Bertylicious said:
I would argue that "too much" content isn't the issue, it is "too much of the same" content that is the problem.
Kingdoms of Amalur, great example btw, is a tremendous game and some of the questlines, the warrior guild questline for instance, have both clever little set pieces, tracking the merchant caravans and gathering clues, as well as story arcs that relate to the wider world. Those are fine and I would say you can never have enough of quality stuff like that.
KoA also has a metric fuckton of "deliver a letter to A", which is purely there to introduce the player to new areas and should be handled by the 'quality' content, and the good old "kill 10 wolves and brang the pelts" bollocks.
Now I would argue that GTA 5 does not do this. It has the whole "strangers and freaks" side-quest system which I would regard as quality and distinct content and not dross.
Skyrim is... I dunno, I think I'm going to have to be a tad hippoctritical here and say that I really enjoyed all the bloat. The fact I could roll up almost anywhere and be given loads of stuff to do was something I found really positive when I started playing. I guess now it is a little bit like porn you've seen loads of times before? You know what's happening next so you just put it on fast forward.
Pretty much this, although I disagree about Skyrim. I found Skyrim and Fallout 3 completely shit.
Fallout 3 in particular is my go-to example of how to make shit games, there's lots of SPACE, but not a lot of actual content, Bethesda don't actually into game design with a basic idea of what the fuck they want to actually do, and it shows, because Fallout 3 could easily been made by any other company in one year, let alone the five that Bethsoft took.
They made the game take place on the east cost, so why take ALL the major factions from previous Fallout games? Because Bethesda can't write (nor can they code, model or animate). That's why.
The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting, so why are weapons, ammo and food so common? Bethesda can't balance gameplay (rarer ammo could have easily been fixed by having it do more damage).
Towns should actually be poor, and be under threat from raiders. I can understand Megaton being safe for example, but Girdershade should have been taken over already from the sheer amount of raiders that appear in Fallout 3. Bethesda can't write.
Little Lamplight, it does not fit in, and why did Bethesda decide the problem with the ghost girl in Fallout 2 was that it fit in with the setting too much? Bethesda can't write (NEWS FLASH! The problem with talking Deathclaws WASN'T that it wasn't stupid enough).
The point is, it all has the same problem, Bethesda made a massive space for content, but they didn't make much content for it. There's items that don't do shit like rusted tin cans, but there isn't any roleplaying (just the usual good/bad binary) and the story is full of plot holes.
