Video Games- Game of the Year

[IlyaP]

3 minutes ago, Werthead said:

There's a good bit in the Noclip Bethesda documentary where they talk about this big storyline revolving around Danvers and Salem having this big rivalry and when they saw the game map they realised the compression had effectively shrunk them into the same town, so they had to throw it all out in favour of a much simpler story (a deathclaw has gotten stuck in the church). They were a bit narked off about, especially the senior designer who was from Boston in the first place.

How peculiar. Will definitely have to check that NoClip documentary out then. 

If they'd just kept the towns as is, it might have worked - especially given that there's only one town between Danvers and Salem (Peabody). Maybe if they've just focused on a portion of the Boston area, rather than trying to cover the greater metro west area, it might have worked better. 

[Clueless Northman]

Monterrigioni in Assassins' Creed 2 is probably the only settlement that's actually bigger in game than in real life, if only because they put that huge villa at the Northern end. That said, Florence or Venice still looked decent-sized in it, except for some glaring bits, like the Grand Canal being that close to San Marco Piazza.

Realistic or totally silly town sizes is always interesting in video games. At times, some are reasonable, say Balmora in Morrowind or Dunwall in Dishonored (but it's not open world so you have to assume you only see a bit of it), but be it RPGs or MMOs, at times you have cities that are clearly downsized, or indeed cities that should be faraway that are very close in the game. I was also amused when playing GRID 2 to check how realistic the city layouts were, at times it seemed to fit quite well, and then I ended up in places that were definitely not that close from each other.

[IlyaP]

43 minutes ago, Clueless Northman said:

Realistic or totally silly town sizes is always interesting in video games. At times, some are reasonable, say Balmora in Morrowind or Dunwall in Dishonored (but it's not open world so you have to assume you only see a bit of it), but be it RPGs or MMOs, at times you have cities that are clearly downsized, or indeed cities that should be faraway that are very close in the game.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance also managed to produce locations whose scale is somewhat on par with the real world sites. Went and found a youtube video discussing exactly that for anyone who's interested. 

[Werthead]

Oblivion and Skyrim are definitely the worst for that. The capital city of a continent-spanning Empire of tens of millions of people is 300 feet across and populated by 55 people! Some of the major cities of the Empire are so small you could throw a rock from one wall to the other. Skyrim they at least made the cities on different levels to try to make it less obvious how small they were, but Whiterun in particular is ridiculously tiny.

That was a good old days when you forgave games for that sort of thing, before The Witcher 3 slammed down Novigrad and went, "behold!"

[A True Kaniggit]

I'm going to take the mention of Fallout 4 to gripe about one of the biggest things I dislike about the game.

The fact you start out in the top left corner of the map, and have to go east or south.

Would it have been so bad to start off in the center of the map and explore outward in any direction? With the further out you get from the center, the more dangerous the world becomes. 

[IlyaP]

13 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

The fact you start out in the top left corner of the map, and have to go east or south.

What you got against Acton, eh? 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

On 1/23/2021 at 1:32 PM, Impmk2 said:

Just noticed Desperados III is on X-box game pass on PC. I was waiting for this to go on a good steam sale or something, but instead I'll happily pay the few bucks for a month or 2 to give it a play through.

I should download it, but I downloaded Halo Reach and it was 150 gigs. Let us know how Desperado is--I'm definitely interested.

[Clueless Northman]

7 hours ago, Werthead said:

That was a good old days when you forgave games for that sort of thing, before The Witcher 3 slammed down Novigrad and went, "behold!"

And Novigrad isn't a 500K big capital of ancient times, like Cyrodiil. Novigrad is basically 30K people - heck, there were 6.000 dead when Vengerberg was sacked, so it might not have been more than 10-15K assuming many people managed to flee before Nilfgaard came.

[Poobah]

11 hours ago, Werthead said:

Oblivion and Skyrim are definitely the worst for that. The capital city of a continent-spanning Empire of tens of millions of people is 300 feet across and populated by 55 people! Some of the major cities of the Empire are so small you could throw a rock from one wall to the other. Skyrim they at least made the cities on different levels to try to make it less obvious how small they were, but Whiterun in particular is ridiculously tiny.

That was a good old days when you forgave games for that sort of thing, before The Witcher 3 slammed down Novigrad and went, "behold!"

I do agree with the general mockery of tiny towns but at the same time I do think I prefer locations that are actually functional where the buildings can be entered, npcs interacted with etc. than some kinda crazy attempts to scale that I've seen elsewhere where most of the city is actually just window dressing that you can't really interact with in any way and mostly just serves to waste a bunch of time or a fast-travel loading screen every time you need to run between the actually important/useful/interactible areas.

[Heartofice]

There is nothing worse in games than buildings that are essentially painted blocks, that you can’t enter or engage with. I also have an issue with NPCs who do nothing but repeat the same line or who can’t be interacted with outside of a quest.

[Slurktan]

2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

There is nothing worse in games than buildings that are essentially painted blocks, that you can’t enter or engage with. I also have an issue with NPCs who do nothing but repeat the same line or who can’t be interacted with outside of a quest.

To an extent that is all open world games though.  Even in the best open worlds like say RDR2 you cant go in everywhere, and there's only so much dialogue one can have in a game.

[Heartofice]

10 minutes ago, Slurktan said:

To an extent that is all open world games though.  Even in the best open worlds like say RDR2 you cant go in everywhere, and there's only so much dialogue one can have in a game.

RDR2 was actually a massive culprit of this and frustrated the hell out of me because of it. It’s actually what I was thinking of when writing the above. It all looks great but you can’t do anything in most of the world

[Kalbear]

Cyberpunk does this too, but much less than I expected. There are a lot of places you can go, especially if you get the cyberware or stats to allow you to do so. 

[Ran]

There are games that don't have this problem. Tetris, Pong...

[Clueless Northman]

10 minutes ago, Ran said:

There are games that don't have this problem. Tetris, Pong...

This.

Being a completionist and usually quite thorough, it would be quite a nightmare if an entire city was fully replicated  In WOW, I visited every house and every houses's room I could get in, even if I didn't expect any quest or any NPC to be there. Same obviously with the Elder Scrolls - if there's a named NPC, I check if there's any specific dialogue there.

[Kalbear]

WoW is a great example of cities that are incredibly tiny. And yeah, most everything is populated, but there are like 15 things total and they're all actually important (IE, they sell something). There's very little flavor in any of them. 

And that's fine! But it's not a hard thing to do.

Building an actual city that's the right size is hard. Doing it AND making it so you can go, like, everywhere AND have things be procedurally generated enough that they're not precisely alike? Ooof. That's an incredible difficult thing - and for what? I guess that's the real issue - what's the actual gain here in terms of gameplay? Reminds me a lot of  the conversations around making AI - most people don't actually care about a 'good' or smart AI, and a lot of times a smart AI is really bad for fun gaming. They want a competent AI that they can beat, along with some really cool scripted scenes with some choices. 

[Slurktan]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

RDR2 was actually a massive culprit of this and frustrated the hell out of me because of it. It’s actually what I was thinking of when writing the above. It all looks great but you can’t do anything in most of the world

If you thought RDR2 was a bad culprit of that I'd advise not playing pretty much any other open world game there is. I do find it strange as well as there's not alot of places in RDR2 that you actually can't get into.  Most places like where ManBearPig is you can just break in with climbing if need be.  The ones I can think of offhand are event/plot related ones:  the upstairs of the valentine jail and the sherriffs house (both are reserved for special events that are not plot related and only come along if you pay attention and follow certain characters), the building that explodes when you get near it in New Austin, and the upstairs of the shop in Rhodes (shopkeepers wife lives there) and a place where you bust peeping toms in strawberry.  I can't remember if you can get into the house in Tumbleweed from RDR1.  Is there anything in most places?  No but that's not what you were saying.

As Kalbear says making even so much as what would be considered a village in real life is painstakingly hard. and incredibly needless to most games.

[Heartofice]

Really? I mean outside of main cities there are a few houses and shacks you can get into, though they rarely start new quests or serve any purpose.

Most major settlements are pretty much inaccessible, with only a handful of places with any real level of interaction, and they are well sign posted.

I got bored of red dead 2 for the simple reason that exploration is basically pointless. I spent a couple of hours wandering around and almost nothing happened. I got involved in no quests and found very few interesting things. 
 

It really doesn’t feel like an open world game at all to me

 

If it’s hard to make that level of detail then don’t go so big. Seems simple 

[Fez]

Its one of the reasons I prefer "hub" games to open world games. Something like the Mass Effect games, Deus Ex games, etc. where you're clearly in just a small part of the city and you can see the vast expanse of the city as a backdrop. That, to me, is far more immersive than an open world game; even though you'll never see yourself actually traveling to mission locations.

[Ran]

3 hours ago, Heartofice said:

If it’s hard to make that level of detail then don’t go so big. Seems simple 

RDR2 has sold over 29 million copies. People like big maps and the feeling of expansiveness, and are willing to trade certain things for that, including illusion-breaking stuff like locations they can't go into or NPCs that don't have endless dialog chains.

Like, if you count up all the properly interactable, multi-dialog thread NPCs  in CP2077.... you might be able to fit them all into one block of Rancho Coronado (suburban town), or maybe one corner of one floor of a megablock (by my count, the typical megablock has 55  levels, so about 2300 people per level... and maybe a tenth of that number fit the number of uniquely dialoged NPC conversation options?)

Would it be neat to know in that very limited area that every single NPC has unique dialog? I guess! Would it be fun to have a single block or one small corner of a megablock to wander around to have that knowledge? Err... not for me, anyways, but I suppose someone might.

It's all a balancing act, really, and everyone has different points of what matters vs what doesn't.