Danbo Jambo said:
The thing is, in TW2 when I explored I came across significant elements, thing which felt intersting. In TW3 stumbling across the umpteenth bandit camp is just tiresome. I try and ride a direct route to my next objective, oh what's this, I've stumbled over another group of randoms who want to attack me for no reason. Great, that's another 5 minutes and possible restart if I die which is delaying me getting to the real nitty gritty of the game. And if I win that fight? wooo, no significant impact on anything. Yawn lol. Don't get me wrong, there's a good game in there and I appriciate that TW3 is still OK/good, whereas these elements destroyed games such as KOAR & DA:I.
I totally agree DA:I is far worse. TW3 is enjoyable at times. For me that's less times than TW2 (so far) but it's still a good game. DA:I is woeful. A truly, utterly woeful game with absolutely no sense of real involvement IMO. If someone asked whould they play TW3 I'd definitely say "try it", with "DA:I" I'd say "avoid like the plague!"
You make some great points about the way RPGs & OWGs are headed. I'm not against them in principle, I absolutely loved Morrowind, I just wish that they'd concentrate more on finding a balance between depth, story and freedom. To me it currently seems as if games are just cramming OW elements in to follow the trend & sell. Hopefully this will change
Ahh yes, the significant elements of 'ghost in the cliffs #300', or 'Nekker #4000', 'Drownie #30', 'Endredga #56' and the ever so memorable harpies litering the entirety of the second act.
There were a ton of just filler mobs to kill in two as well, they just didn't have a map marker above them. Some of them had a quest that'd give you a handful of coin tied to them, but that was about as impactful as most of them got.
Likewise, Witcher 3 also has the more interesting quests around. Villages that have been slaughtered and a quest to find out not what, but who did it. An abandoned manor with an old friend. Meeting a bunch of the Witches and doing their deeds and following their stories. There is, however, yes, a lot more of the random mobs sitting around, though keeping to the roads you can usually manage to avoid 90% of them. There are far more detailed quests in 3 than there were in 2, the problem is its often overwhelming in the sheer amount of stuff there is to do that as soon as you start focusing on doing things like clearing out bandit camps, content fatigue can hit pretty quickly. By and large though, its very similar to 2 in its structure; You've got a handful of main hub towns with a bunch of main quests inside them and the immediate surrounding area. The key difference is that one has loading screens and flashbacks between these sections, the other has you journeying between them yourself for the most part.
That said, I'm not going to hold it up as perfect. Honestly they should have done away with all the ? symbols and let players just find all that stuff themselves. Would provide less of a drive for players to do everything and not miss out on the 'content' around them, and instead focus them on the core parts of the game that the developer designed for them to experience. Also needed to handle its level scaling a bit better, considering how schitzophrenic it can be at times, and how that results in getting level 40 missions when you're level 5 half the time, or coming across level 30 monsters in what would otherwise seem to be a level 10 area...
DA:I does have its redeeming moments. I remember getting to the Ball at the Palace and had a great time playing that mission, because there was so much care put into everything; carefully designed puzzles to get an advantage in the ball, persuasive checks to impress the court, a mystery to solve and a lot of important actors, characters from 1 returning anew, and while there was plenty of exploring to do, it still felt focused. It wasn't a generic MMO collectathon. Its a shame much of the rest of the game wasn't similar. Its other issues, such as those involving its gameplay, also played into it not being a game I'll replay often, but it does, occasionally, have its upsides at least. It just doesn't handle its open world segments well at all.
And yeah, ATM a lot of games are focusing on the OW mechanics because they're vogue, and they're doing it
somewhat intelligently in that, like DA:I, they're designing for it from the game up, but they lack the experience and manpower to make it work. DA:I as an example, was designed to be a great open world game, even though it didn't manage it. The team obviously hadn't done a ton of open world work before, and didn't really execute the level design aspect of it well [Not in aesthetics, but in the gameplay aspect], and tried to do too much small content to fill the space, rather than focusing down on a bunch of strong core content, and then putting in some mobs around the area to make the traversal areas more interesting. Don't need 30 fetch quests, 5 quests with an actual story to engage with, and a bunch of darkspawn that just happen to be in the way would be far better. They didn't just throw it in at the last minute though - honestly it might have turned out better if they did. With everyone starting to gain experience, and the market showing the ideas that work, and the ones that don't, devs should be starting to clue in on how to make good open world games, kind of like how when FPSs became the big 'thing' there were a bunch of rather mediocre ones that came out without tight controls, or that didn't understand the core appeal of the genre, but by the end of the generation we had a lot of competently executed FPS, and a tiny handful that were also creative on top of that. I think one of the biggest things they'll need to realise is that you don't create a huge world for the sake of having a huge world, but you create a world size that fits your game. You can be open world and semi-sandbox within just the territory of Crow's Perch in Witcher 3, if your game only has enough core content to really make it work in that size of world, make that size of the world. Don't make it bigger and try to stretch things across without good reason. In Witcher 3, they were trying to make a territory spanning 3 nations that the whole story takes place in, in order to allow the story to flow uninterrupted - and they've got enough core content in the game to make that work, though it does result in a huge amount of side content that they put down markers for, unfortunately. The Hinterlands in DA:I? There's no reason for it to be that big, beyond trying to make it feel bigger than the content calls for.
Hopefully the next round of open world games will be better than this one, but with how long it takes to develop them I get the feeling we'll be waiting a while to find out.
