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.
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.
Same. I struggled with RDR2 and gave up on Elden Ring.
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.
Agreed. And while there are some days where my “I just want to walk as far as I can” instinct has me wishing for bigger game worlds, at the same time it can be a bad experience when the game tells you that you have to go somewhere and it’s either a slog to get there or you fast travel and skip the world entirely.
ever played Death Stranding?
I put in about 6-8 hours and never came back. Not that it was bad or anything, but I just don’t have that kind of time and it wasn’t particularly compelling. I might try it again some day, but I didn’t really understand the hype. You deliver boxes for likes and try to not fall over while walking forever in a kinda scary sci-fi post apocalypse world. What am I missing? I heard great things about it making the journey less of a slog, but if anything, it made traveling feel like more of a slog. I just had to not fall over. It’s not like I was finding that much cool stuff along the way, just occasionally a slightly useful bridge made by some other player.
I had the exact same experience and don’t know what I’m missing that everyone else loved so much. It was all just so tedious.
I really wanted to like it, but nothing about the game hooked me. The world was cool and graphics were good but the core gameplay loop was tedious. I was hoping for a more interesting or threatening world to explore. The random objects placed by “xXXgamer420xXx” didn’t help my immersion. I wonder if the game would have been as successful if Kojima’s name wasn’t attached to it.
I did, and I really liked it. I am excited to see how the sequel holds up, the trailer was so whacky I couldn’t look away.
Rdr2 is too fucking big lmao
Damn I’m literally playing Wildlands now. It’s a really fun game to just drop in if you want to cause some mayhem.
I would never finish a game 8 times longer than Witcher 3+exansions. I started once, got burned out and had to restart a year later to get to the end. Enjoyed it a lot but yeah. I don’t need like 1600 hours of anything.
1600 hours is insane gameplay loop not content size imo, I have that amount of hours in a few game but they’re either fighting games or ARPGs which are repetitive by nature.
*cries in osrs*
OSRS has obliterated my sense of what constitutes a grind. I’ve communities for other games tearing their hair out over a 1/300 drop.
Same. Someone’s like, oh a 3% drop that’s awful!
And I’m like, oh 3%? That’s like, a tiny coin drop or random trash right?
I think the disconnect has to do with old gamers vs new. Old gamers were used to getting one game every 6mo to a year. New gamers are looking for a variety of that or short bangers. Idk I somehow fall between. I can play a long game as long as it comes in digestible amounts where I can easily drop it and pick it back up. All I know is ‘AAA’ type studios are out of touch as fuck. Only game I can think of in recent memory that was long and checked all the boxes would be God Of War. Horizon Zero Dawn as well. Coincidentally both ports from PS but I’m PC.
It’s funny, I actually was thinking it’s the other way around. Older gamers have a million different things begging for attention, so longer games just aren’t as appealing anymore. Younger gamers can easily find the time to sit down for hours at a time uninterrupted.
In reality, it’s probably somewhere in between. Younger people also gave increasingly smaller attention spans due to social media, so there probably are a growing number of them that just wouldn’t sit with one game for that long.
They mean gamers of old. That is, currently old gamers, but back when we were young, and had time, and not a lot of games to fill it with, so we appreciated a longer game.
Current young gamers have vast libraries of games to choose from, and shortened attention spans due to social media.
I wouldn’t mind a much bigger world. If it’s actually populated. There needs to be shit to do. Reward me for going off the path.
8x the size of the world either means 1/8 the original handcrafted stuff per area or 8x the development time and cost, there’s no way you can get around this
The biggness doesn’t matter as much as how much there is to do in a meaningful and rewarding way.
I’ll take it if it’s well done. I’m fine with it also not being done all at once (think expansions in MMOs). However, I’d rather the game be smaller (and priced appropriately) if quality will suffer.
Huge game worlds were awesome back when it was challeng to make them. People have proved they can be done. Now it needs balance.
