What do you feel about this stance on open-world RPGs?

[theparsonski]

With a game like Skyrim, it is great to have a content packed open world. When you compare it to something like Daggerfall, which had a landmass the size of the UK but was all randomly-generated and had barely any content within it, the world feels far more alive and varied. However, one of my main issues with the Elder Scrolls series as a whole is the way in which this "huge" world feels so... small. Sure, there is plenty to do, but when you purport Tamriel to be one of the main landmasses on an entire PLANET, the 16 miles or so that make up Cyrodiil feel extremely tiny.

What I would like in a game like this is to have large expanses of wilderness, which, while looking very nice, would not necessarily have to be packed with content. If there were areas where the content was very tightly packed, and dungeons, towns and cities etc. were frequent, and to get between these areas you could either fast-travel or, for example, cross a desert 30 miles wide with only one or two ruins and nomad tribes and random events to keep things interesting, I feel it would greatly add to the atmosphere of the open-world.

I want my epic fantasy to be epic. Having what you know is a huge world would benefit the scale of the game hugely. And by giving players the option of travelling across these areas, you would be giving them the best of both worlds; satisfying the people like me, who want their games to feel suitably grandiose, and the players who care only about the gameplay and finding cool stuff.

So yeah, keep the cool stuff (and obviously make it even cooler), but give players the choice of experiencing a truly huge world. It may get boring fast, but that doesn't matter - it's the benefit it has to the atmosphere that is important.

Thoughts on this?

 

[shasjas]

Yeah I was thinking about this sort of thing a while ago. In skyrim the mountains are really small compared to real life, even though the game makes them feel epic. it would be nice to feel genuinely lost and far away from civilisation at some points.
it would also help with the large amount of bandits that inhabit the world, in old forts about 5 minutes walk away from a major town with guards, as it would make the distance more significant so you can understand why those bandits havent been delt with. however i think this sort of think would put most people off a game, so it probably wont happen in an official release.
Modders, get to work.

 

[Mikejames]

To be honest I thought Skyrim was already pushing quantity over quality.

I guess I'm not too motivated to explore large areas if there isn't anything worth finding.

 

[shrekfan246]

I guess that's one reason I enjoy World of Warcraft. It would really take a lot of effort to make it work in a single-player game though, and it probably wouldn't be very market-viable. But I know I'd love a painstakingly recreated open-world ARPG Middle Earth that isn't an MMO. Too bad Warner Bros. killed that Skyrim mod...

 

[Epona]

A large empty world sounds boring. If I wanted that I would go into the middle of nowhere in person.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Add more emptiness so the world feels bigger?
Well it sounds horrid for my taste but you can just as well try playing Minecraft and see how long that entertains you.
For me Skyrim was walking the edge of size vs content, any more thin spread and the game would be unbearable.

I understand randomly generated stuff is considered the bees knees nowdays but you people don't seem to understand that all that random content is without context and meaningless, not to mention how old shit gets when it's repeated.

 

[VanQ]

It feels tiny because you're using fast-travel. When you can instantly move from one end of the world to another with little time and effort involved, it's natural that the world would feel smaller. Morrowind had just the right amount of fast travel in the form of Silt Striders and had just the right ratio of content:size to feel big and alive.

If you haven't already played Morrowind to death like I have you may want to give that a try. There's a bunch of gorgeous mod packs to bring the game up to modern graphical standards too, if that's an issue for you.

 

[theparsonski]

It feels tiny because you're using fast-travel. When you can instantly move from one end of the world to another with little time and effort involved, it's natural that the world would feel smaller. Morrowind had just the right amount of fast travel in the form of Silt Striders and had just the right ratio of content:size to feel big and alive.

If you haven't already played Morrowind to death like I have you may want to give that a try. There's a bunch of gorgeous mod packs to bring the game up to modern graphical standards too, if that's an issue for you.

I have indeed played Morrowind, and I loved it. However, my laptop can just about handle Minesweeper, so even a 2002 game is pushing it. That also rules out any graphical enhancement mods too. Damn, I need a better PC.

 

[Tom_green_day]

Large, empty world? Rockstar games, Assassin's Creed games, Far Cry 2 & 3, Brutal Legend. There are so, so many games like this. The reason I love Bethesda so much is because while their worlds aren't huge, they are packed and actually feel like real people live in them.
Also I don't think it was ever mentioned that Tamriel was the main landmass in the TES world? Just that it was the main one in the actual games?

 

[gamernerdtg2]

And by giving players the option of travelling across these areas, you would be giving them the best of both worlds; satisfying the people like me, who want their games to feel suitably grandiose, and the players who care only about the gameplay and finding cool stuff.

So yeah, keep the cool stuff (and obviously make it even cooler), but give players the choice of experiencing a truly huge world. It may get boring fast, but that doesn't matter - it's the benefit it has to the atmosphere that is important.

Thoughts on this?

Gameplay is always the key, and I'm not sure there is a divide between grandiose games and people who care about gameplay and finding cool stuff. As far as I know, big games are always a good thing. But a big game with lousy gameplay like Skyrim is a waste of time IMO, no matter how big it is. Amalur could have been done better, but I didn't care about the little things because of the gameplay. Watch what happens with Dragon's Dogma. That game could destroy Skyrim if they come out with a sequel and do it right.

 

[Maxtro]

Walk from Riften to Solitude and tell me how small the game is.

 

[Conner42]

An open world game where you can just sort of "feel" the bigness of it?

That could work. There's just a lot of other things you would have to do to keep the player interested.

One of the main problems I've had with Skyrim was that it has such a huge and epic landscape that gave off such a great atmosphere when you were traveling, but the people in the game were just flat and uninterested. The story was pretty cool, but the way people were in the game were...well, the thing was, nobody seem particularly bothered that they were being invaded by Dragons.

Traveling in the game was fun, but, by the time I had to interact with people, I was taken out of the experience.

I think the thing is, the most immersive thing for me about a game can be the story and characters or...what ever Faster Than Light does that keeps me absorbed(it'll take a wall of text to describe why Faster Than Light is one of the most immersive games I've played), but the story and characters are the part that makes the game feel alive.

So, I'll say, good writing mixed with what you want, I'd say it would come out with a really good experience!

EDIT: I think what you could do to make the traveling feel less boring is to be able to travel with a group and you get to hear the interesting, funny, or character building conversations they'll have. I can see that working!

 

[RandV80]

A large empty world sounds boring. If I wanted that I would go into the middle of nowhere in person.

It's not so much about being large and empty as it is finding the right balance. While something where things are actually spaced life sized apart would be boring, having a world where things are too close together doesn't really work either. It's not really open world exploring if you can't go a few steps without stumbling over some cave or dungeon.

Now the real problem is the perfect balance of let's call it content density is going to be different for every person. For Bethesda I thought Morrowind was about right, the Dwemer ruins are a great example of something that's sparse and spread out enough that's a challenge to actually find them all. Oblivion on the other hand everything was too dense for me and kind of ruined my experience. For the different setting I found Fallout 3 to be acceptable, and I haven't played Skyrim yet to judge that.

Now back to the OP, he brings up Daggerfall and how while it was massive it was always empty, but you gotta remember that this was randomly generated content created in like 1995. It was probably something like a beta version of world generation and the hardware would have set severe limitations. While going to the handcrafted model was the right idea for Morrowind, I've always wondered what they could do today with modern tech and development tools trying the random content generation idea again.

This is a tree I've been barking up this tree for a long time now. One of the benefits of today is while for Morrowind they probably had to do the pre-generating in house and package the world with the disk, today you could package the random generator with the game so you could get a new world every time you started a new game. Furthermore, in relation to the content density I was talking about above I could see this being scalable here. If you think in terms of Minecraft's 'chunk size', a much larger development team should be able to make this scalable. So for those who like things nice and close you could scale chunks to be say 100 square Meters, or for the more hardcore explorer you could set the chunk sizes to be 1 square KM.

I'm not holding my breath but I really wish a developer with money would try making a game like this.

 

[skywolfblue]

I think having an RPG world "to scale" with real life would be rather problematic, and kinda boring.

Want to climb that mountain? It'll take 8 hours of walking.
Your horse died and it's 40 miles back to the nearest town? Enjoy spending the whole day walking back there to buy a new horse.
Real sized towns? There's 80 houses here, which one is for that one NPC with the quest?
Real sized forests? It's a million acres and it will take you the better part of a whole day to hunt down 1 deer.

I'll pass. Skyrim is already plenty large. WoW was larger and with a higher content density, but it's a giant MMO so it's not too relative to what can be put in a single player RPG.

 

[mohit9206]

as a lot of people here said skyrim was just lacking the immeriveness and epicness inspite of being a huge open world rpg . but this was mostly because of pathetic side quests, dull one dimensional characters with barely anything interesting to say , to or explore. even if the world is not big as long as its immersive and fun to explore its good

 

[loc978]

That sort of thing is what overworld maps are for. Everyone seems to want their newfangled first-and-third person point of view until they have to trek 10 miles across barren landscape. Hell, Fallout 1 and 2 stretched from the border of Oregon down to Los Angeles and over to the edge of the Mojave... even driving that would be boring if you had to do it in the first person.

In short, rendering all of that is a bad idea. Bring back the overworld map, random encounters and make in-game locations mean something.

 

[RandV80]

One of the main problems I've had with Skyrim was that it has such a huge and epic landscape that gave off such a great atmosphere when you were traveling, but the people in the game were just flat and uninterested. The story was pretty cool, but the way people were in the game were...well, the thing was, nobody seem particularly bothered that they were being invaded by Dragons.

Traveling in the game was fun, but, by the time I had to interact with people, I was taken out of the experience.

I think the thing is, the most immersive thing for me about a game can be the story and characters or...what ever Faster Than Light does that keeps me absorbed(it'll take a wall of text to describe why Faster Than Light is one of the most immersive games I've played), but the story and characters are the part that makes the game feel alive.

So, I'll say, good writing mixed with what you want, I'd say it would come out with a really good experience!

EDIT: I think what you could do to make the traveling feel less boring is to be able to travel with a group and you get to hear the interesting, funny, or character building conversations they'll have. I can see that working!

While better writing is always a good thing I don't think this is necessarily the answer for TES, it's just too damn big to do. Since this is a game where they want everyone to interact with you and everything has to be voice acted it's going to be an enormous and expensive amount of work to make everyone react to the situation around them believably. In my opinion, to create a better experience in some places you need less writing. Crank up the number of citizens in a city but make them essentially ignore you. So basically like Assassins Creed. Get away from this idea that you can talk with everyone then you can focus on making better dialogue with fewer key NPC's, and build a better atmosphere with towns & cities full of actual people.

The technology was more limited being on the Wii but The Last Story did a pretty good job with this as well.

 

[blackrave]

I would prefer if TES6 had same content amount as TES5, but the world itself would be inflated (close to actual province size)