The problem is when games go for size is that they don’t populate the world
The modern Assassin Creed games were a prime example of this - big world, completely barren
He’s right. We don’t need maps bigger than Skyrim, we just need content and good core gameplay loops. Being hugely moddable like Skyrim really helps too.
Mods definitely help. Same reason why I think Fallout 4 is such a big hit.
Exactly. GTA V’s biggest selling point was the worst part for me: giant map. The only way a giant map is good is if it has a ton more fun stuff to do, and even then, I’d honestly rather have a sequel/series instead of throwing everything in one game.
I still prefer gta 4, the city was worn out, lived in, cramped and dense.
Same. I mentioned SA mostly because both are in Los Santos.
I look at the RPGs I enjoyed and the ones I didn’t and I think what I want more than anything in RPGs is for them to be fleshed out and well fitting.
If the world is too big for the story it feels empty and the side quests don’t feel connected. If it’s too small, it feel cluttered. It’s a fine balance.
A lot of quests in games have a specified start and an end, and are unimaginative. It’s 2025. I’m not bringing somebody 20 orc horns for a slightly better sword. Well, I will, but I don’t want to. It just feels lazy.
I’d rather stumble across a thread woven into the world and follow it both ways to it’s logical conclusion, choosing any branches along the way.
Honestly, I think “big” works against developers if they’re trying to make something that just fits. When you look at something like BG3, the world isn’t that huge. But once you start filling out all the blanks, it takes you a long time to get through.
I think the issue is that most game’s core gameplay loops are not endlessly replayable. Lots of single player RPGs fall into the trap of being alright to progress through for maybe 20 hours, but you can quickly become so powerful that the rest of the game falls into busywork. It’s really hard to meaningfully introduce new and interesting gameplay after the 30 hour mark, but without it things become same-y.
I’d argue this is just a fault of poor game design though. There are RPGs with really well iterated gameplay loops, with a wide array of variety, that I’m happy to put 400+ hours in. Games like Baldur’s Gate 3, or Elden Ring, have a lot of freedom and variety in the way you can approach a playthrough, even allowing you to dramatically change things mid-playthrough, while still feeling mechanically satisfying to play. A 10/10 game will feel good to play forever, but a 7/10 might get boring after 15.
Skyrim is huge. I played it last year, going to all locations and doing main and side quests. That takes 100 hours or so.
Now I’m playing Elden Ring with SOTE, doing the same thing. I’m around 180h in and honestly I kind of want to finish by now.
So yeah, I don’t see 600 hours of playtime as a positive goal. Unless they mean expand the map but don’t keep up the content ratio. In that case, why the fuck would that be good? More travelling isn’t worth anything.
Honestly, my limit is about 80 hours, and that’s only if the store and side content is really good. An average story/RPG game should target 20-40 hours IMO.
I do care about finishing games but not completing them. I will play the main story and some of the side quests. I am happy with games being 20-100 hours long.
I will play the main story
hisss!
I don’t need bigger game I just want Shakespearian spectacular quest and events, gripping storylines, and endearing character.
You could have a tiny map full of passion and I would love the game.
Agreed, to an extent.
I do think advancements in AI will eventually give us open world games with infinite procedurally generated engaging quests and NPC interactions. That’ll be cool. In the meantime, I don’t need a team of humans to burn themselves out to produce a large amount of bleh content.
Ehh, I think it’ll be a looong time before machine learning can make meaningful character interactions.
It may be able to make maps faster, slightly better versions of something like No Man’s Sky or Minecraft (both already sporting functionally “infinite” procedural generation), or fill a city like Cyberpunk 2077’s with slightly less mindless wandering NPCs, but I don’t think it’ll help make story-based RPGs bigger in a useful way
The NPCs that stand out in an RPG do so because they typically have a well-crafted, and finite, story arch which is incredibly difficult to do with machine learning and trying to make things more procedurally generated.
I think we’re nearly there as is. There’s already mods that integrate ChatGPT with Skyrim NPC’s. There’s definitely room for improvement, but just these fan projects have achieved some impressive results.
Pair that with the developers’ eagerness to eventually fire most of their writing staff, and they’ve got a lot of incentive to dump money into improving what already exists.
My concern is that this will lead to more abandonware. Star Trek: Bridge Crew had integrated voice commands using some IBM service to process. Once their agreement with IBM ended, they shut down the feature in the game. So what happens when a developer integrates AI as a cornerstone to a game’s storylines, using remote servers to do all of the processing, and then decide to end support for the game?
I do think advancements in AI will eventually give us open world games with infinite procedurally generated engaging quests and NPC interactions.
If you want to believe in fairy tales that is fine, but the problem is when CEOs believe in those fairy tales and use them to fire their artists and developers which is already happening.
…and there will be no market correction back to actually hiring humans and paying them a living wage and treating them humanely once your only option for AAA games is AI slop…
That’s not what they said. There is a difference between using AI in a short sighted effort to cut costs and using it to enhance content created by people. AI is a broad term, and just because a bunch of rich asshole morons are misusing a version of it that does have use does not make it automatically bad. AI, Generative or not, is just a tool.
There have been games that have procedural generation for decades in one form or another to create practically infinite content for players, but they are always limited in other ways. Minecraft can generate an “infinite” world, but what you do in the world is limited to what has been ready built. Hell, Games like Skyrim randomly generate NPCs all the time, but they are shallow and don’t really add much to the game.
Having people build out the mechanics, the spells, the world, and other features with a basic foundation of game play and then having AI implemented to combine those features in a way based on player interaction, or create NPCs that are doing similar things the player can that can make the world feel more alive is likely the next real advancement that games will have.
Sure, you could have people make hundreds, if not thousands, of NPCs, but they are going to be very derivative and you’ll see the usual “copy paste” people that aimlessly wonder around or do one or two things and making that many NPCs that aren’t story driven would be mind numbing work.
Sure, you could have people make hundreds, if not thousands, of NPCs, but they are going to be very derivative and you’ll see the usual “copy paste” people that aimlessly wonder around or do one or two things and making that many NPCs that aren’t story driven would be mind numbing work.
If you think “damn I need to make a bunch of fluff here to fill up space but I find the process excruciatingly boring and unfulfilling” please for the love of all that is good and beautiful please stop making art, it isn’t making anybody’s life better including yours. Make art because you desire to create the thing you are actively making in your hands, and if your heart tells you that it isn’t worth it, that means you aren’t making art that is worthwhile.
Procedural generation is a staple of many gaming genres already, but the difference between procedural generation and AI is that a human can ensure that procedural generation will reliably reproduce interesting content, AI has no such proven ability and you can’t just assume that it will attain that ability at some point. Crucially in all the critically successful games that leverage procedural generation the motivation is not to provide endless content but rather to “shuffle” the deck of a carefully hand selected array of cards to create a specific experience that never repeats quite identically which is a crucial element of mechanically challenging roguelike game design.
Enter The Gungeon wouldn’t be made better by swapping out the careful level design considerations for AI generated slop, it would ruin the precisely crafted balance and gamefeel that has lead to it being considered a modern classic.
Procedural generation is not AI, it is in fact philosophically the opposite of AI in that procedural generation procedurally creates and mixes content instead of machine learning which just learns to bullshit pattern match from material that is 9 times out of 10 stolen from exploited artists. One of those things you can tweak to reliably provide fun, challenging and interesting level design that remixes human created elements in ways that don’t undermine the humane element of them and the other is a bullshitting machine. I am sure the bullshitting machine will get better, but it will never not be a bullshitting machine and the success of procedurally generated design in gaming really has NOTHING to do with what we now define as “AI” whatsoever. Rather, on the contrary procedural generated design has far more in common with the now largely forgotten attempts in AI research to create procedural intelligence by explicitly defining thinking and logic routines that could then be modified and built upon by a logical agent operating in a human defined architecture.
If you want to talk about AI in the context of how people used to define AI before the explosive growth and hype of machine learning basically erased an entire branch of research from the public consciousness, well yes that older style of AI design has actually shown itself to be continually relevant to game design…
What fairy tale? You can run models right now that people have trained to work as DnD DM’s. I guess you’re not keeping up with developments, but it’s already happening.
I agree. They won’t want to hire humans back. Capitalism will not continue to function in an AI driven economy. It’s going to be feudalism or communism. And if we don’t do something about it, I know which one the capitalists will choose.
It is crap, I mean AI can be fun at providing raw grist for the creative mill of a human artist, but it is a grist used to compose a plywood of human art that was violently shredded apart and stamped back into the vague impression of a wholistically shaped entity with a grain and texture that contains nothing of the fluid mark of a living being recording an individual history throughout the artistic process of creation.
Is plywood cool and useful? Sure.
Am I glad plywood was invented? Absolutely!!!
Am I exhausted by techbros holding up plywood next to beautiful wood boards and not only trying to gaslight people into thinking they are identical but also trying to argue that we no longer need trees because any day now we will be able to make magic synthetic woodchips and go straight to plywood? To the point that I want to throw up every time I hear it and also why do we even desire to do that in the context of human art?.
But you’re taking it to the extreme, to the point of dishonesty. You’re so incensed about the overuse and overselling of AI, that you’re now lying about what it can do to diminish it.
To build on your example, you’re so upset about the sales pitch for plywood, that you’re now trying to claim it’s a fairy tale fabrication and shouldn’t & couldn’t be used to build with at all.
Only if the interesting content scales with size.
I am honestly excited to what GTA6 can bring to the content map. Considering how dense some parts of GTA 5 already are.GTA V dense? I found it incredibly bare, especially coming from GTA SA.
Yeah V has the most lifeless map of any GTA since 3. Even NPC detail was missing like umbrellas when it rains.
Didn’t play it so I can’t comment on the SA part.
At least they have loads of little details in obscure placesThat describes pretty much all GTA games though. The difference with V is that it has a much bigger map, so there are a lot more areas with uninteresting details.
Maybe it’s just me but I felt like the space was for the better. Maybe it’s just the fidelity of the game that helps it vs the older gen.
I quite like sandbox games so in those cases I would like it bigger, but at the same time I have no need for some main storyline to be in the game either. I want to be able to live in the world and either challenge comes just from surviving or things you find while exploring.
And I really don’t like sandbox games, so I need a really good story or really compelling gameplay, and neither needs a huge map or tons of hours.
Don’t try to please everyone. A good sandbox game doesn’t need a story, a good story game doesn’t need sandbox elements, and good gameplay can be really short.
Yeah a lot of these games that try and do a bit of everything seem to often fail to entertain anyone.
Honestly, I feel like games have been getting too big. The ends of RPGs always feel like a slog these days.
Maybe it’s because every game thinks it needs a 3 act denouement. Maybe it’s because there’s 100x the games coming out now compared to when I was young and the feeling of wanting to get to the next one is rushing me. Or maybe I’m just plain getting old.
In any case, I’m ok with shorter games.
I actually might like a game that big… If it were actually a game that big. Starfield is a perfect example of pointlessly big but full of nothing. A game with the depth and complexity of some of the best cities in Bethesda games but EVERYWHERE instead of just a few select cities with barren wastes in between like a real world has might be incredible and be the last game I play for the rest of my life.
But that’s not currently possible and all we can do right now is the fake BS where everything is empty but the map is BIG.
I think it really depends on the game.
An MMO or a sandbox game I can sink hours and hours into. I don’t know how many hours I’ve lost to games like Minecraft, Rimworld, etc. Even if those types of games might have “objectives”, I’m more likely to just kind of do my own thing.
And I had something like 500 days logged in with my Final Fantasy XI character. It was my default game and I kept playing because I always felt I had something to do and people to meet.
Narrative focused games? Nope. While I might enjoy playing, the narrative can feel more like a chore in a game that has too much stuff to do, especially if mechanics or areas are locked behind it. I will end up ADHD because I hit a block or feel like the game is forcing me to do the main story when I don’t want to.
I had that happen in Fallout 3 where I was just wondering around, having fun exploring and stumbling on things, and I end up finding someone I didn’t even know I needed to look for connected to my dad and suddenly I felt I was being pulled away from what I found fun.
Might be why I really liked 76 despite the hate it got/gets.
Counterpoint. Mordor II.
World size, density, and traversal have to be balanced.
I tend to play without fast travel, and skyrim meets these three pretty well, using the carts and horse for faster travel.
GTA can be bigger, with cars and planes for long distances.
Large worlds are great, if they are packed w content, open barren landscapes are terrible.
Ghost recon wildlands for me is the sweet spot for a big, interesting world with good traversal options.
I’ve been playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance for the last few weeks and have found the balance to be pretty spot on. At first the world seems massive, and you have to travel around on foot, then eventually you get a horse and can also auto travel between locations. I think they really nailed the balance in that game.
Yeah, that game gets it right. I played it with the map turned off and the sleep walking perk and had the best time of it.
Think the second one will finally make me buy a ps5
Rdr2 is too fucking big lmao
I found it to be so immersive, that the large map size was a bonus to me. I wanted to see it all, and by god I did. I have done every single thing on that game.
I found it even more immersive by camping when it got dark out, cooking to eat, and then going to bed. When I woke in the daylight, I would sit there and have Arthur drink a cup of joe, break down the camp, and continue on with my journey to wherever.
Now I want to play it all over again for a fifth time. >:(
I’ve not enjoyed single player, Arthur is only allowed to be a cunt for story reasons, the moment I’m doing it I get penalised. It’s not bad but it’s… Eh. At least it was only $30 on sale.
Ah, I’m sorry you didn’t get to enjoy it! It is my favorite game of all time, so that’s sad to hear.
Still got my money’s worth, about 10hrs in single player, although a lot of fucking about that certainly wasn’t productive, mostly just been around valentine and the place to the east. A bit more than that online.
I’d be really interested to see an action RPG type game that just embraces the real-life scale of the world and lets you screw about with the rate of time passing like in Kerbal Space Program when you’re walking a long way. You’d have to limit the scale of the story to make it manageable to develop, but I think there’s the potential for something cool in there. Maybe there are only two or three villages in one valley, but they’re all full villages and they’re actually several kilometres apart. Make sure that whatever goals you have are time-gated in some way so that you actually have to weigh up whether you can afford to walk to the other village, because even though you fast-forward it so that it only takes a minute of real-life time to walk there it’s actually most of the day in-game.
It’s not real life scale but I have yet to see another developer attempt anything like the slice of time that we got with Majora’s Mask
Daggerfall was like this, if I’m not mistaken (I got into TES with Morrowind, and I’ve never found the time to play the older games).
The map was about the size of Great Britain, and mostly empty, even if it had about fifteen thousand locations spread about it.
Not quite KSP whole planet scale, but uh, Kenshi.
Its a pretty damn big world, pretty sure it is significantly larger than Skyrim.
You’ve got world speed controls, rpg style mechanics and progression, and you can have multiple members of your party, and you can build your entire own town if you want to.
The game is filled with many roving factions, who all have a sort of reputation dynamic with all other factions, as well as yourself/party.
The game is full of many different story lines, many of them conflict with each other and cannot all be done, there is no such thing as a plot armored, impossible to kill npc, and there are tons of unique, npcs you can meet and have many kinds of interactions with.
If you want to take on a huge faction, you can, but you’re probably going to need to literally raise your own army to do so.
Main downside is the control scheme is fairly awkward / old school… its basically like an mmo from the early 00’s, but single player; click to tell your peeps where to go sort of thing, awkward camera controls by modern standards for an ARPG.
You don’t directly control the combat of your character like in Skyrim, the game basically rng rolls based on you and your opponents stats to determine who uses what kind of attack or block or dodge… but you can set different combat stances, basicsally.
… So its not an ARPG in the sense of Skyrim or AssCreed or Dark Souls… but it is an ARPG in a more loose sense, that its an RPG mechanics style game and world, without rigid turn based combat, which all revolves around action.
But the scale you are looking for is there. If you don’t set the time to fast forward, it can easily take 15 minutes to an hour or more to walk between settlements or major landmarks, depending on what part of the map you’re in.
Nothing is really obvious from the onset of the game in terms if what you are supposed to do, beyond not get murdered, eat, drink and sleep to stay alive.
It’s very much a sandbox approach, but theres tons and tons of stuff to do if you are capable of directing yourself.
Also, lots of mods that add more content, immersion, and deepen or alter gameplay mechanics.
Kenshi 2 is in the works with upgraded engine and graphics… ETA totally unknown.
I tried to play that game and totally failed to grasp the controls. The idea of is is appealing. I might have to give it another go.
I am honestly kind of baffled that no one has made a mod that makes the camera/control scheme into something more up to modern standards, like a mode shift button that toggles you into a modern 3rd person control scheme.
I’d attempt it myself if my wrist wasn’t so fucked up
That sounds fascinating! I’m pretty tolerant of jank in games if they’re doing something engaging, and while I do enjoy the combat systems of the Souls games I am totally okay with a more abstracted system. Hell I love Paradox’s grand strategy games, and this sounds a lot like how battles work in those — the meaningful decision is in which fights you pick and how you prepare for them rather than your actions within the fight itself.
Outward is your game.
Never heard of this one, but I will check it out. Thank you for the recommendation!
Agreed. And while there are some days where my “I just want to walk as far as I can” instinct has me wishing for bigger game worlds, at the same time it can be a bad experience when the game tells you that you have to go somewhere and it’s either a slog to get there or you fast travel and skip the world entirely.
ever played Death Stranding?
I did, and I really liked it. I am excited to see how the sequel holds up, the trailer was so whacky I couldn’t look away.
I put in about 6-8 hours and never came back. Not that it was bad or anything, but I just don’t have that kind of time and it wasn’t particularly compelling. I might try it again some day, but I didn’t really understand the hype. You deliver boxes for likes and try to not fall over while walking forever in a kinda scary sci-fi post apocalypse world. What am I missing? I heard great things about it making the journey less of a slog, but if anything, it made traveling feel like more of a slog. I just had to not fall over. It’s not like I was finding that much cool stuff along the way, just occasionally a slightly useful bridge made by some other player.
It’s definitely not for everyone, but the begining does an absolutely shit job of selling the game’s depth and the more interesting bits about the setting.
As you progress through the game you have vastly different landscape types where “hold forward and don’t tip over” isn’t enough to make it through. River deltas, canyons, mountains with and without snow, swamps, craggy wasteland strewn with boulders, open plains with enemy camps, forests, etc. You also get a decent variety of tools to use to tackle those challenges, and multiple ways to approach each one.
Do I skirt around the edges of the terrorist camp or try to speed through on a motorcycle? Should I try to defeat them to make the area easier for a while? What tools do I need to get through the terrain on the outskirts? How many ladders and climbing ropes? How am I going to carry that all with the cargo and deliver it within the time limit? What do I need to defeat them? Can I? Should I do that while I carry the cargo, risking it? Should I clear it before I take on the delivery? Should I take the time to build a zipline network and then come back later when I can just zipline through? Is there enough bandwidth for buildings that I can afford a zipline network? Should I grind out some other delivery destinations to unlock more bandwidth? Maybe I should repair the highways in the area instead and drive through? How do I get the resources I need for building this stuff? Will I do repeatable deliveries for the materials, scavenge them from lost cargo in dangerous places, fight the terrorists and take theirs? Do I take on extra difficult delivery conditions (time, cargo damage) for higher rewards? How do I deal with those additional requirements?
But again, the game does a piss poor job of demonstration any of this depth off from the begining. It also does a terrible job signposting how and when you unlock more tools. So you can grind shit out the hard way, then do one mission for someone different (that you could have done the whole time) and unlock something that would have made the grind half as difficult. Shit didn’t really “click” for me until more than 20 hours in, which is pretty unforgivable.
For anyone thinking about playing or picking it up again, my advice:
Get the deluxe edition. It has a bunch of seemingly minor QoL additions in terms of new equipment and some added functionality for old ones that make a ton of difference.
Slam through the starting area. Unless you really want to grind, just do the main quest path and ignore the side stuff. You can come back later with gear that will keep it from being such a slog. This would have cut down my “20 hours until it clicked” by a ton.
After you take the boat to the second map, you can take things slower. I reccomend focusing on the main quests until you unlock each new “hub”, then do as much side content as you’re interested in. On the second map the game does a better job of indicating the story sections in advance that you might want to grind out side content to be better prepared for.
Most of all, don’t treat Death Stranding like a normal game that’s meant to entertain and keep you hanging on for the next beat. It’s a slow, contemplative game while you grind out sidequests. I mostly play it to relax. Put a video up on my second monitor, or listen to a podcast, and deliver shit.
I’d also like to throw another good point to the ones you have provided: The game is also about helping other players along on their journey.
Once I got to the good equipment, I laid down as much as I could to help others on their journey. I even went as far as grinding (which I legitimately hate doing) to build the roads, build the zip lines, and fixing other people’s equipment that I had used.
That, to me, was one of the cooler aspects of the game!
I had the exact same experience and don’t know what I’m missing that everyone else loved so much. It was all just so tedious.
I really wanted to like it, but nothing about the game hooked me. The world was cool and graphics were good but the core gameplay loop was tedious. I was hoping for a more interesting or threatening world to explore. The random objects placed by “xXXgamer420xXx” didn’t help my immersion. I wonder if the game would have been as successful if Kojima’s name wasn’t attached to it.
Same. I struggled with RDR2 and gave up on Elden Ring.
Damn I’m literally playing Wildlands now. It’s a really fun game to just drop in if you want to cause some mayhem.
