Counterpoint. Mordor II.
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 do think advancements in AI will eventually give us open world games with infinite procedurally generated engaging quests and NPC interactions.
If you want to believe in fairy tales that is fine, but the problem is when CEOs believe in those fairy tales and use them to fire their artists and developers which is already happening.
…and there will be no market correction back to actually hiring humans and paying them a living wage and treating them humanely once your only option for AAA games is AI slop…
What fairy tale? You can run models right now that people have trained to work as DnD DM’s. I guess you’re not keeping up with developments, but it’s already happening.
I agree. They won’t want to hire humans back. Capitalism will not continue to function in an AI driven economy. It’s going to be feudalism or communism. And if we don’t do something about it, I know which one the capitalists will choose.
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, 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.
The thing about not finishing games is very true. Simply look at achievement stats. Most games have a huge drop off in achievements earned after the first 25-50% of the game, with any achievement for completing the story of the game having a super small number of players who earned it. Even games that are easy as fuck and practically play themselves!
I absolutely want a game that I can sink 1000s of hours into. I do not want a game where I get bored half way tough because the dev clearly gave up or only the first 10 are fun.
Same. That’s why I don’t really like The Witcher 3, but I keep coming back to Cyberpunk 2077. The Witcher 3 has a great story; but the game gets super boring and repetitive super quickly. Cyberpunk is setup more or less the same; tons of filler content that is ignorable, great main story, but I like the action more. I can skip through the story and still have fun blowing away gang bangers in a ton of different ways, as opposed to Witcher where there’s not much variety in the action and every battle is just swinging swords and using the right spells on the appropriate enemy types.
Sounds like the same issue I had with the Witcher, 2 hours of build up and fetch quest for a 10 minute fight get a a little old 40 hours in. I didn’t even get to play the cool looking vampire DLC because I would have to keep grinding more boring stuff to level up.
Bg3 acts after 1?
To be fair, I got bored at the start of act 3.
Oof for me act 2 was the worst. I mean act 3 also kinda phoned it in but there’s a lot more stuff to do that isn’t gray.
I actually might like a game that big… If it were actually a game that big. Starfield is a perfect example of pointlessly big but full of nothing. A game with the depth and complexity of some of the best cities in Bethesda games but EVERYWHERE instead of just a few select cities with barren wastes in between like a real world has might be incredible and be the last game I play for the rest of my life.
But that’s not currently possible and all we can do right now is the fake BS where everything is empty but the map is BIG.
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
*exacerbated
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.
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.
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.
I recently rewatched Rango and the size of the main settlement in that is about the size of those in RDR. Reflecting on that, I suppose I want the map to reflect the kind of scale and focus seen in other media. A film or TV show doesn’t show us every street (usually) but it gives a sense of the scale of the place. If a game map couldn’t be used for an establishing shot without looking daft then it doesn’t really work for me, I reckon.
It’s something I like about the overhead perspective used by games like Fallout and Wasteland - I perceive what’s on screen as the area of the settlement that’s relevant to me but with the understanding that there’s more off screen. A character might mention going somewhere, much like in a play, and then reappear. Perhaps the player can go there, perhaps they can’t even see it, but it makes the world feel larger.
I suppose, much like in reality, we rarely visit every location of a place, but it needs to feel like it might enter our narrative in some way.
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.
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”.
The only thing that I hate from open world is emptiness, you can have big or massive world but if it’s seems so empty why bother to make it. Like Fallout & Skyrim we always use mods to fill that emptiness to make it feel alive.
I rather have game with small world but filled with many NPC like old Dragon AgeBig reason I don’t understand the obsession with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. The game world is empty and just feels like so much wasted space, and a ton of it looks like PS2 worldbuilding.
I didn’t play Tears of the Kingdom, but if you found large swaths of the map to be empty in Breath of the Wild, it means there’s something hidden there that you didn’t find.
It’s just about density. BotW/TotK were eerily empty and dead. But something like Elden Ring? I would play a game 10x the size of Elden Ring for the rest of my life.
This is my biggest complaint about No Man’s Sky. There are literally over a billion billion worlds, but they’re all mostly empty, not to mention all the space in between.
I played NMS ~2 years ago and thought for a huge procedurally generated game it was pretty good. The planets had lots of POIs and trading posts and stuff to go to. I quit mostly because the flight mechanics were too “on rails” compared to something like Elite Dangerous or X4. I just didn’t get the rush I was looking for from dogfighting and stuff. I had constructed a series of bases that let me craft a ton of tradable items that gave me plenty of money but there was just nothing to spend it on because my ship was already plenty strong enough for everything I encountered…
It’s not an open world, but Mirror’s Edge is a great game.
Wasn’t the second game open world tho? But that might be the reason it lost its charm for me.
Yes, it was. But EA ruined it with their launcher, so you can’t play it on Linux.
I feel like how big I want the game to be is a weird quantum unstable value. When I’m interested in the game I want it to keep going. But at some point I lose interest, and I want it to wrap up. But usually I don’t want to skip content that’s at least okay, especially if it affects endings and other choices.
Like I enjoyed Veilguard, but there were bits near the end where I was losing focus and kind of wanted it to pick up the pace. There have been other games where I finished all the side quests but was like “that’s it? I want more”
Not sure how to square this circle. I don’t think procedural generated or AI content is quite up to the task yet.
I do think we’ll see a game that has AI content in the critical path in the next couple years though. You’ll go to camp and talk to Shadowheart, and it’ll try to just make up new dialogue. I don’t know if it’ll be good. There will probably be at some weird ass hallucinations that’ll become memes.
I feel like how big I want the game to be is a weird quantum unstable value. When I’m interested in the game I want it to keep going. But at some point I lose interest, and I want it to wrap up. But usually I don’t want to skip content that’s at least okay, especially if it affects endings and other choices.
I’m kind of at this spot right now with Pathfinder: Kingmaker. If I had realised it was a 200h+ game I might not have undertaken it. I’ve had a good time with it all things considered, but at this point I really kind of want to move on to the next game in my backlog.
Same happened to me with Zelda: ToTK. I did everything I came across, collected a lot of things I found, did a lot of questing, got so good in combat I could defeat everything without getting hit, but then I was like “it’s time to stop now” and I defeated the final boss and put the game down. It was amazing.
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.
I do think a huge world with an engaging and dense design can still be made worse with size. In some games like Skyrim, Breath of the Wild or GTA 5, you could probably drop me anywhere and I’d know where I was, half due to good and differing region design and half because the map isn’t that big.
Back in 2015 I’d dream of a GTA 5 expansion that adds San Francisco and Las Vegas to the map, turning the north and east of the map in to a 500 yard straight of water, but in reality, two more large cities and their surroundings suburbs and wilderness would have never kept it’s memorability like the first region.
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.
The whole reason I burned out on W3 was trying to be completionist and doing all the map markers before moving to the next area.
Honestly I think these games need more points of interest that are not marked on the map whatsoever, and don’t matter towards 100% completion.
I eventually went through the Witcher 3 post game and got every single marker but it was basically background work while I listened to audiobooks, I didn’t come across anything interesting for hours. However I do acknowledge that those markers aren’t necessary meant to be sought out, but stumbled upon.
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.
Horizontally I’m fine with how big games are. They should grow vertically, and I wouldn’t mind 6 times the depth.
What do I mean by that? I have no idea. Maybe you people have
I’d interpret vertical content growth as content per area, deep story lines, stuff like that. It’s a common enough comment, see e.g. MMO players complaining about “content drought”.
A cyberpunk game that takes place entirely in a replica of the Kowloon walled city would be cool as fuck. Just as much map “area” as fallout 4 but packed into a 1 mile cube.
Wait I had a similar idea once! Youre right that would be cool af, but very difficult to get right. In open world games you usually get away with “isolated” side quests, in a dense cube this is difficult – which might be a good thing, it forces interconnectivity.
I was nodding along in agreement but now that you mention it I also didn’t really know what you were saying
No, no he has a good point, let him finish
