A short treatise on open worlds: Or, one of the few ways Skyrim fails

[Bad Jim]

And it simply doesn't make sense for a dungeon to be located under a city, that's idiotic except in the most extreme of circumstances, such as Markarth being built inside the surface area or a larger underground Dwemer ruin. No one is dumb enough to go "lets build a city over a giant ruin full of draugr!". That's almost as bad a RPG cliche as NPcs telling you thier entire life story at the slightest provication, instead of just telling you to go away like Skyrim's NPCs do.

Well, firstly, actual dungeons are prisons typically found in castles. Since cities often build up around castles, it is quite normal for real dungeons to exist in real cities.

As for why anyone would build a city on top of a Dwemer ruin, probably because the site was a good place to build a city. Naturally defensible, access to a river/sea, fertile land etc. The Dwemer built a city there because it was a good place, then others built a city on its ruins because it was still a good place for a city. Consider that a lot of real world cities are built in earthquake zones. If real people are living in and building cities in places where eventual destruction is almost inevitable, why wouldn't fictional characters build on Dwemer ruins when the Dwemer will probably never come back?

 

[SajuukKhar]

Well, firstly, actual dungeons are prisons typically found in castles. Since cities often build up around castles, it is quite normal for real dungeons to exist in real cities.

As for why anyone would build a city on top of a Dwemer ruin, probably because the site was a good place to build a city. Naturally defensible, access to a river/sea, fertile land etc. The Dwemer built a city there because it was a good place, then others built a city on its ruins because it was still a good place for a city. Consider that a lot of real world cities are built in earthquake zones. If real people are living in and building cities in places where eventual destruction is almost inevitable, why wouldn't fictional characters build on Dwemer ruins when the Dwemer will probably never come back?

You are aware that there is a difference between a dungeon(a prison under a castle), and dungeons(long giant ruins in RPGs for the player to explore and loot shit) right?

Every major city in Skyrim has the former, and the latter being under a city is nonsense, so that's why they don't do it.

Also, re-read my post, I said Markarth being over a Dwemer ruin is an EXCEPTION to the rule, meaning its ok. Your entire second paragraph is trying to refute a point I never made.

 

[Xdeser2]

I really think the cities in the next TES game should be bigger and more epic - maybe more like Assassins Creed, filled with nameless people and houses and secret passages across and under the streets.

The "cities" in all TES games (apart from Vivec in Morrowind) all kinda suck and are devoid of much to do apart from shops and quest givers - compare this to Baldur's Gate where the big cities had tons of quests, sewers, hidden dungeons, wizards towers, slave compounds etc.

The world of TES is so rich and full, but the cities are so empty and lifeless.

Oh man I so feel you there. When you hear about Solitude in the lore, it sound like this great state, this city that holds huge sway over the economy and politics of the Empire and Skyrim.......And then you get there. It has about 20 buildings and 70 people. Its basically a village :/

 

[Phrozenflame500]

Urg, this one of of my major complaints with Fallout NV and to a lesser extent Skyrim.

Giant Mountain in your way? Try and find the one winding path the dev's hid up it. Atleast Skyrim didn't have lolvisible walls to prevent you from just spamming jump for 10 minutes to get over it.

I've been using the "Blink" power from the Dishonored powers mod in my recent Skyrim playthrough, and it makes transversing mountains and other rough terrain so much easier. I would still prefer a cleaner solution to this problem then just mod shit in though.

Also, I would prefer bigger cities in the next TES. Maybe during the next timeskip have civilization actually advance for once.

 

[skywolfblue]

I've been playing several open-world games recently, and had some thoughts on the topic I figured I might as well share.

For me, at least, one of the key parts of an open world is making sure that travel, in and of itself, is an enjoyable experience. In a large open world game you are going to spend significant amounts of time moving from A to B. You can, of course, fast travel everywhere, but then you're missing out on sort of the point of an open world in the first place.

That is one of the few areas in which Skyrim fails. It is, in every other respect pretty much, an excellent game, and one that I definitely enjoy. BUT, when it comes to making travel an enjoyable experience, Skyrim falls somewhat flat. Sure, it is a gorgeous set of vistas to move through, and sure, random encounters with crazy monsters and stuff on the roads do serve to break up the monotony, but other than that travel itself becomes somewhat dull. Other open world games have made travel incredibly fun. Some examples: Batman: Arkham City, Just Cause 2, pretty much every Assassin's Creed game. In fact, Just Cause 2 has what I would consider the perfect travel system: A lot of the time a player (maybe it's just me, maybe not) will look at a place across the map that they need to get to, consider using fast travel to get there, and then decide not to do so. That, in my opinion, is an ideal way to set up getting around your open world: have a fast travel system, but make normal travel so fun that player end up not wanting to use your fast travel.

Another major component would be the ping-pong effect. NPC's send you to the other side of the world and back for their bear hides, and then go "now go all the way to the other side of the world AGAIN"... The first time it's a fun journey, with much senic viewing to be had, the second time it's getting familiar, the 3rd-2billionth time it just becomes tedious and players just skip it. It's better when there is reason and flow to the journey, and not a back and forth eternally boring series of fetch quests. Red Dead Redemption, Assassin's Creed and even World of Warcraft have much better quest organization so you're not going all over the place all the time.

Skyrims "random events" are pretty shallow too. Red Dead Redemption did better at having random events that involved using your horse, like picking up people and taking them back to the nearest town, or chasing down the person who stole their wagon, instead of having to get off the horse and fight more dudes. Part of that is due to skyrim's very limited abilities when it comes to horseback combat.

 

[SajuukKhar]

Another major component would be the ping-pong effect. NPC's send you to the other side of the world and back for their bear hides, and then go "now go all the way to the other side of the world AGAIN".

Its great that Skyrim largely eliminated this by having all radiant quest objectives be in the same hold that the quest was assigned. As well as making the majority of normal side-quests follow the same principle.

The exception being guild quests, both normal and radiant, due to guild's province spanning influence.

 

[Kged]

I couldn't disagree with the OP more if I tried. I spent literally weeks in Skyrim avoiding the main quest or even the major sidequests - I'd just walk the land, meet people, get into adventures. Maybe one's playing style is a factor here (I belong to the take-it-far-too-seriously school of deep role-playing), but for my character it was perfect. I was very conflicted about the civil war, and for the considerable amount of time it took to sort my head out on that one I just drifted. Helping the helpless, smiting the wicked, and generally being an active archmage who lived up to his duties. If I'd fast-travelled around, I wouldn't have got a fraction of what I did from the game. And I saw little if any monotony on my travels, quite the reverse in fact - monotony sets in when you hit the towns, not in the wild. (Oh, you work for Belethor, at the general goods store? Do you really? Because I've only seen you there 91,263 fucking times.) There are countless moments on those journeys that I wouldn't trade for anything.

 

[The Funslinger]

I really think the cities in the next TES game should be bigger and more epic - maybe more like Assassins Creed, filled with nameless people and houses and secret passages across and under the streets.

The "cities" in all TES games (apart from Vivec in Morrowind) all kinda suck and are devoid of much to do apart from shops and quest givers - compare this to Baldur's Gate where the big cities had tons of quests, sewers, hidden dungeons, wizards towers, slave compounds etc.

The world of TES is so rich and full, but the cities are so empty and lifeless.

Oh man I so feel you there. When you hear about Solitude in the lore, it sound like this great state, this city that holds huge sway over the economy and politics of the Empire and Skyrim.......And then you get there. It has about 20 buildings and 70 people. Its basically a village :/

Yeah, but unfortunately it's not a new problem for Elderscrolls. Remember in Oblivion when you and Martin marched on the Great Oblivion Gate? During loads of your quests, you'd heard of these troops amassing for defence. Then you get there, and it's you, Martin and about six guys.

What an army. ¬_¬

In Kvatch, a half dozen guys made sense, because they were like some scattered remnant, driven back by the hordes. Comparing the grand "army" to that kind of soured that earlier quest in general, and makes you wonder why they had any trouble.

 

[BathorysGraveland2]

One of the biggest problems for open world games is having an actual sense of scale. The Elder Scrolls is the obvious example, which other users here have stated quite well. It takes only a short time to actually move from one side of the map to the other - this is an entire country we're crossing. Supposedly great cities are really just glorified villages with some fortifications - about the only city in the main Elder Scrolls series that feels scaled so far is the Imperial City in Oblivion, and even that can do with some enhancing mods. You also have the immersion-breaking things such as entire armies of bandits just a minutes walk away from Whiterun, and wolves and other animals staying around well-traveled roads. These things, and others, really harm any kind of immersion or sense of belief in the world due to how terribly scaled it feels. This is something that has me slightly worried about Witcher 3. How they're going to handle the open-world, I do not know.

Something I think can improve open-world settings is not being too ambitious with it. Maybe the next Elder Scrolls can be set around one single, big and detailed city and its surrounding region. That way the scale will make the world feel bigger, it can allow it to be more detailed and allow for more immersive things, such as bandit groups and dangerous animals far off into the deep wilderness and etc.

 

[Something Amyss]

But not fast-traveling gave you dragons and random camps to find. I found tons of stuff not fast-traveling places. It would be unrealistic to fill every inch with something to loot and something exciting.

Yes, we wouldn't want to sacrifice realism in a game with dragons, undead and elves.

 

[Something Amyss]

Having fantastical elements in your game/story/film/whatever does not mean you can be excused making anything and everything nonsensical. The whole dragon thing, battling the Dovahkiin, all that; those things are evocative, exciting, and add to the setting.

Keep in mind you are defending a post that says it would be unrealistic to add exciting things. I think you're fighting a losing battle on this one.

 

[llafnwod]

I think Morrowind had a pretty good answer to this. Like Oblivion and Skyrim, it had fast travel, but it was integrated into the game in the form of travel that you had to pay for or otherwise had some sort of gameplay cost. Getting around efficiently was a matter of learning the routes of silt striders, ships, mage teleports, et al. over the course of playing the game, so fast travel was something that pulled you into the experience rather than out of it.

 

[Jynthor]

Skyrim fails in a lot more ways than just a few but that's not what the thread is about so, whatever.
There already is quite a bit to explore when just travelling, the problem is that after a while you've seen all of it. So really, it just needs more variety in random encounters and stuff like that. Like, how many times have you killed that damn Old Orc guy?

Also as an alternative to fast travel you should have... faster travel, as in horses which are actually faster than humans, more carriages(Definitely one of my favourite mods) and other similar transports.

 

[JasonBurnout16]

In a large open world game you are going to spend significant amounts of time moving from A to B. You can, of course, fast travel everywhere, but then you're missing out on sort of the point of an open world in the first place.

That is one of the few areas in which Skyrim fails. It is, in every other respect pretty much, an excellent game, and one that I definitely enjoy. BUT, when it comes to making travel an enjoyable experience, Skyrim falls somewhat flat. Sure, it is a gorgeous set of vistas to move through, and sure, random encounters with crazy monsters and stuff on the roads do serve to break up the monotony, but other than that travel itself becomes somewhat dull. Other open world games have made travel incredibly fun. Some examples: Batman: Arkham City, Just Cause 2, pretty much every Assassin's Creed game. In fact, Just Cause 2 has what I would consider the perfect travel system: A lot of the time a player (maybe it's just me, maybe not) will look at a place across the map that they need to get to, consider using fast travel to get there, and then decide not to do so. That, in my opinion, is an ideal way to set up getting around your open world: have a fast travel system, but make normal travel so fun that player end up not wanting to use your fast travel.

I would also argue that, most people, when told to head from A to B will head in a straight line in that direction. The games you mentioned all allow that - in Just Cause 2, your main way to travel is also the quickest way even!

However in Skyrim, the map is a bit of a jumble and so people end up grinding against mountains or stuck in ravines when really they just want to get to their objective. And everyone's ended up grinding against a mountain at one point! It's for this reason and another that I would suggest people would want to fast travel more in Skyrim; that reason being that the quests are extremely spread out, with the player having to travel for long times across the map, to hear a small snippet of speech or act of violence, before having to head all the way back to the quest giver. That's just my point of view though.

 

[SajuukKhar]

Also as an alternative to fast travel you should have... faster travel, as in horses which are actually faster than humans, more carriages(Definitely one of my favourite mods) and other similar transports.

Horses are faster then humans.

The speeds for movement, as defined by the CK, are
-Player
--Walking: 80 or 3.8 feet/second
--Running: 370 or 17.3 feet/second
--Sprinting: 500 or 23.4 feet/second

-Horses
--Walking: 125, or 5.9 feet/second
--Running: 450, or 21.1 feet/second
--Sprinting: 600, or 28.1 feet/second.

Meaning horses are faster then the player in all forms of movement.

 

[bug_of_war]

The world of TES is so rich and full, but the cities are so empty and lifeless.

Empty? Sure, there are far too few buildings and what not in all the major cities of Skyrim for it to even begin to be considered a major city (Same can be said for Oblivion), but lifeless? Can't say I'd agree with you there. Check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppIgwF1M9po&feature=youtu.be&t=40s

In it, an Argonian NPC steals some random NPC's crap, then the guards run the Argonian down and begin fighting it till the Argonian is dead and they go about their lives. It's not scripted, it's not tied to a quest line, it's just the NPCs doing what they do. Every NPC in Oblivion go about their lives purely independent from what the player character does.

Then look at Whiterun in Skyrim, Ysolda knows the Khajit traders, the Battle-Borns and Gray-Manes hate each other, and have no interactions, yet children from both families are intimate with one and other and go about it in secrecy, by killing someone in the city and getting caught their family will react negatively towards you for the rest of the game (For example, killing the Bosmer whom sells food in the Whiterun market will cause his brother, owner of the Drunken Huntsman, to call you a piece of shit every time you come into his house). Elven, Khajit and Argonian characters will acknowledge that you are of their people, Werewolves will take note of other Werewolves, random thieves will be encountered in Riften, the Vampire lady in Morthal will notice if you are a Vampire and will comment on how you should leave due to her coven already claiming the town as their own.

The Elder Scrolls series may lack in physical scale, but there is a ton of life and individuality to be found in the game.

 

[Jynthor]

Also as an alternative to fast travel you should have... faster travel, as in horses which are actually faster than humans, more carriages(Definitely one of my favourite mods) and other similar transports.

Horses are faster then humans.

The speeds for movement, as defined by the CK, are
-Player
--Walking: 80 or 3.8 feet/second
--Running: 370 or 17.3 feet/second
--Sprinting: 500 or 23.4 feet/second

-Horses
--Walking: 125, or 5.9 feet/second
--Running: 450, or 21.1 feet/second
--Sprinting: 600, or 28.1 feet/second.

Meaning horses are
-36% faster at walking
-20% faster at running
-17% faster at sprinting
then the player

So, basically just as fast as humans.
Seriously though, I think they should be faster to make horses more viable(non retarded AI would also be nice)

 

[SajuukKhar]

So, basically just as fast as humans.
Seriously though, I think they should be faster to make horses more viable(non retarded AI would also be nice)

how does 17-30% faster = just the same?

Sorry, but your not making any sense.

 

[Jynthor]

So, basically just as fast as humans.
Seriously though, I think they should be faster to make horses more viable(non retarded AI would also be nice)

how does 17-30% faster = just the same?

Sorry, but your not making any sense.

Well, we can just rule out walking since we're talking about getting to some place fast, then we only have up to 20% increases in speed, and unless you're playing an online game in which balance is very important, 20% isn't anything.
Also, I was kind of joking.

 

[SajuukKhar]

Well, we can just rule out walking since we're talking about getting to some place fast, then we only have up to 20% increases in speed, and unless you're playing an online game in which balance is very important, 20% isn't anything.
Also, I was kind of joking.

Balance is important in singleplayer games also....

And yeah, a 20% increase is a big deal, it takes those 20 minute jogs across Skyrim downs to 16, and over time, that adds up to hours upon hours of time saved. If you rode a horse everywhere while playing Skyrim for 200-300 hours, you would have saved 40-60 hours in traveling time, then had you just ran.

Also, making horses run faster would make them outrun the game's ability to load the next cell in time. same reason why you cant fly dragons across the whole map.