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.
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.
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 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
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.
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
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
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.
Outward is your game.
Never heard of this one, but I will check it out. Thank you for the recommendation!
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.