Egregoros

@smugumin I don't disagree, though most of the me-too open world games (AS DEMANDED BY THE SHAREHOLDERS) use software to slop together everything on the map, and nothing feels hewn by the hand of man. Nothing is memorable, only vaguely familiar on repeated playthroughs. Check out the open world complaints about Boringlands 4. It's five hundred square miles of NOTHING, dotted with pickups and fast travel points so you never need to ride Scooty-Puff Jr after unlocking them.
Horrible as a lot of DooM's levels are, I can still play through some of them in my mind.

@smugumin
It's less the world design framework itself and more:
1. Game devs and/or suits adding open worlds to game franchises not known for open world that didn't need it or had design philosophies incompatible with open world frameworks. See MP4 as a recent example.
2. Game devs doing open world badly and not adding enough intractability and interesting locations. Again, MP4 is a good example of this as well.
3. Gamers experiencing an over saturation of open world since the early 2010's at the expense of decent games with well-designed linear or interconnected levels.

@smugumin GAME: start, play through 100% of the intended experiences of the game, reach satisfying end
GAME (procedurally generated): same but you randomly experience 1/60th of the intended experience and you're aware you're missing a lot, so you keep playing even though most of your actual experience is very similar from run to run. No end to the game; you just stop one day.

The latter gets hate because it CAN BE a cynical emulsifier, like water-filled or slime-filled beef. You can take a small game and spread it out the events spatially (open world) or temporally (procedural generation) and make it feel like much more of a game even though there is no additional game design work put into it, and even though the gameplay is worse off from being much more repetitive.

There are plenty of good games where the feature is sincerely used, but anything that gets popular then becomes a gold rush and then attracts gold-rushers who do the "GAME (open world)" deliberately. Anyway, the feature can be overused to the point that people want carefully designed games again.

Another case like this is level design in FPS games, where the art direction got so good and the environments so immersive you no longer felt the malice of the level designer and the beautiful environments may as well have been blank corridors for how much they mattered to the game.

@DEERBLOOD @smugumin TotK almost got deeper than an inch when you beat all the dungeons which triggers the event at the castle where you fight Phantom Ganon. It felt like the plot was actually progressing. You couldn't have had that scene where your friends rescue you last minute because obviously you had to meet them first. Normally in a Zelda game, this plot development would stay for the rest of the game, but in TotK nothing happens and everything returns to the baseline. The sage characters all return to their respective villages because they had a quest to give you, and you can't be locked out of doing those quests!

Worst part is it's not like you even NEED to do this plot sequence to access the "5th sage" quest where you meet the furrybait lady. Doing this sequence simply gives you some text that makes you aware of said quest and tells you where to go to initiate it.

But in the case of my friend, he found that quest out of order. So the payoff for beating all the dungeons later was... being told about a quest that he already did. So I guess you gotta go fight Ganon now. Worst storytelling ever and retards eat this shit up because that one flashback with Zelda had epic music and made me cryyy omgg

@suquili i was actually looking for that pic because its so incredibly wrong. the pic of the left has challenges of varying difficulties and you decide what to tackle, from goblin nest to legendary dragon. the complexity increases generally with distance from spawn and other things, like if you're gonna go in desert you might want stuff for that, same with fierce lava mountain or frozen biome. and if you ever get bored or the challenge is too great you go do something else. or if its too little you can challenge yourself. theres nothing cucking you. the pic on the right has a fixed difficulty and challenges that a redditor decided you were going to do the T like his little puppet, no thinking outside the box, with tons of backtracking and if the challenge is too hard or too dull you're shit out of luck. "go to the cavern of buttfire link, grab the flame of glombom to walk back to the sage in the temple of tralala" it makes me want ot kms

@smugumin There’s multitudes of complaints about open worlds, but I think the better way to look at it is what constitutes a good open world. Which is a problem, seeing as there is no such thing as a “universally good” open world.

In my eyes though, open worlds are best when full of jank but also love. This metric is a mess seeing as every single game studio wants to obliterate any jank and make money over passion projects. So instead of lovingly crafted projects made with a specific goal, we get either “genre but what if open world” or crime sandbox based off GTA. Means there’s a lot more trash than I’d like.

A notable example of that poor decision making is Metroid Prime 4, because the idiots who pushed the open world forgot something. Metroid is open world. The entire genre is predicated on backtracking and exploring through a vast world. By adding an area that is artificially called the open world area, it just fucked up the entire flow of what was already an open game. As for the other issue, see any Ubisoft game, or more specifically Watch Dogs.

@smugumin @suquili >the pic of the left has challenges of varying difficulties and you decide what to tackle

This part is actually a problem, mainly because so many developers are adverse to any form of real challenge. Instead of handling things by making later game shit beat your ass if not well prepared, most games just use a cheap level system that doesn't have synergy well with the open world. This leads to either nothing being able to be done in a high level area, or the areas scaling directly to you.

This also leads to situations that, while it is the player's fault, many end up blaming the devs for. Getting high level or rarity shit early from a high level zone, dipping out, then cheesing everything. If equipment is one of the only metrics of power, then this can get especially bad (which is a common complaint for BoTW and ToTK).

Honestly the solution to these problems is very simple, but it's one that scares developers and turns away quite a few players. Just make everyone have equally high lethality. Make the areas distinct and interesting while making them all dangerous no matter what you've got. Let the player find solutions to problems rather than making the solution "just grind." Then again, that's me talking from the angle of a guy who likes when guns function as guns even in an RPG. I want bullets to be almost always lethal, whether hitting me or an enemy.

@smugumin In BotW's case that's not how it is at all. The difficulty is largely artificial aka enemies deal more damage. Aside from that it's trivial stuff like "it's too cold, make a warmth potion". The graphic isn't talking about difficulty, it's talking about gameplay and narrative complexity, which only coincide with difficulty.

In BotW and TotK, every area is designed with the assumption that it's the first one you go to. The dungeon quests are all written according to the same template ("Link! The divine beast is messing up our home! You have to help us!"), and the dungeons themselves follow the same flow of "solve 4 disjointed and easily-cheesable puzzles to access the boss".

To make this design possible, the player is given all of the items they need at the start. So the set of possible gameplay scenarios is always constant. There's nothing unique gameplay-wise about the divine beasts beyond set dressing (and even that's limited). Compare this to old Zelda where you started off with only a sword/shield and every dungeon introduced a new ability which added a new dimension to gameplay. Similarly, since the next area you reach was usually thanks to the item you just obtained, the devs could write those areas as a continuation of an existing plot, whereas in BotW/TotK the "next area" is a deja-vu repeat of a story you already went through. That's why Link as a character never develops in these games. He can't. Worst part is you can fight Ganon at any time, so all those dungeons are just glorified sidequests. The overall plot does not progress in any meaningful way because even Hyrule Castle is written as though you skipped all the dungeons. In BotW/TotK's case, the graphic never even REACHES the yellow portion.

You can call it on-rails Reddit design, but that doesn't really make sense. An open-world game has the same amount of content, you just decide what order to do it in. However, that means the game will have a bland story and flat gameplay progression because the devs can't write a coherent introduction/rising action/climax story. For that you need locks and keys, which are not bad things in games. Case in point, the most iconic moment in BotW is obtaining the paraglider so you can jump off the plateau and explore Hyrule. Literally obtaining an item to unlock new areas.

@WandererUber @smugumin @madcuzbad Oh yeah, that's another big thing. That "self made adventure" notion doesn't resonate with me at all in BotW/TotK. But I had a Minecraft phase about a year ago and was like "holy shit this is so fun me and my buddy got our own little kingdom here and we're mapping it out and naming all the areas and writing down lore in books"

Minecraft isn't trying to tell a story. There's no opening dialogue and the "ending" is less of an ending and more something you can do. It's not like the Ender Dragon is the culmination of everything you can do in Minecraft. There's no cinematic cutscenes or a mystery about your past to uncover. None of that.

The epic adventure and the sandbox counteract each other badly.