Ironically open worlds kind of trivialized the feel of game worlds and made them feel inauthentic.
I never feel like I'm on some grand adventure lost in the world anymore, you can just look over the hill and you see the place you started from. Being able to go anywhere at any moment and see every inch of the world ruined the mystery and turned game worlds into theme parks.
those biomes are cringe
I have such fond memories of them. Ashenvale is never going to not be comfy
I hated Ashenvale tbqh.
Are you horde? Only experienced it as alliance
For me its Darkshore.
just reduce the view distance then
Ironically, a huge open-world could capture the sense of adventure best. If you aren't given a reason to keep going back to your starting town, or if there's a long journey between significant places that deters you from going back and forth, you could have a great sense of adventure. But open worlds are still formulaic, slowly becoming less of a bland checklist but still not really feeling like a world.
Let's say you're playing an RPG, and you do a few small tasks locally before you have the supplies to make a 3 hour (real time) trip to the next city, but along the way there isn't actually much. A few caves, bandits, may have to get your own food, camp out. Could be a couple of routes you can take with different encounters, but you aren't fast traveling anywhere, and the world updates when you reach specific parts so things don't always remain the same. By the time you go back, maybe a fire burned down a few buildings, somebody important got murdered, suddenly there are new experiences. It's all a lot easier to do than creating an open-world that's all constantly visitable, filled with mediocre content like collectibles.
Yeah, something MMO-sized or even bigger could replicate that feeling better than both instanced games and current tiny open world games, hence the WoW screenshot. And a real time investment + updating world would do wonders for it, along with maybe something to keep you interested on the road like pretty sights or party banter or stuff to comb through, books to read, inventory to organize, obstacles to traverse, etc.
But I think the completionist nature of most players is at odds with a true adventure game, a true adventure would have you carving out your own path in the world while ignoring everything else and never looking back, whereas I think most players have a tendency to approach game worlds as a lawn to be mowed, and *want* to see and do everything multiple times.
You can never cover the entire width and breadth of real life, when you're on vacation on the other side of the world you can't just hop over back home and hop back to vacation if you forgot something, even if you're rich and can afford it, there's a time/convenience barrier to it.
Spot on. Open worlds present an amazing opportunity for dynamic gameplay that is completely ignored by the task based themepark style that dumbs the genre down. Walking out of the starter town should be an experience in itself as you embark on a generally unknown adventure. "Who knows what I'll encounter?" Instead it's just this and that or the other all of which basically present no consequence.
>If you aren't given a reason to keep going back to your starting town, or if there's a long journey between significant places that deters you from going back and forth, you could have a great sense of adventure.
at that point why not make a linear game? like Half Life 2 but let the player backtrack to previous level if they feel suicidal
Yeah, he basically just described an Adventure style game with the arbitrary option to return to a past location for basically no reason.
Having the option but not using it is huge, when you're young life is filled with potential and opportunity even if you don't claim it, as you get older you start feeling down as you lose potential even if you never used it.
I guess that is true in a psychological sense. All old pokemon games basically do the same thing.
New content is more of a reason than finishing off a checklist of quests you picked up 20 hours earlier, after having killed a God, to everything there remaining the same.
Because linear games seem to be offputting to most people today. And with the open-world, you have the ability to give multiple routes to one place, but the nature of most now means you're back and forth exhausting everything. Deny that with time commitments and the way the world would change so players will just miss out on some things in their first run.
The idea would be that you don't want to revisit until your adventure is over. The world would still be open to the player, but the world wouldn't just be a static playground.
>The idea would be that you don't want to revisit until your adventure is over. The world would still be open to the player, but the world wouldn't just be a static playground.
How about this- the whole open world is one giant advancing frontline that is no man's land in front and behind, idk you're a convict soldier pressed into conscription so it isn't all that safe the other way either. The band of safe zone presses forward through the map, the salient of the advance is effect by your actions but the war continues its momentum regardless. Certain landmarks will get obliterated after set amounts of time so there is content you will never see unless taking massive risks with your life and savegame.
Multiple endings, you can either vindicate yourself and travel back through the countryside as a war hero or become a turncoat escape to enemy territory.
They won't do this because people are used to the theme-park model popularized by Bethesda. While you could do one thats the size of Cataclym's Kalimdor map pictured above no developer would even attempt it. Imagine players crying about Skippy the Elf dying after their week long journey or being cucked out of a quest because they forgot to clear a cave of bandit rapists who kill the mayor of the village in the town over.
Real life is pretty open world
not mine
Realism doesn't make for good game design all the time.
But besides all that, I think it is interesting how Open World design has changed since Zelda 1. Zelda 1 is downright linear compared to open worlds now.
You think that, then you get older.
>A
>FRICKING
>RECTANGLE
What's wrong with rectangles?
There's probably some technical reason game worlds are always rectangle. Probably has to do with float-precision memes.
Easier to break up the map into a square grid to do LoD shit and divvy up tasks to the artists with, and you don't want to waste extra rows/columns to make an odd-shaped map with a lot of empty nothing or unnecessary amount of cliffs.
>several zones on this continent not even pictured
The thing that trivializes a world is being able to just go in a straight line to get to your destination. Skyrim suffers from this despite having a better world than most. You can just 'go straight' and not really have to conform to obstacles beyond just going around a camp.
Ironically, a COMPLETELY open world is hard to remember. Cause it ends up just becoming a memory of the locations rather than the journey between them.
it's cause modern open worlds are obssesed with giving the player something to do every 20 meters, with no negative space there can never be a sense of adventure or scale, it just feels like a themepark
Also when that content is just copy paste with no variance or reason to remember, it just becomes a blur. A general feeling of a game rather than specific moments.
Games without open worlds are boring and don't give the player any agency. Vanilla WoW has one of the best open worlds, and funnily enough, many players in vanilla disregarded the questline funnels and traveled to other lands to quest on their own accord. Don't remember cata, but I'm sure it was cancer.
>it's cause modern open worlds are obssesed with giving the player something to do every 20 meters
It's ironically that way because they unfortunately listen to hate the open world format. People who won't explore for the sake of exploring, people who hate to look at the larger picture, and people who will only go to someplace if there's some sort of character progression tied to it.
>Games without open worlds are boring and don't give the player any agency.
Wrong, see classic Fallouts
But, the old Fallouts had open worlds... Am I missing something?
They aren't they have an overworld map with specific areas you're free to tackle in almost any order
I mean, some people would argue that IS what an Open World is.
this
Fallout 4 is like, you clear out one area, and you can already see two more in the "distance"
no more wandering in the forest and stumbling on a unicorn or secluded cabin, everything has to be constant stimulation
is there anything more cucked than being a nelf player in modern wow? The teldrassil-darkshore-ashenvale leveling stretch was peak comfy. They literally set all those zones on fire as well as hyjal for good measure.
Glad i saw where the wind was blowing and fricked off after mop, good riddance.
flying mounts, even ground mounts in general ruined open worlds, these transitions never felt jarring at ground level on foot. Being able to look behind the curtain ruins it.
And running with no stamina bar
Stamina bar is moronic what are you on about.
Running everywhere makes the world feel small. Like mounts. It's also ridiculous.
The WoW world is such absolute kino, even now with the game's quality dropping and with flying mounts etc. I played a bit recently and levelled a druid through Vash'Jyr and it was genuinely one of the best looking zones I've ever seen in any game
Playing through Vashj'ir on Cata launch day was something else, it felt absolutely enormous while no other zone nailed the sheer sense of being unwelcome there as it did, you were constantly on the run with the same few questgivers taking up shelter in shitty caves
You have never played a great open world game (GTA5, RDR2, GR Wildlands, Horizon FW, Rust, Arma)
>Rust
Really?
It’s both open world and the greatest game ever made, so.... yes really.
Rust - the best game ever. Yeah I just don't see it.
>Yeah I just don't see it.
Was this the best you could do?
I mean, it's subjective opinion so what else am I gonna say?
100% disagree
what makes worlds feel inauthentic is being railroaded down a tube of content
Both are bad. A large world that's basically just an over glorified hub world to connect important locations and a linear shit fest of tubes are both bad.
One manages to smooth over the bumps and keep up the illusion, the other doesn't. It's similar to how low poly 3D manages to sell abstract looking styles better than modern high fidelity 3D, they let your imagination have a go
All right anons.
Under which premise is which map the objectively best choice?
For me a Zelda game should always be a Semi-Open Map which gets expanded the more items you get.
I prefer Semi Open.
Hub world satisfies my autism and love for old collection games from my childhood, but I don't know if it works in modern games.
I mean, there is no hard set rules for how something has to be designed. I think how everything interreacts is key to how you design your world I guess. Like Demon Souls Uses a Hub World while Dark Souls uses a Semi Open World and then Elden Ring is basically just a gated open world.
Hubworld for platformers
Semi-open for adventure games
Semi-linear for shooter campaigns
I like VTMB and Deus Ex style. I don't know what you would call it. Multiple semi-open maps?
>he didn't play Elden Ring