Building a Successful "Open" Game World 104
M3rk sends an excerpt from an opinion piece on Gametopius discussing what it takes for an open game world to be successful. Interesting stories and characters are important, but they must be balanced by varied and entertaining gameplay. The lack of either will be a limiting factor in how many people return to play once the primary plot is completed. Quoting:
"A game like GTA IV takes itself and its fiction very seriously. It spends a lot of time, effort, and gameplay resources convincing you that the world you are traveling through is the same world that the story and cutscenes take place in. It may not be a game that allows you to own or control property to the degree seen in Burnout Paradise or Saints Row II, but it wants its world to be cohesive, not divided. ... While GTA IV's game systems almost serve its plot, Saints Row II and Burnout Paradise live for their game mechanics. Sure, these worlds are fun to look at and explore, but any exploration and discovery that the player enjoys merely drives them to these games' raison d'être: fun systems to play with."
Re:eat my shorts slashdot !! (Score:3, Informative)
I have to agree really, I don't think GTA4 lived up to the hype in all honesty. It was a good game, but only as good as the majority of other games out there but personally I felt, not as good as Saints Row 2.
Saints Row 2's more open world style, it's coop mode and so on made for such a better game. The minigames were just more funny too- seriously, the escort one, driving round at high speed avoiding TV crews and the IRS whilst your mate is in the back performing the "Brown Twister" or whatever on an old granny, hours of amusement! It just had so many semi-hidden elements too from streaking to the suicide guy to the zombie killing section.
But Saints Row 2 wasn't unique in beating GTA4 as an open world game I felt, Mercenairies 2 was rather fantastic, from getting your first chopper through to continuing to play the game after you'd completed it and getting to actually calling nuclear strikes that would whipe out half a city.
I think coop matters as much as anything for these types of games though, Crackdown clearly wasn't as good as GTA4 single player but slap coop mode on and you could have much more fun. Even then coop isn't the be all and end all though because as you say, Fable 2 was more fun, even though it's coop mode was pretty crap. IIRC GTA4 actually has a coop mode but it's just a crappy sub-game.
Whilst we have our Resident Evils, our Rainbow Sixs, our Gears of Wars and that that do have coop modes, there's nothing I look forward to more on release calendars than open world games with good coop modes. One in particular I'm holding out my hopes for is Just Cause 2, I quite enjoyed the first one and if the next one will have coop then it should make for fun times.
Re:Open worlds are still limited by plots though.. (Score:5, Informative)
You are correct. I was actually disappointed that in Fallout 3 the game stopped after completing the main quest, but also that most side quests are closely related to the main quest. In the previous Bethesda games you could actually ignore the whole main quest and still play a round with a world where the main quest didn't bother. Ignoring the main quest in fallout 3 could lead to an instant jump in the main quest progress, which is actually very annoying.
Bethesda's Daggerfall featured a very open world. Of course the quests eventually became nothing but grind. But you could do pretty much whatever you wanted. You could go into the trading business, busing and selling houses. Or join one of the various guilds/cults.
Re:Burnout Paradise "fun to explore"?! (Score:3, Informative)
- "Retry previous race" would be nice
It's not intuitively placed, but it does exist. It's in the in-game menu (right on the d-pad by default on X360 controllers IIRC).
Re:procedurally generated history (Score:1, Informative)
Ever played Dwarf Fortress?
Re:procedurally generated history (Score:1, Informative)
I was going to post that. Dwarf Fortress does exactly what S3D describes.
Re:Open worlds are still limited by plots though.. (Score:3, Informative)
The Elder Scrolls games (also Bethesda's) are more open then Fallout 3 in that sense -- you can ignore the main quest easier, and even when you complete it, the game continues on.
By the way, Fallout 3's third mini-expansion will change the ending and allow you to continue playing once you complete the main quest. Why they didn't think to do that right away confuses me, since they could have just looked to their Elder Scrolls games from the get-go.
Re:Open worlds are still limited by plots though.. (Score:2, Informative)
Depending on the item, you could re-acquire it. If it was the Wraithguard, there was an alternate (pretty cool and non-cheating, actually) way to get it, and it went on your other hand. People that went a little psycho and decided to off Vivec himself ended up having to go this route.
Where is the godfather of open games: Ultima! (Score:2, Informative)
Especially Ultima VI, but also Ultima VII had a vast world that can be explored freely. You can even harvest crops and bake bread if you like or drift across the sea in a raft...
I still fondly remember the exploration of Britannia and it took me at least a month to realize there was a storyline I could follow (I only had about 1 year of english at school at that time and game-information was heavily text-driven...)
Re:Open worlds are still limited by plots though.. (Score:3, Informative)
I would also like to remind of Arcanum. True, there you couldn't play past the ending, but you could also ignore the main quest, and roam at will. It is also the only game I know which had map of the entire world (a large continent) available for exploration from the very beginning, and you could actually go to any point of it and find what was there (i.e. if there's a city or a camp that you do not know about, you could still stumble into it by walking.
How is it different from TES and Fallout? In one simple way: the map of the world was true to scale. You could truly walk the entire continent from end to end, but that would require weeks of in-game time and hours of your time, watching your character journey through the land, and an occasional random encounter with some hostiles.
Of course, the whole thing was procedurally generated, outside from special locations such as cities, dungeons etc, so there wasn't much point in travelling around like that... but the very fact that you could do it somehow improved immersion.
On a side note, it's also the only CRPG I know of where you could kill every single living creature you meet, and still finish the plot - none of that silly unkillable NPCs a la Oblivion (and so many others), or "the thread of fate is severed - maybe you'd like to load the last save?" of Morrowind.
Re:A website for game development? (Score:3, Informative)
I know. Actually, GtkRadiant is "almost already there" in Debian:
http://mentors.debian.net/cgi-bin/sponsor-pkglist?action=details;package=gtkradiant
The problem is that nobody seems to care about "sponsoring" it. Last year I somehow managed to build it from SVN (there is a crapload of different revisions of the source, each of them broken in a very unique, specific and interesting way) on one machine, but since I've switched to a newer hardware and did a fresh install of Debian Lenny, I was unable to accomplish this feat again. And one would wonder why is GtkRadiant getting less and less popular.
Re:Idee fixe of first person (Score:3, Informative)
In Monkey Island 1, you could 'die' by staying underwater for 10 minutes. Guybrush did say he could hold his breath for ten minutes, and it just shows he was exactly right. Also, when you actually get to Monkey Island, there is a joke about death in Sierra's adventure games on the cliff. It crumbles under Guybrush, and the Sierra save/load/quit dialogue comes up. He soon bounces back up thanks to a rubber tree. I forget if you could die in the second game or not, but in the third, it was a vital part of a puzzle. Alright, so that's actually a fake death, but the characters nearby talk at length about how they didn't think you could die in a Lucasarts adventure game.