8th March 2017, 1:03 PM
(This post was last modified: 8th March 2017, 4:12 PM by A Black Falcon.)
Quote:The game isn't directionless at all, not even in the slightest. You're given objectives along a "main path" and a primary objective you can decide to pursue at any time, under-prepared or not. It's just that the game LETS you do whatever you want instead of going on those quests. How is that "directionless"? Are you honestly telling me right now that you would prefer they put in artificial barriers to FORCE you along the main story path? Do you honestly believe that's better?"
Hmm... good question, really. Most of the time of course, I prefer a more guided experience over a more open one; I've said that many times over the years, and it's true. When a game is too open ended either I get overwhelmed with the number of directions I could go so I end up doing none of them, or I wander around for a while until I lose interest somewhere early-ish in the game. There's never been a conventional open-world game that I loved, or even finished.
The closest thing I can think of to answering "no" to your question, though, is thinking about my reaction to Twilight Princess, when I first played it around ten years ago. I really love that games' gameplay, world, dungeons, art, music, etc., with only the story and characters really holding it back, but at first I did find how little of the world you can visit early in that game frustrating; it's not until after the second or third dungeon that you finally are able to explore the whole game world, and I do think that that's when the game gets great. Of course this is not an open-world game, but it is one of the few cases where I actually wanted something a bit more open than it gave me. However, going back to the game more recently, this didn't bother me at all, since the early parts of the game are really good too in retrospect, and knowing that it will open up, the more railed early part is fine. (I've never had a problem with the "collect the shards of light" stuff either, finding all of those can be fun...)
A more typical example are the Baldur's Gate games. BG1 has a large, somewhat directionless world. I love that game, but never even got into the city of Baldur's Gate, since I wandered around the woods until I lost interest. BG2 is more linear though most of the time, and that game I stuck with and finished. Games like Baldur's Gate II or Guild Wars 1 and its expansions, one of my favorite games ever of course, show that I can love a game with huge areas if it's presented in a linear manner -- like GW, where each explorable area is massive, but the main mission path in each campaign follows a linear structure. You go from town to explorable area to mission to the next explorable area, following the main quest line. Towns and mission lobbies are areas all players can be in, but missions and explorable areas are instanced, a system I really like. Along the way there are many also huge side areas, lots of side-quests everywhere, etc., but the main quest path in each campaign is linear and I like that. Guild Wars 2's world is more open-ended, and that's one issue I have with the game; yes, t here is still an entirely linear main story mission tree, but the world itself is now a single world, not an instanced combination of lobbies/towns and instances, and you can wander around a lot more without following the missions. I don't like how monsters now respawn continually for instance, in standard MMO fashion, it's so much more satisfying in the first game where enemies stay dead until you leave the zone!
But anyway, to get back to your question, saying that I dislike open worlds doesn't mean I always dislike games with large worlds, GW shows that that is not true. The games' world is huge! It's just that you have to unlock a lot of areas by playing through the story, you can't just wander anywhere in each of the three campaigns from the start. And in the end, that is definitely the style I prefer. Sure, just randomly wandering around in a GW2 or something can be fun, but I stay more engaged when there's something clearly pushing me to go in a direction, versus just 'wander around and do quests and stuff'. That's a recipe for "and then I stopped playing after a bit because I lost interest, since I do not find that kind of gameplay engaging for long". And sure, I may well not finish a more linear game either, but it'd be much less likely to be for that reason.
(Is this the right time to mention that surprisingly enough I've actually found Destiny (which I have for 360) to be kind of fun? It is another game with an instanced world of decent size that also has a main linear story path along with side stuff, so it is similar there, while being quite different in mechanics of course since it's a FPS. I haven't done any of the multiplayer stuff, which I know is a huge part of the game for those who get into it, and as always don't care much about the huge loot aspect of the game, but it looks great and plays well, and if I stick mostly to the main mission path it's fun. Even the wandering-around-the-areas element isn't too bad, as it gives you waypoints to missions you can try. I don't find Destiny to be a great classic, but I like it more than I thought I would.)
Quote: I was trying to throw some bombs to a distant outpost, and it suddenly clicked that I could go over and grab a long metal plank, a metal box, lay them over a log, and I created a working catapult to launch bombs with. I CREATED A WORKING CATAPULT USING IN-GAME PHYSICS! I DID THAT! THAT'S A THING I CAN DO! I.. CREATED A FRICKIN' CATAPULT! THIS is the sort of fun you could have in this game ABF.Physics systems in games can be fun, yeah. That was one of the things I remember most liking about Rocket: Robot on Wheels for the N64, the physics system...
Quote: Durability... stamina... Frankly I agree. These are vestiges of gaming's experiments from a few years back that turned out to never have been worth pursuing in the first place. The new Doom and Phantom Pain in particular prove that such systems aren't really needed for the most part (Phantom Pain has durability on the silencer alone, but I'm okay with that, since the gun still works fine when that breaks, and they're easily replaced). The best I can say about stamina is the game does give you upgrades to it. Still, it would have been better if it hadn't been in the game at all and they'd designed it around that. Phantom Pain really did spoil me. I now look at stamina bars as nothing but a liability. It's a shame, because Nintendo was smart enough not to toss that into Link Between Worlds. I can say this about durability. Frankly, weapons are constantly dropping like candy in the game, so if something breaks there's probably already a replacement on the ground right next to you. If nothing else, I've had a number of "both me and the enemy scrambling towards that one weapon" moments like in an action movie. Those were pretty fun. Still, I would have preferred those moments come about because something knocked my weapon out of my hand and I had to run over and grab it. That'd be pretty cool.It's like they thought 'okay, what can we do to make this game more difficult' so they stuck in a stamina system, even though it's never a good idea. Come up with a better way to do difficulty than that, seriously! Stamina systems are awful. As for weapon degradation, perhaps that was done to make you switch weapons regularly, but having things break constantly during fights does not sound fun, and with a limited inventory it seems like it'd be harder than it should be to store some good weapons for when you really need them...
Quote: As far as cooking goes, I wanted something like a mini-game, but I think Nintendo found a better way. It's hands-on cooking but without the burden of a mini-game every time you want to eat. You have to light the fire, carry a big handful of stuff, and stuff it in the pot. It could only be improved, I think, if one of those Koroks you find at the start summoned a magical shelf full of all your food so you picked it from the shelf instead of an in-game menu, further giving you that experience of actually picking stuff yourself. "Recipes" would come in the form of asking the korok to cook something you discovered for you, but generally I think Nintendo handled it well.No game with crafting should not have something ingame telling you what the good combinations are! "Go read a guide to figure out how this works" is the worst kind of design. I know that a lot of games do things that way, either in hiding game systems in ways you'll never notice unless you read a guide as so many JRPGs love to do or this annoying but not quite as bad crafting system with no recipe list, but I never like it.