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

[Conner42]

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.

There's a lot more to writing than just dialogue. And better writing doesn't mean more writing. And I do agree that having everybody talk and being more believable would be...well, insane. But, not even the key characters in Skyrim felt like real characters.

I do think you have the right idea about interacting with people. You shouldn't really be able to talk to everybody, and you could probably hear a passing comment every now and again from a citizen(though, after hearing the same few phrases over and over again is just....bleh!). Really though, I thought they pretty much had the right amount of people in each area in Skyrim.

The writing and acting was only just one of the main problems I've had with the game. There's a lot more I'm not talking about, but, as far as making it a believable world, I'd say the whole story and characters thing would be the biggest part.

So, yeah, good writing, but it doesn't mean more writing, it's just knowing what to do with what you're working with.

EDIT: Erg, really hate it when I have a couple of more things to say right after posting.

Anyways, when I said writing on my last sentence, I meant dialogue. Good writing doesn't equal a lot of dialogue. But, it still makes sense that good writing doesn't mean more writing, because, you can have something over-written.

 

[TrevHead]

Imo it's no good just making a massive open world as you actually need lots of interesting things in it to do. overwise we have the same problems Fallout 3 had where most of the interesting stuff was in towns and the wilderness got a bit bleh after a while.

And while I suppose fast travel would be needed for a game the size of daggerfall but I would like to see it axed from smaller openworlds and ferrys / caravans used to travel between key areas.

 

[Pulse]

Huge barren deserts that take 10 hours to walk across.

Huge barren deserts that take 10 hours to walk across.

Huge barren deserts that take 10 hours to walk across.

...

Not feeling it.

I don't think it's worth the developers time, money and effort to put in environments that literally one or two players might pass through once before using the fast travel option every time after that.

 

[Vault101]

I like openw world games a slong as they arent just shitty "fantasy world simulators" like the elderscroll games!

 

[Antari]

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?

What you just described is called Just Cause 2 ... Otherwise I agree with you. A better balance can be struck than has currently been found.

 

[lacktheknack]

I thought it worked for Daggerfall, but that's a lightening-strikes-once kind of thing.

Daggerfall is completely empty, aside from a couple important cities. Everything else is completely interchangeable. This worked for Daggerfall specifically because it made the world feel "realistic" (in kind of a bad way, really) and really gave you a scope of what you're being told you have to save, as well as making you feel insignificant.

This doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would fly with today's developers.

And if you try to add a few interesting bits that are just far apart, it's known as "spreading yourself too damn thin".

 

[Twilight_guy]

Yeah because I want to spend an entire day gaming that consists of holding the forward button to get across a vast featureless desert... that sounds like a terrible idea.

Travle time is games is dead time. It offers no positive feedback to the player. People hate travel time. Ever had to backtrack though an entire level because you forgot something or the game requires you to go back to do something and then have to wlak back to where you were? yeah, that sucks. If there is some interesting environment to look at you can sometimes get away with it, but most gamers hardly notice the environment anyways. People hate having long expanses of nothing nothing and that is what most travel time is.

I can't help but feel this is only more epic in the sense that a level 80 character is more epic then a level 75 character. It has a bigger number and is therefore more epic. Unless you can explain why this is better, beyond "bigger numbers, whooo!", then you are missing the point.

(Maybe they should multiple all health and damage output by 100, that'd make things more epic because the numbers would be BIGGER!!! even though it would play exactly the same!!!! BIGGER NUMBERS!!!!)

 

[The_Lost_King]

*snip* What you just described is called Just Cause 2 *snip*

Damn ninja'd

I like Skyrim's size just fine thank you very much. I would not like to wand around in JC2 without vehicles.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

Skyrim is large enough to be honest, it's big enough to explore but small enough that there's generally something you can attack if you want. RDR was probably the most empty space I could handle in one game, and helped enhance the atmosphere. Dragon's Dogma was probably the least amount of distance between encounters that I'd want. I'd like large enough to be epic when it wants, but also travellable in a decent amount of time and not devoid of everything.

So in other words, without specifying the size, I've decided I want the best of both worlds. Well what a contribution I've made.