World size, density, and traversal have to be balanced.
I tend to play without fast travel, and skyrim meets these three pretty well, using the carts and horse for faster travel.
GTA can be bigger, with cars and planes for long distances.
Large worlds are great, if they are packed w content, open barren landscapes are terrible.
Ghost recon wildlands for me is the sweet spot for a big, interesting world with good traversal options.
I’ve been playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance for the last few weeks and have found the balance to be pretty spot on. At first the world seems massive, and you have to travel around on foot, then eventually you get a horse and can also auto travel between locations. I think they really nailed the balance in that game.
Yeah, that game gets it right. I played it with the map turned off and the sleep walking perk and had the best time of it.
Think the second one will finally make me buy a ps5
I’d be really interested to see an action RPG type game that just embraces the real-life scale of the world and lets you screw about with the rate of time passing like in Kerbal Space Program when you’re walking a long way. You’d have to limit the scale of the story to make it manageable to develop, but I think there’s the potential for something cool in there. Maybe there are only two or three villages in one valley, but they’re all full villages and they’re actually several kilometres apart. Make sure that whatever goals you have are time-gated in some way so that you actually have to weigh up whether you can afford to walk to the other village, because even though you fast-forward it so that it only takes a minute of real-life time to walk there it’s actually most of the day in-game.
Daggerfall was like this, if I’m not mistaken (I got into TES with Morrowind, and I’ve never found the time to play the older games).
The map was about the size of Great Britain, and mostly empty, even if it had about fifteen thousand locations spread about it.
Not quite KSP whole planet scale, but uh, Kenshi.
Its a pretty damn big world, pretty sure it is significantly larger than Skyrim.
You’ve got world speed controls, rpg style mechanics and progression, and you can have multiple members of your party, and you can build your entire own town if you want to.
The game is filled with many roving factions, who all have a sort of reputation dynamic with all other factions, as well as yourself/party.
The game is full of many different story lines, many of them conflict with each other and cannot all be done, there is no such thing as a plot armored, impossible to kill npc, and there are tons of unique, npcs you can meet and have many kinds of interactions with.
If you want to take on a huge faction, you can, but you’re probably going to need to literally raise your own army to do so.
Main downside is the control scheme is fairly awkward / old school… its basically like an mmo from the early 00’s, but single player; click to tell your peeps where to go sort of thing, awkward camera controls by modern standards for an ARPG.
You don’t directly control the combat of your character like in Skyrim, the game basically rng rolls based on you and your opponents stats to determine who uses what kind of attack or block or dodge… but you can set different combat stances, basicsally.
… So its not an ARPG in the sense of Skyrim or AssCreed or Dark Souls… but it is an ARPG in a more loose sense, that its an RPG mechanics style game and world, without rigid turn based combat, which all revolves around action.
But the scale you are looking for is there. If you don’t set the time to fast forward, it can easily take 15 minutes to an hour or more to walk between settlements or major landmarks, depending on what part of the map you’re in.
Nothing is really obvious from the onset of the game in terms if what you are supposed to do, beyond not get murdered, eat, drink and sleep to stay alive.
It’s very much a sandbox approach, but theres tons and tons of stuff to do if you are capable of directing yourself.
Also, lots of mods that add more content, immersion, and deepen or alter gameplay mechanics.
Kenshi 2 is in the works with upgraded engine and graphics… ETA totally unknown.
That sounds fascinating! I’m pretty tolerant of jank in games if they’re doing something engaging, and while I do enjoy the combat systems of the Souls games I am totally okay with a more abstracted system. Hell I love Paradox’s grand strategy games, and this sounds a lot like how battles work in those — the meaningful decision is in which fights you pick and how you prepare for them rather than your actions within the fight itself.
I tried to play that game and totally failed to grasp the controls. The idea of is is appealing. I might have to give it another go.
I am honestly kind of baffled that no one has made a mod that makes the camera/control scheme into something more up to modern standards, like a mode shift button that toggles you into a modern 3rd person control scheme.
I’d attempt it myself if my wrist wasn’t so fucked up
Outward is your game.
Never heard of this one, but I will check it out. Thank you for the recommendation!
It’s not real life scale but I have yet to see another developer attempt anything like the slice of time that we got with Majora’s Mask
Damn I’m literally playing Wildlands now. It’s a really fun game to just drop in if you want to cause some mayhem.
Same. I struggled with RDR2 and gave up on Elden Ring.
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.
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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”.
Oh hell yes! We need this!!
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.
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 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
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”.
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 biggness doesn’t matter as much as how much there is to do in a meaningful and rewarding way.
He’s right. We don’t need maps bigger than Skyrim, we just need content and good core gameplay loops. Being hugely moddable like Skyrim really helps too.
Exactly. GTA V’s biggest selling point was the worst part for me: giant map. The only way a giant map is good is if it has a ton more fun stuff to do, and even then, I’d honestly rather have a sequel/series instead of throwing everything in one game.
I still prefer gta 4, the city was worn out, lived in, cramped and dense.
Same. I mentioned SA mostly because both are in Los Santos.
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.
I think the issue is that most game’s core gameplay loops are not endlessly replayable. Lots of single player RPGs fall into the trap of being alright to progress through for maybe 20 hours, but you can quickly become so powerful that the rest of the game falls into busywork. It’s really hard to meaningfully introduce new and interesting gameplay after the 30 hour mark, but without it things become same-y.
I’d argue this is just a fault of poor game design though. There are RPGs with really well iterated gameplay loops, with a wide array of variety, that I’m happy to put 400+ hours in. Games like Baldur’s Gate 3, or Elden Ring, have a lot of freedom and variety in the way you can approach a playthrough, even allowing you to dramatically change things mid-playthrough, while still feeling mechanically satisfying to play. A 10/10 game will feel good to play forever, but a 7/10 might get boring after 15.
I look at the RPGs I enjoyed and the ones I didn’t and I think what I want more than anything in RPGs is for them to be fleshed out and well fitting.
If the world is too big for the story it feels empty and the side quests don’t feel connected. If it’s too small, it feel cluttered. It’s a fine balance.
A lot of quests in games have a specified start and an end, and are unimaginative. It’s 2025. I’m not bringing somebody 20 orc horns for a slightly better sword. Well, I will, but I don’t want to. It just feels lazy.
I’d rather stumble across a thread woven into the world and follow it both ways to it’s logical conclusion, choosing any branches along the way.
Honestly, I think “big” works against developers if they’re trying to make something that just fits. When you look at something like BG3, the world isn’t that huge. But once you start filling out all the blanks, it takes you a long time to get through.
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.
only the first 10 are fun.
Or worse, a game where everyone keeps telling you that you need to put in 100 hours before it is fun.
Not to mention if you do the 100 hours and it turns out the culture is more toxic than Warcraft raiding.
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.
Only if the interesting content scales with size.
I am honestly excited to what GTA6 can bring to the content map. Considering how dense some parts of GTA 5 already are.GTA V dense? I found it incredibly bare, especially coming from GTA SA.
Didn’t play it so I can’t comment on the SA part.
At least they have loads of little details in obscure placesThat describes pretty much all GTA games though. The difference with V is that it has a much bigger map, so there are a lot more areas with uninteresting details.
Maybe it’s just me but I felt like the space was for the better. Maybe it’s just the fidelity of the game that helps it vs the older gen.
I quite like sandbox games so in those cases I would like it bigger, but at the same time I have no need for some main storyline to be in the game either. I want to be able to live in the world and either challenge comes just from surviving or things you find while exploring.
And I really don’t like sandbox games, so I need a really good story or really compelling gameplay, and neither needs a huge map or tons of hours.
Don’t try to please everyone. A good sandbox game doesn’t need a story, a good story game doesn’t need sandbox elements, and good gameplay can be really short.
Yeah a lot of these games that try and do a bit of everything seem to often fail to entertain anyone.
Huge game worlds were awesome back when it was challeng to make them. People have proved they can be done. Now it needs balance.
