when is a game world too big?

[LWS666]

so, a while ago i played GTA IV and thought "where's the variety gone?", you know, the stuff that made GTA San Andreas so good?

well, then i heard about Just Cause 2 and it's huge game map with cities, mountains, jungles, deserts, blimps etc and though that this is the greatest game ever.

and it is, but it's getting boring when it's just somehting like 5KM i need to go.

so i was wondering, how big a game map do you think is the cross-over line between greatest map ever and dull?

 

[pyrosaw]

when it's comes to get around a big world.This is why people loved spider man 2.large area, and very fun to get around.

 

[rayskyrift]

Just Cause 2 is great, but yeah the map is a bit too big. I just basically use it to act like a retarded grappling Batman, and speed off into the wilderness whenever I need to hide from angry pseudo-Asians. So if you use the map like I do, it's just the right size. Huge game of hide and seek. I am sure with most people though the map will be too big.

Manhattan itself I think is a great size for an open world game, so if anything, Spider-Man shows us how to do it best, space wise that is.

 

[adderseal]

When the game is called Daggerfall.
It's fun enough but I would take Morrowind over it every single time.

 

[D_987]

A game map should meet the game-plays needs and not the other way around. A good example would be Farcry 2 - the map in that game was very large, yet due to the poor driving mechanics, endless enemy re-spawn and similar looking areas the game played poorly. Contrasted to large hack-and-slash RPG Sacred 2, in which each area is covered with different enemies, a different art style and a wide variety of cities.

Personally I would never consider a game to be "great" just because it has a large game-world, in fact I found a game like Grand Theft Auto IV to be incredibly boring, particularly due to the overly large world and how similar everything appeared. Contrast that with what we've currently seen with Red Dead Redemption and it seems Rockstar have learnt from that mistake.

 

[Songbird-O]

A big game map is only good if there are lots of things to see, a method for getting around fast (doesn't need to be always available), and great atmosphere.

Without those, trekking across maps is boring.

I always point to Dragon Quest VIII's overworld when talking about this. It was absolutely stunning, even with random battles. The scenery was wonderful and varied, and the music was epic. Heck, sometimes I would just walk around and try to find the best views. The map changed as time went by, and there were various ways of getting around. If you were on a boat, the map felt different. If you were riding your Great Sabrecat, it felt different.

When you were flying on the wings of a godbird and seeing everything from a bird's eye view, it was absolutely magical.

That's how a map should be. It shouldn't just be tedious space between plotpoints. There is no set amount of space. Only bad ideas and laziness.

 

[Legion]

so, a while ago i played GTA IV and thought "where's the variety gone?", you know, the stuff that made GTA San Andreas so good?

Wait.. what?

GTA 4 was probably half the size of San Andreas and a large proportion of San Andreas was empty desert. Surely San Andreas should be the one that is considered too big in this comparison.

 

[JoshGod]

depends on how you get around and what there is to do

 

[thethingthatlurks]

When transversing it is a chore, when there is nothing to see or do for miles, and even the largest world is boring when there is no variety.
GTA: SA and Morrowind have the best worlds I have seen so far, and GTAIV has one of the worst.

 

[KimberlyGoreHound]

so, a while ago i played GTA IV and thought "where's the variety gone?", you know, the stuff that made GTA San Andreas so good?

Wait.. what?

GTA 4 was probably half the size of San Andreas and a large proportion of San Andreas was empty desert. Surely San Andreas should be the one that is considered too big in this comparison.

Mmhm. Especially the missions that send you to the buttfuck nowhere area in the southwest. South of Mt. Chiliad (which was at least fun to ride on), or whatever it was. Took five or ten minutes to get to the place, then another ten to get back. Bleh.

Although after getting my pilot's license and getting all golds in flight school, it became a lot less of a chore to travel, flying instead of driving. Doesn't redeem it though, because flight school was so far into the game.

 

[Veleste]

Oblivion and GTA IV were roughly the same size game world wise however I found GTA's hugeness annoying and Oblivions one engaging. I think size doesn't become an issue if you can skip it should you choose (Oblivion's fast travel and GTA's taxi) and that there's lots of interesting stuff to do in between the main bits.

I enjoyed riding through the picturesque countryside in Oblivion but found it tedious and annoying in GTA cause I was playing dodgems with the cars all the time and it was largely non-interactable grey walls so graphics is important too.

 

[Blindswordmaster]

Just Cause 2. That game needed quick travel. You transport me over half the map away for a mission and them don't transport me back? Fuckers!

 

[Banana Phone Man]

I'm going to say Far Cry 2. By no way is it the biggest and I have played a lot bigger but because of the endless amount of raider camps that kept on respawning it seemed to drag out the game and it felt pointless. I did do the main quest and got past the first area onlt to find it had another one with the same annoying camps. I gave up.

It's not too much size that makes a game boring, it's whether a game has enough stuff with enough variation to occupy it.

 

[SwitchUK]

Case in point: Just cause 2.

 

[SnootyEnglishman]

A game map is too big when there's nothing special and fun to do in it. That's why San Andreas was good sure it had 3 big cities to travel about in but each one had something fun to offer within it's borders.

 

[tahrey]

Whenever I see things like this I just roll my eyes. I come from an age where we had entire planets (or at least whole continents / huge archipelagos) as our playfields. Where has THAT kind of epic gameworld gone?

(Mercenary, Damocles, Midwinter 1 & 2, Civilisation, Railroad Tycoon, Rescue on Fractalus, F19 Stealth Fighter, Sim Earth and just so many others. I think Terra Nova and Frontier might also count? Plus Cybercon III ... never played it personally and it's all indoors, but from what I've seen, that must have been one HUGE building.)

Yet at the same time I find the cities in most of the GTA games to actually be a bit too big and complicated. It's very easy to get lost - much like in a real city, in fact. But when it's supposed to be a not-entirely-realistic game, it does kill the flow a bit when you're told to "go to so-and-so area" for a mission, and you don't even know where you are or where that place is, let alone how to get between the two... and no game I've seen yet has a built in satnav. Closest it's come to that is either (flowbreakingly) switching to the map and hunting around, or the floaty yellow arrow in the old 2D versions.

 

[Tommy Callow]

Test Drive: Unlimited has a REALLLYYY good map. the only problem that i has is that if you are going 1 mile per hour, it will literally take you an hour to get one mle in that game. For instance, i was doing a race that was 121 miles long, took me 50 minutes. and the end of it i was like "and i won 200,000 for this?"