If you found a new area you had no idea what you were going to find inside of it. You could walk out with nothing more than a few unusual terminal entries on your mind as you wondered about what really happened in there, or you could walk out with a shiny new weapon that wasn't the type you preferred but was strong enough that you'd take it out for a test run on your way to the next shop to pawn it at. Maybe a little event inside the building, or maybe it was the destination of a quest you haven't even picked up yet and now you're in the heat of a sticky situation you know nothing about. It was always exciting.
Compare that to Fallout 4. Areas in the map were basically just designated "Go in here to get a fusion core" buildings with super mutants, gunners, or raiders. There are no unique weapons. There are no unique terminals because the writing was a joke. There are no out-of-the-way quests. Worst of all, there might not be nothing at all. You might have just spent an hour clearing out an empty building that was part of a radiant quest you never picked up, only to walk into your settlement and have Preston tell you there are ghouls in there that need to be wiped out.
Aimless wandering around can be exciting in its own right, but there has to be something to find even if you're not looking for anything at all. Areas like the Republic of Dave or the Dunwich Building from Fallout 3, Camp Guardian from New Vegas, even Cranberry Island from Fallout 4. These are the kinds of things you should be encountering in your travels. Not "building x filled with enemy y: reward scaled loot z".
If I were to make, say, a Fallout fangame of my own, it would be a game built entirely around vaults. Vaults were those out-of-the-way optional areas that had all the most interesting lore behind them. You don't need a reason to go exploring them other than sheer curiosity. You don't go in there for the loot. You don't go in there so you can pick up a fusion core and some mini nukes. You go in there because you can, and you want to, and maybe you'll find something useful but you'll almost always find something interesting.
c6cd93 No.15635734
>>15627678
>hates stalker
>posts fateshit
>>15627654
I like how Yume Nikki/2kki did it, but you either love or hate those.
51364b No.15635819
>>15627654
>Are they doing it wrong, or is it fundamentally bad design?
Yes, fast travel system, chore quests and boring flat world.
266a1c No.15635837
>>15635734
>defending oblivion with more bugs
c6cd93 No.15635846
>>15635837
Great argument, doesn't make you look like a fucking mongoloid at all
77cf14 No.15635856
I actually enjoyed fallout 4 but it was also the first game that I just loaded up with mods for several weeks before actually playing and never even tried vanilla.
266a1c No.15635857
>>15635846
I forgot to mention it also has memes, sorry. Why are you so insecure your open world first person rpg-lite is being compared to another series of the exact same inclination?
c6cd93 No.15635863
>>15635857
>memes
What? You mean outside of the game? You really are an idiot.
>why are you so insecure
Another great argument
32df68 No.15635880
>>15635819
Fast travel is shit, it is the very antithesis of what open world exploration should be about.
If a game is going to have fast travel, it should be from designated points, like the guy in the cart in Skyrim. You go to a handful of specific locations, pay him money, and get taken to others of those specific locations. You don't just open a menu and teleport to wherever the fuck you want.
66b54e No.15635883
>>15627958
Level scaling can't be done right as it removes any feeling of progression from the game. Oblivion was notorious for this and a level 1 character will face the same hardship and difficulty as a level 10, 20, 50 etc. Sure its nice to get new weapons, spells and armour when you level up, but that gear is made meaningless when the bandits, demons, orcs etc.all gear up to match you.
a140f6 No.15635904
>>15635880
I agree with this completely and it really is a thing for which it's not simply enough to ignore it in a game. Just ignoring it doesn't remove poorly designed quests that are made on the assumption that you'll just teleport from one end of the map to the other and back, it's not enough. It needs to be completely removed from a game to maintain the immersion, the game needs to be made on the basis that you can't just bamf from A to B but maybe get a wagon, a ferry, a giant mutant flea from certain destinations.
c6cd93 No.15635926
>>15635904
I think Elona handles this pretty well, where you can use either a scroll or a spell to return to a designated home location or to escape the dungeon. Might and Magic 6-8 also had this kind of thing where you could either travel to another town via land, which takes the most time and food, boat, which runs on a certain daily schedule, or use a high level spell to teleport directly to a certain city. Whether or not you can qualify either of these as open world is kind of subjective though.
d2c94f No.15635955
>>15627654
The systems and mechanics that are put inside that open world are 9 out of 10 times just bland and not fleshed out enough.
I'll use Ghost Recon Wildlands as my example as that's the last thing I've played in this regard and made me feel sorry for the poor saps who put effort into prettying that pig up.
The setting is nice. Every province tries to have its own environment and looks really good. Then you look at the actual game inside of it and everything just falls apart. You realize they spent all that effort in creating the massive game world to have fuck all in it. You can play the first province and have seen the entire game right there in terms of missions and mechanics, it's all copy paste from there.
They really dropped the ball on this one in regards to pushing the open-world part to be the main draw. It doesn't really fit as a more standard mission select type of deal would have done the job much better. Either that or they should have really cut down on the size of the world. There is such a thing as too much space.
They had to butcher the otherwise decent customization and spread weapon mods all over the map for you to "scavenge" to pad out the world a little, because there's literally 0 reason for you to travel anywhere besides the mission objectives.
On top of that the controls for the vehicles you need to use to traverse this large swath of nothingness are absolute ass. Physics feel ridiculous. It's hard to describe.
So yeah, if you want to make an open-world game look at Ghost Recon Wildlands on what not to do. You need to prepare as much content to put in it as you can. More than you'll be able to use.
That, or just don't bother with it. Open-worlds don't make a good game by default and can't beat good level design.
d2c94f No.15635968
>>15635880
>Fast travel
Fast travel is simply the developers admitting that the "open" world they've built isn't interesting enough to actually play and explore in.