I want to pin a new comment here because there is something I failed to address in the video that is really important to the discussion, and that is the fact that Day/Night cycles are abstractions that suggest the passage of time in open world games, which means that the 2 hour trip from Solitude to Riften was actually several days in the game. This is the strongest counter point to what I'm saying in the video, and one I'd like to address in a future video, but I might as well bring it up here for the sake of the conversation. My response to that (in short) is that this kind of abstraction falls apart more quickly in my mind than zone construction does, and admittedly that is a matter of personal preference. It is easier (for me) to accept scale when we fade to black, suggest the passage of time, and change the climate or environment, than it is to watch a snow driven landscape turn into a desert in a matter of minutes. Again, it's a matter of personal preference, but the way these transitions in open worlds are handled breaks immersion more quickly for me, and the larger the environments are made to try and blend them more realistically, the more empty space will be created that is difficult to fill with interesting things to do. In other words, if they are made even bigger they only become more boring to traverse. I prefer abstraction, which gives me the sense that the world is big while allowing me to get to the next town in a couple of minutes and get on with the good stuff.
Everything in a game is an abstraction tho the open world itself is just an abstraction of a real world. You just never get a “break” in the visuals. Like the zones offer. Maybe the fade to black is easier to detach from, cuz it’s MORE of an abstraction. More is left up to the players imagination for sure. I really dig the video. Very interesting concept.
I think you're a pretty unique person and thus I think this probably bothers you more than others. Logically speaking there isn't any arguments that could be said against your good breakdown and reasoning, but I think immersion is in itself is very subjective to each individual. For example many people hail BotW as breaking new grounds of immersion and concept in open world games. However I've found Skyrim to be much more immersive despite it's speedy zone changes. Some people may find immersion in realism whereas like yourself, others may find immersion in abstraction.
David Kwon I agree, skyrim may be the at the very tip top of “immersing” me in a game, personally speaking. For me I think part of it has to do with its first person perspective. As well as having no mini map. BoTW was certainly doing its job tho. Especially for a third person game. Also where do you look for “realism” in your games? The visuals, or the mechanics? Games that look “real” but don’t play real- just cause 3. Or games that play real but might not look it- BoTW? (Besides the sheika slate I guess haha) I dunno, I never really dug the “realism” argument being leveled at games. But it is still an interesting topic for sure. Games that both look and play realistically?? Basically SIM games, maybe the Ubisoft shit? (Wildlands, Maybe even farcry) Which are boring me to tears lately... battlefield is a better example Although pretty much EVERY game has a HIGHLY abstracted health system. Basically abstraction is a vital part of games in one way or another. (This wasn’t aimed at anyone just rhetorical thoughts, feel free to respond tho!) peace ✌️
A lot of open world games are like driving through the back roads of Texas. On your right...nothing,on your left...nothing and two miles ahead...nothing.
THANK YOU for this. Narrative is about limitation, not freedom. FF7 and early JRGs felt bigger than any open world game I've ever played. Abstraction as you put it, or symbolism in less than real looking characters, allowed for infinite interpretation both in characters and scale. Much love man
FF 6, 7, 9, when I think back on these games I remember how massive they felt, how rich and deep the story and the world was. These open world titles, Witcher 3, FFXV, etc, they just feel hollow and soulless, like a bad film adaptation of an incredible novel. It seems like developers have forgotten that graphics != good gameplay. Bravo to you for calling this out, bring back abstraction, stop spending millions making shitty games with great graphics.
I agree entirely with this video. I think actually with how crazy costs are to make games nowadays, you would think they would be open to going back to forms of abstractions. FF13 may of been too linear, but FF15 was the exact issue in the other extreme. If world maps are no longer allowed to be a thing, then I hope FF16 does take inspiration from FF12 or Xenoblade. FF14 however is structured similar to FF12 where there are zone lines to each area. Making the world feel big despite only two continents technically being available. It also however gives that grand feeling of wanting to explore even more as new content comes out. Hopefully Square-Enix does take the criticism of the open world.
I think Zelda BotW did it right. I don't think Zelda games were meant to be as a grand scale as say....Skyrim. Hell, Miyamoto said it himself that he wanted players to be able to fit a "miniature garden inside their drawer" not a Continent. Which works perfectly. BotW is just big enough to enjoy, and yet not get boring at the same time. Same goes for Zelda 1, and Link to the Past. I also think games like Far Cry 5 are smart enough to address that the open world is a "County" and not the entire State of Montana to bring a more realistic scope. I prefer that. It would have bothered me of they said that it was the entire state..it would have definitely felt too small at that point.
I have a similar problem. It really breaks the immersion when you see the capital of a kingdom be a few houses big. How can I care about this grand epic war when the population of the entire nation is less than a thousand people?
Great video. One counterpoint for me is that overworld maps often leave the world feeling super empty. Sure it’s abstract representation, but flying a ship around FF7,8,9 and only seeing one big city and a couple towns per continent is just as distracting to me as running across Skyrim in an hour. Both have their pros and cons.
You could do it like in Bioware games where you just "fast travel" to other areas that are supposed to be hundreds of kilometers (or lightyears in the case of KotOR and Mass Effect) apart. This avoids boring overworld maps but keeps the sense of a huge world.
This could have been solved by continuing to innovate the concept of the map to give players more stuff to do. It's kind of an obscure example, but you can look at Mount and Blade: Warband for a more complex overworld. Travel time between towns is massively important, army size can affect movement speed, you have map-specific skills you can level like tracking and spotting distance, and you can have both friendly and hostile encounters with NPCs on the map itself as they follow their own schedules. Now, it is an open-ended WRPG and a lot of this probably isn't applicable to story-based JRPGs, but it's still an interesting example.
I agree all the way, man. I wish more game devs/producers/executives would stop and ask themselves "does this game benefit from having open world design, as opposed to segmented world design, or traditional levels"
I do call out the bullshit problems with open world sandbox is that despite being vast and beautiful, it's the same as if you go outside your house. If you have nothing to do, it is background to you and irrelevant. In a game, it's literally wasted data to give you the illusion of space.
What I meant is, there's lot of space but nothing to do and basically that empty space is in itself a challenge because you need to travel THROUGH all that nothing
Maybe vast open areas. Developers need to stop doing that. But they also shouldn't pull a God of War 4 and have a lot of narrow places because they feel way to small in scale.
this is what i was thinking about when comparing ff12 to ff9, ff12 had massive zones to travel through, but it felt empty and it didnt help that the cities and towns there felt empty too, basically their just places to buy stuff, but 9 felt big in terms of content and story, the locations in 9 though small, had a alot of character and by the way the story uses the locations it felt like there's something to do there, like for example its in ff9 where the locations feel like they have culture, there are kingdoms there where you attend a hunting festival, or a city where theres a card tournament and an auction house, there towns also where there are mini-sidequest with the people inside that unlocks new locations/mini-games, it felt like there was something to do for players who are curious enough to roam around the small location. my main point is that open world games are great and all, but what matters to me is making the locations meaningful either story wise, or through content.
That's the problem with games trying to achieve a level of realism by doing away with abstract interpretations. When something is supposedly "realistic" there's no incentive ask questions of want explanations. The rules that govern the universe are plopped in your lap from the first moment and you never revisit it again. Abstractions however forces you to look for answers to the why, what, where, and how of the game's purpose and design proving a deeper relationship between the player, the developers, and the product. FFXII is huge because time was spent to incorporate answers into every detail of every zone. Everything was hand crafted to give you and idea of the scope that was both present in the zone you were in and also applicable to the overarching world of Ivalice. Many open world games don't share that level of depth. It's simply make the world, generate NPCs, and scatter side quest around the map. They're more akin to a high production but smaller scale MMO rather than a fleshed out and rich single player experience.
I couldn't put it into words but that's how it felt playing Skyrim and BotW towards their end games. We can suspend logic to leap between fictional and practical scales, but it doesn't make the problem go away. Really interesting insight.
This feels very relevant now that the Final Fantasy VII Remake is on the horizon ... it's going to be interesting to see how the two compare in terms of world design.
This is what worries me with the eventual next FF7R installment. Some people argue for an open world style akin to FFXV. I don’t think they can do that world justice with current open world design. I hope they implement the overworld in some way. Make my imagination fill in the blanks.
Awesome video Mike, I agree wholeheartedly. One of the biggest examples of this is mass effect 1-3 vs. Andromeda. The galaxy map alone plus the various planets and races you visited did an amazing job of selling the complete vastness of space without ever opening too much of it up to the player. In comparison, andromeda feels tiny, and it's a bit disappointing when you compare it to the diversity of its predecessors.
For an open world game to feel truly big, the far reaches of the map must feel truly remote, and inaccessible, compared to your current location. It must feel like it's a serious amount of time and effort to reach the other side. Red Dead Redemption (haven't played 2) feels big even though you have a horse. From the far reaches of Mexico all the way to the deep forests of Tall Trees feels like a proper journey, and the soundtrack goes a long way towards establishing that diverse atmosphere
I almost didn't click on this because BotW's world (your thumbnail) does not feel small to me. But I'm glad I watched this anyway because of your main points on abstraction. I don't think you even referred to BotW directly at all. Abstraction can be used to make larger feeling world, but it can also require a greater suspension of disbelief. If you go from an open-world version of a game to one where you have a separate map screen to travel from location to location, it can feel like a let-down. An example of this I can think of, although not exactly going from Open-world to over-world is Tales of Symphonia and its sequel Dawn of a New World. The original had an over-world you could traverse on to go from place to place. In the sequel, you only have a menu selection showing the map. If you can remember people being disappointed over FFX having that menu selection on the airship and not being able to manually fly around the world, it's kinda like that feeling, but instead with Symphonia, you have something that was traverse-able before which is now only a menu option. You should check out Razbuten's video on open-world games "I Hate Fast Travel" if you haven't already. Kinda off topic: Strangely, I'm looking forward to FFVII REMAKE having less abstraction than its original. Not because I don't like abstraction or prefer open-world games, but because I'm more interested in seeing a retelling of FFVII's world from a different perspective. I really don't like how some people have been upset with the prospective that REMAKE will have a different battle system, etc, than the original. I don't want to play the exact same FFVII with only better graphics. I've played the original plenty of times that I'm ready to experience this world in a different way.
Super interesting point and discussion, and something I definitely feel tugging at my suspension of disbelief while playing games like Skyrim. However, is it possible that this seamless traversal across, say, a 1:100 scale Skyrim is a kind of modern abstraction like an overworld map? Just like I know my character is not a giant stomping across a continent, I know my Skyrim character didn't stroll across an entire province in a couple hours. Of course, both of those things did happen on screen, but I know what they represent. I definitely agree cities have worked better, and you're right about larger scale world's necessarily becoming smaller, but perhaps Skyrim wasn't meant to feel like a 1:1 representation.
Yeah, you could definitely be right about that. I suppose that could have been the intention. I'll add that I enjoyed the crap out of Skyrim when it was released, and had a blast exploring the world.
THANK YOU! This is exactly what I've been thinking for the last couple of years. Games like KotOR and Dragon Age Origins seem MUCH larger to me than Skyrim, even though their worlds are tiny compared to Skyrim's. In Dragon Age, you have the country of Ferelden, but you can only travel to a few areas. When you travel to an area, you can see the path of your party on the map. Even the capital city of Ferelden is implied to be much larger than the few areas you can visit. This is what proper RPGs should do. It not only leaves the size of the world and what happens during travel to your fantasy, it also is more lore-friendly. Man, I remember playing KotOR as a kid and when I went on board the Ebon Hawk and traveled to another planet, I figured the flight would take several days and imagined how my party would talk with each other, eat and sleep during the flight. It was also clear to everyone that the areas you could walk around in were supposed to be a tiny part of the planet. This is something modern open world games fail to reproduce. They feel so empty, meaningless and boring compared to classic RPGs. Old school RPGs are like interactive novels, while modern RPGs are basically walking simulators that are all about finding useless stuff spread randomly accross the world. I mean how can a game like Skyrim, whose world is like two kilometers wide, make you feel like an important hero who saves the world from a dangerous evil? If this evil is so dangerous, how come that the people of Cyrodiil, just a few hundred meters south, aren't affected at all by this?
Except none of those are necessarily "open". Heck, "Metroidvania" is, by design, NOT open world at all. The whole point of "Metroidvania" is for most of the map to be closed off (largely in corridor mazes), with more and more becoming possible to traverse as you gain new tools or abilities. Seamless, interconnected traversal is not necessarily the same thing as open world.
Just my two cents - FFXII feels small. The abstraction there never worked that well for me. I felt it worked better in FFX but in both it felt "small". Actually for size something like FFIX felt large - the cities genuinely felt big. All of these games suffer from the issue that open world suffers though - once you step back and look at the sparsity of everything, everything feels small. What I'd love is a game that could make you feel like there were small outposts and villages while travelling with huge city scapes or middling towns to actually explore. Abstraction would be key for this, but I feel like until we get that none of these games will feel HUGE. The single exception maybe - FFVII. Because of the "midgar moment" it genuinely feels like FFVII is HUGE just because you suddenly leave a large area to enter an even huger one that (for me at least) I didn't realise was coming. It was amazing. I just wish we could get that feeling again.
There is already such a thing as a 1:1 computerized virtual world that gamers sometimes forget about: Microsoft Flight Simulator and X-Plane. I realize these aren't "games" per se, with world conflicts, hit points, stories, or bosses. But still, it's a 1:1 virtual world that you can explore on your computer. But there isn't much point in flying across the continent because it usually entails just sitting and staring at a still screen for hours and not doing much (leave it on autopilot while you listen to DPG podcasts about open worlds in games - so meta). A 1 hour flight is sufficient for enjoying the purpose of the simulator. But there are simulator nerds who have flown around the entire world just to say they did (probably wasn't much fun). For games to be fun and captivating, I agree abstraction is KEY. The most fun I've ever had with a computer flight simulator was when I was a youngin' playing Pilotwings 64, the gyrocopter in Little States. I could use my imagination to feel like I was exploring the country, and I could get from NYC to LA in an enjoyable amount of time. The less games leave to the player's imagination, the more they fall short of captivating make-believe experiences. I think this is why many people say games today in general aren't as fun as they used to be, and I'm inclined to agree. The fun per megabyte and pixel is much lower today.
Couldn't agree more with this observation. Even though I still favor Square's PS1 style of pre-rendered backgrounds and overworlds, I think it would be possible to have a piece-wise world to traverse like FFX, FFXII and FFXIII that also included a traditional overworld with airship navigation. Take the overworld map of FFXII for example. Say that once airship navigation became possible, you boarded the airship and then saw an overworld that looked something like it did in the games prior to VII. When you landed your airship in the "zoomed out" version of the overworld (the prior to VII version), you landed in the equivalent space in the FFXII style overworld. In short, there are two styles of traversal in this scenario: on foot in Square's "zones", or by air in Square's old school overworld. One problem with this is the space the loading screens represent at an abstract level which bridged different terrain (you walk to the edge of the snow level zone and end up in a woodland after the loading screen- what happens to the space in between?). I would say that it would only be possible to land when a prompt came up in the airship which designated the landing zone of your choice as a place that can be navigable by foot. So the simplified overworld with airship navigation could be "zoomed out" pretty far, even farther than it was in VIII, and would rekindle that notion of a huge world to explore. I could see my idea aggravating some players though as you would not be able to land everywhere, and it would be difficult to approximate where you were landing in relation to the "zones" navigable on foot.
Thank you for this video. While watching E3 presentations this year, they kept saying the word "seamless" to describe their gameplay transitions and it bugged me in a way that I couldn't quite describe, but this video articulates it perfectly. Thank you.
Hey Mike! Today I played the very first Ultima game which is the game that created the idea of traversing an overworld as a giant towering cities which Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy then followed and I noticed something interesting. In Ultima 1 there is a food ration count and as you move around the map your food ration count decreases in number which forces the player to traverse the map carefully and pay attention to where you are going. It also discourages exploration which I actually really appreciated because in a real life scenario, if we as people were to go on these grand journey's we would never want to explore just for fun and curiosity because we would waste so much time and resources while putting ourselves harms way. In a realistic scenario, we would want to get to where we need to go as safely and efficiently as possible. I thought that this element of survival was pretty neat and proves your point in how overworld map design philosophy from the very beginning was always meant to be a deliberate abstraction for a much grander journey as opposed to being taken literally. It also makes me wonder why JRPG's that followed suit with Ultima's overworld format didn't expand on interesting survival mechanics but instead stripped them away. From playing the first Ultima game, I now feel like JRPG's could be doing so much more to implement meaningful abstractions for danger and survival than just random battles with random monsters over and over again and I find it kind of funny how Ultima, a game that came out in 1981 provided that layer of depth which Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy seemed to ignore. I just thought I would bring this to light in case it's something you want think about, talk about or expand on in the future. Huge fan of the channel. Keep up the great work.
This is my biggest concern for the FFVII remake. I’d love if it the found a way to abstract the world map somehow. I just fear that’s not going to happen and the size of the world is going to be so small in comparison. However, sandbox Midgar would be amazing.
I jump to the progression through environments in Half Life 2 as an example of how to sell scale pretty well too. I felt physically exhausted when I first beat the game because it felt like you had travelled SO far. They sprinkle vehicle sections and interiors just at the right moments to add up the feeling of distance covered and Half Life's a linear game. Yet it feels a lot bigger and the world is much more convincing to me than a lot of open world games. This video brings up a lot of cool ideas to think about. Nice job.
Billysan291 what's a game that you consider not a tedious chore? Not even jiggy is gotten the same way. Different puzzle and you need to explore to find them all. I find most these open world games you don't need to explore these environments making them feel empty on a gameplay level, not a graphic /npc level
Mario Galaxy. Retroactively looking at it, Banjo is essentially nothing but the worst parts of Galaxy like throwing trash away. Just very derivative style task.
Billysan291 but Mario galaxy is liner... And Mario 64 and sunshine is closer to banjo. I just want an open world with things that actually reward you for searching. Not just collectables that do nothing to progress your character
It's pretty much the same with GTA games imo. Even tho GTA 5 in fact have a much bigger map than other previous GTA games, i still got the impression that GTA San Andreas' open world is bigger than the GTA 5. Of course the level design and the games draw distance can affect how we perceived the scale of the open world in video games
I disagree with the premise here, at least for me personally. In Skyrim, I have no problem seeing the 30-45 minute trek from Whiterun to Riften as an abstraction of what should be a days-long trip. In that time, I walk across winding mountain paths, fight bears, meet merchants, discover ruins and caves, etc. It functions just like a a JRPG trip from town to town. Just because it's more realistic than than a 16-bit game doesn't mean I expect it to be a 1-to-1 recreation. Like in classic rpgs, we're presented with a condensed version of what should represent an epic quest. It's still up to our imaginations to fill in the holes. And I think it's worth noting that just because you CAN go border-to-border in 2 hours doesn't mean that you will. Most players will go to Whiterun, receive quests that gradually expand the explored area outward in all directions, then use fast travel from the furthest edge whenever they need to go somewhere new. This illusion won't work for everyone (and some folks will decide they have to walk straight to Makarth in the beginning of the game for some reason), but for me Skyrim feeling small was never an issue. That's not to say that there aren't aspects of Skyrim that hurt immersion - I just think they're mostly gameplay issues rather than world design. Being so combat focused means you meet (and kill) more people in caves and bandit camps than you see in most towns (why do so many people prefer a life of crime in a dank old ruin to living comfortably in one of the many towns? Or at least joining the rebellion?). Returning to town should be all about getting a good meal and a warm bed to sleep in, but instead it's about BUYING ALL THE IRON THEN FORGING 70 IRON DAGGERS BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO LEVEL YOUR SMITHING.
I see where you're coming from. The other thing that bothered me personally about Skyrim though is that the capital city had like 80 people living in it. There's a surprising lack of people populating those cities. Just felt really, really small for something that was trying to give me a sense that it was so huge.
Yeah, that's fair. It doesn't help that townsfolk just yell their problems at you as you pass by. They don't really interact with each other or the world around them. Maybe they'll learn from Witcher 3, but Fallout 4 doesn't make me too optimistic. Anyway, thanks for the great content!
@@ResonantArc/videos Tiny cities, indeed. I'm certain people make larger and more complex cities DMing in D&D. So as usual, we have to rely on mods to make Bethesda's AAA games as big as they easily *should* have been from the start.
You just gave me the idea of a game where the journey between locations of interest has FTL/80 Days style encounters in addition to battles. I wonder how different games would be if abstraction was pursued more than it is.
There's also the tedium of traversing said open world. Like for me in GTA, I am always entertained by the story but hate the long drives to get from point A to B.
I fully agree about this sensation around open world games. Doesn't matter how much you can provide you always be smaller than our real perception. Abstraction of world maps is great and I really miss that. Since Final Fantasy X, lack of world map makes me feel like these worlds have no soul. The last game that I remember a good sensation of full complete world is Tales of Legendia. In fact this can be a good opportunity to create more and more content to unexplored areas in the map once you just have a symbolically images of what it could be.
A great example of this (and a great pair of games to use as a comparison) is Mirror's Edge vs. Catalyst. Not only did I like the atmosphere of the city in ME1 much more, but the fact that you are only every traversing small sections of the city makes the game's world feel so much bigger. Compared to Catalyst where you can physically traverse a MUCH larger portion of the city seamlessly (unless you consider the swing-shot a seam), it still feels like a much smaller game world in comparison. The first game's division by missions helps create that sense of abstraction and allows your imagination to fill in the in-between spaces, and the way the map jumps around with the buildings corresponding to the mission you're selecting highlighted in red is such a nice touch. Great analysis DPG!
Hey I agree exactly! Thought about this when I played FFXV. One observation of mine is that as games get more "realistic" per their design intent, they become "darker", too serious. Compare FFXV to FFVII, both stories with good vs evil where FFVII is way more playful. Childhood me enjoyed the good vs evil in FFVII while adult me felt uncomfortable with the good vs evil in FFXV- a bit much... Anyway, you are very smart and observant and critical. Well done.
Since this open world trend started I've come to appreciate more the small hub games. Packed with intertwined stories, npcs. Small maps I can learn faster but it will take me long to uncover all it's secrets.
That's why I prefer Demon's Souls to Dark Souls. Demon's Souls levels may not have all been physically connected, but each archstone and the levels contained within gave a great sense of scale and atmosphere to each region, like the world was truly large. Dark Souls on the other hand, has a much smaller feeling world because there are dozens of little "areas" connected together. Areas like Valley of the Drakes (like a 20-foot path) left me extremely disappointed, since I didn't see the area as a valley at all. On the other hand, the Valley of Defilement spanned multiple levels in Demon's Souls, and was a much more memorable area, even compared to Blight town.
StickySock Dark Souls is indeed an undergraded Demon's Souls. I was pretty disapointed with it when I started playing after Demon's Souls, but eventually the game grew on me. Bloodborne got the formula right, tho
Final Fantasy Mobius does the "abstraction" you talk about fairly well; you're mostly fighting on the same "stages" over and over, but since every area uses its own world map with different paths you traverse to get from point to point you get a suprising sense of scale out of it. Pretty impressive for a phone game aswell.
I think that when videogame developers had limitations for game design and videogame mechanics, they had to be creative in order to develop the game that they wanted to create with all of that _"limited tools"_ in the industry at that time. But right now the variety to create games is massive but the time to develop them is limited or sometimes they have a lot of time to develop a game but have a lot of problems in the development.
I agree with all of this. I feel that many corporations want their game worlds to be big rather than feel big. After all it’s a lot easy to sell a game on the fact that it is “so and so” square miles rather the promise that world will feel big. Xenoblade Chronicles 1 (and to lesser extent 2) handle scale significantly better than many open world games through the use of abstraction and a unique world concept. When you first get to the Bionis Knee and see the Mechonis off in the distance, the knowledge that you will most likely go there creates a sense of scale that is unmatched even by games on modern hardware. Despite being several times bigger, Xenoblade Chronicles X never felt as grand, because there was never a moment that matched that sense of scale due the world being one seamless area (and the poor writing and story structure didn’t help, but that’s argument for another day).
Devs need to realize that not every game works with an open world. Zelda doesn't need to be open world. Metal Gear doesn't need to be open world. These are the two best examples for me. Both have huge empty worlds that are gigantic for the sake of being gigantic. I hope this trend will come to an end eventually.
Breath of the Wild's world is not empty. There are tons of things to do along the way to a destination that it is very easy to get distracted finding secrets.
Well said. It wasn't a problem for me in MGSV since it still had tight levels at its core, but I do hope we get to a point where not every AAA game has to be a massive open-world sandbox. There are so few games that manage to stay interesting over 50+ hours, much less 100.
Zelda has always been open world, IMHO (just not sure about Zelda 2) there is not really that much abstraction, and this is the charm of it, its a story about a small group of individuals trying to live their lives. Metal Gear Solid 5 was a smart open world IMHO, the execution didn't always worked, but the idea of having a tactical action/stealth shooter where you could decide upon how to engage the targets is fantastic.
*Core Gameplay* There are 3 rewards whenever you find a "secret": Korok Seed(The most annoying repetitive reward you can find in the game) Shrine(With a puzzle, which can range from Motion controls to Actually decent puzzle(Or be an instant reward shrine(Or a combat shrine, yay))) Small goodie(Usually either a Weapon/shield/bow/armor(Super rare), Ore or Rupees) And when most of the "rewards" you find are Korok Seeds. Nothing is more depressing to "find" than a rock that is just laying alone on top of a hill. Is it even a discovery when you know already what you are gonna find? Its like discovering a signpost when you walk across a road.
@@clayton_games "Breath of the Wild's world is not empty. There are tons of things to do along the way to a destination that it is very easy to get distracted finding secrets." The problem though is that all of it feels meaningless. It feels like randomly generated filler to keep the player busy. Previous Zelda games had much smaller worlds but everything had a meaning. Everything was placed with thought behind it and had a purpose. You didn't have thousands of random items that are going to break anyway, instead every major item you got was an exciting milestone. Also, due to the fact that the games were more linear, the story was better and felt much more important. Even in Majora's Mask, which was mostly about its side quests, due to the small size of the world, everything had a purpose. In Skyrim for example, everything feels so random and meaningless. I mean sure, it's a good sandbox for people who like that sort of thing, but for people like me, who want an immersive experience with a good story and characters, this game design doesn't work very well. The last open world RPG I enjoyed was Oblivion and that game is 12 years old. In my opinion, semi open world games are the best.
Thing is, simulation is the direction things seem to be going in, and that includes the boringness of stuff. What happens then is, they cut back on size to prevent players from being bored from the realism, while purporting to be going for realism in the game. That kind of paradoxical push and pull is only troublesome. That's the "X seconds rule" thing. I agree that abstractions get along with gaming and storytelling far better. While reading a novel you wouldn't want to read about all of the boring shit a character would do on the way to work if nothing relevant happened. I think a solution to this kind of problem would be to implement a more immersive shortcut system that isn't exactly fast travel but rather kind of resembles it. For instance, in Skyrim you have those carts that can take you from one city to another, and that system wasn't bad. What would be interesting would be to have tons of nothingness around each city and roads, then also perhaps quests or maps that would point towards treasure and loot meaning that guided or purposeful exploration would be rewarded but walking around just for whatever reason would get you lost or in danger. That would force players to try and get along with the systems in the game and also acquainted with the world itself. Going back to Skyrim, it could perhaps be information requested from inn and tavern keepers. Some video on RUclips about Morrowind was all about the player-character connection in it due to having to really ask around for directions and learn the ins and outs of the game. That inaccessibility created meaning and engagement, and it's largely absent these days. This conversation is fascinating, honestly. The more the industry veers towards huge worlds, the less of a connection there is with the world itself during the experience. AC Odyssey is just running around towards the next undiscovered location, which will invariably be an enemy stronghold, cave or little town. Once you've explored one area you've explored them all mechanically speaking.
I couldn't agree more. This video so well done. The part about FF15 taking 15-30 minutes to drive through the entire 'continent" is super on point. It even takes 3 hours to drive across the largest Island of Hawaii. The reason I feel Open World works for BOTW is because other Zelda games makes no attempt to cover an entire planet, other Zelda games just cover one city (Hyrule) and it's surrounding geography. BOTW simply does the same but makes it 1:1, so you don't lose out on epic scale. I think BOTW is closer to the GTA model than the FF15/Skyrim model.
Can't say I agree. Skyrim (especially with some atmospheric mods) was just such a joy to walk through and I didn't need it to feel actual continent sized. It's about sunset chasing, seeing a random battle or new area far in the distance as you crest a hill. The abstract style world could only hint at such moments by scripting them, whereas discovering them on your own is an unparalleled feeling in gaming.
The sad reality is the reason why open worlds are so commonplace is because "Open World" is the easiest form of single player campaign gameplay to consistantly monetize. Also, they're not very hard to design, comparatively-speaking.
What I dislike about modern open world games is that they resort to vast but empty and artifficial open-ended environments filled with pointless loot resources to collect, checklist requirements and main/side objectives in order to complete the game but nothing much to do instead of being dense open-ended inter-connected world with tons of activities and livelyhoods that almost feels real in players eyes. It's like the developers implemented that mindset where bigger on a default means better, so they resort to making bigger areas but don't know what to put in them so they add pointless filler and call it a day. It's like they were forced to make bigger open-ended worlds because it's becoming the modern standard in video games. Not to mention the urge for photo-realism in games which, in my opinion, is the reason why it takes a considerable amount of time to develop video games lately. It's a shame though, because I remember when I was completely amazed by the dense and seamless open structure of the first Jak and Daxter game where it all feels inter-connected and lived in, which made me excited about the possibilities of a wider potential in post-PS2 era. And they used all of that memory capacity for useless checklist filler where the only purpose is to earn the platinum trophy instead of exploring plethora of new towns and landscapes. And that's where my disappointment lies when it comes to modern FF games, especially with FFXV. I enjoyed it, but I expected more than just two towns to explore. I'm more in favor of overworlds instead of open-world environments, but if there needs to be an open-world game, I'd rather it be a smaller scale one with tons of fun activities to do where it feels bigger in return rather than a huge scale one with empty environments, tons of looting and nothing much else to do. Yakuza games will impress no one with the scale of its open ended structure, but it works on the franchise's favor when they shouldn't be considered as open-world game. They're basically open-districts with tons of fun side activities that almost simlute the real modern life-style.
I love it when you analyze video game design choices and techniques. Whether in a standalone video like this or in a podcast or even in the middle of a game's analysis/review, they're the most interesting and informative videos you come up with. You might not realize the service you're doing the whole gaming community, but I won't let it go unappreciated. I'm sure young people as well as aspiring developers are watching your videos and their opinions, ideas and practices will certainly be influenced by videos like this. All I'm saying is, you're a force of good in the gaming community, and I'm very thankful for that.
Omg I been preaching this for years but didn't know how to interpert it exactly and people just thought I was so full of it. My deduction was that with new rampant evolving technologies, have restricted alot of ways to incorporate these enthralling fantasy epics both in terms of expansion and creativity for a japanese role playing game. That is why many devs still resort to create their ambitious projects using a style and approach that is more rooted to traditional design such as Dragon quest XI or Ni no kuni as opposed to utlizing all of the near photo CGI open world seamless transioning of many of todays western games and newer Japanese role playing games like FF XV. Simple speaking the many massive worlds you visit in the polygon and sprite era's were just enormous in terms of its design being 2d background art and pixel landscapes and the scope felt more like you were exploring a large thriving world but making that same sort of scope TODAY, is just almost impossible with today's tech. Look at FF VII remake as a pure example of that. That is basically only the midgar portion of FF VII's world, yet its expanded with all the graphic fidelity it can handle but its still relativly a small space in the game, were as FF VII's world from the PS1 was enormious with 3 continents across a massive ocean, with volcano's mountains, towering castles, desserts, snowy landscapes. I just think the implementation and design for those traditional styles felt much larger to me then open worlds of today's tech if that makes sence. You probably explained it a bit better in this video though.
I've been saying something similar for years, that giant open worlds often feel empty compared to "giant open areas". Like you said Xenoblade did this best, but I think one that's often overlooked is Dragon Age Inquisition, it had all these huge open areas, but you switch between them. I also always found that more compelling as frankly, it limits how frequently I'd otherwise use fast travel systems, which I hate but exist out of neccesity in open world games.
Oh also, an "open world" that is detailed and fascinating for me is Link to the Past or Resident Evil. They're contained large zones but for the most part within this sandbox you can play.
A pretty neat solution would be to incorporate the two. You know how riding the car in FFXV is supposed to show the bonding part of traveling between areas? Developers can do something similar on world maps. Maybe visually have an overworld map that gradually grows into details, showing the transition between areas. Like the tedious parts during trips. These could be character building portions, and then players arrive at a city, and these cities can be small areas like you'd find in Xenoblade 2. These transition areas can be arrived in anyway. It's a win win I think.
Old jrpgs filled me with this idea that there were secrets worth finding in the strangest reaches of a map. A perfect example: Duncan’s house in Ff6. All you see is a group of trees and you say to yourself: “that’s a weird pattern, I’m going to go down there and check it out”. I also think that since the surprise of the discovery was always worth the effort of exploration, you began to think and dream about what else could be out there that you missed. The importance of the discoveries,encouraged you to believe there just might be more out there, which made the world feel bigger. In Skyrim, most of your discoveries, even ones that seem consequential, don’t give you any real reward. So the world might be full of things to do, but they’re boring, which discourages you from looking for more and dreaming about what else you might find. It discourage the imagination from wondering about what else could be out there. The concept of a bigger world dies out when we, the players, stop wondering what else there might be. On an almost completely different side note: In the real world, sights, animals and things that are rare are valued and make us stop and admire them. We think about how big and beautiful the real world is. How we still haven’t “seen it all”. Games can do this similarly by having exploration show us things and items that are rare and different from what we already have seen or had. Most open world games fail to give you rewards that move your imagination to WANT to think about what else you could be missing. It’s filled with padding and quests that are identical to the last 30 that you completed. That padding makes you feel like you’ve already discovered and seen everything that’s worth seeing; making the world seem small. In Skyrim’s favour, discovering the dwemer underworld was amazing and made the world feel bigger and more interesting than what was just on the surface. Like, there might have been more on the surface that I missed. So my imagination stirred and I wanted to see more. It was probably the one discovery that made me feel like the world bigger than it let on.
Going back to having large instances does make worlds bigger in my mind just on the fact that areas can be seen beyond your playable area. Such as the Prince of Persia series where a map can be big or small but visuals go out as far as your character can see. In all I like both for there various gameplays. Also great vid👍
I agree, and at least part of why I preferred the last third of FFXV over the rest is that sense of scale you get. Going from place to place on the train makes the world feel immense.
Very well stated! I was always wondering why gameworlds then felt so much bigger and more lively to me than modern games do now. I don't hate open world games, I just prefer them not to be. I stopped playing lots of them because I couldn't immerse in the large worlds presented, even though immersion is the thing open world games strive to provide. But I hope this is a just trend that will come and go like others have. A game doesn't have to be open world to be good and to feel real.
Great video! I'm curious where Dragon Quest VIII falls into place here since it kinda of falls into both categories. Abstract and 1 to 1 ratio depending how you are traversing.
I never really thought about this until i played Final Fantasy Tactics with the calendar being active as you go from point to point. Seeing that it was taking a entire day to travel a half inch on the screen and having a full scale battle that sometimes took 15 minutes plus. In an open world game do you think that the day/night cycle would be considered an abstraction? Or a effective one at that?
You bring up a very good point with day and night cycles. This is the strongest counterpoint to my argument, and one I want to address in a follow up video. Thank you for your comment!
Just so we are on the same page, I much more prefer the over world map in most cases. I really liked what Ni No Kuni 2 did with it actually and i think it is a awesome representation of how it can be successful in current gen.
Awesome vid. This seems like an extension on the points you made in response to my last patreon question. I definitely agree with this, and the points you made about xenoblade and ff12 is why I was hoping that ff16 would adopt using zones over the way they went about it in ff15.
What do you think would be a good way to implement this in games now, that are more immersive? Obviously, it would be silly to see a giant Noctis running around a tiny overworld. Maybe larger sectioned off areas than we've had in the past? Something similar to Witcher 3, or Dragon Age Inquisition. Where you have to fast travel via the world map to get to a different region or country, but they still contain huge, convincing areas to play in, that don't feel like the little dioramas of something like FFXII? You could even include abridged travel cutscenes similar to Red Dead Redemption II's fast travel mechanic.
And that's actually why I am actually more curious than hyped to see the FF7 remake. Just how are they going to do the world map? Ni no Kuni would be a good inspiration, but it would clash with the seeming realism they seem to want to take...
This is why I love the Xenoblade games. They actually give you something to do in the worlds, and they are ALIEN worlds with features we’d never see IRL
Nicely put man. I think this helps explain why I was so happy to see the return of the overworld map in Lost Sphear. Aside from nostalgia, anyway. I think that the other problem with open world maps is that they need to be "filled". I remember one of the problems I had with Twilight Princess' Hyrule Field, (yeah, remember when that was considered a large map?) was the fact that it was immense, but pretty much empty. Now, with Breath of the Wild, they've "filled" the world with things that aren't meaningful. Collecting Korok seeds, is a prime example of this. Now don't get me wrong, I enjoyed BotW, but I think that creating an open world, and filling it with these meaningless things to do only serves to decrease the overall impact that you could have had, if the game had instead used abstraction, as you said. Hand crafted worlds are more interesting than procedurally generated ones, even if artists went back over the world and spruced it up a bit after-the-fact.
This is why I prefer games like Dark Souls and Nioh. It feels like you are in a small part of a much larger world. Skyrim just felt ridiculous to me. Like, its cities are suppose to be massive, but you get to them and there is only a dozen or so houses. It completely takes you out of the game.
The original Mirrors Edge, which although not perfect, had linear levels that gave a real feeling of progression through unique locations and highly focused challenges. Mirrors Edge Catalyst, although not completely terrible, replaced these for the most part with a bland and lifeless open world that is slow to navigate through. I think Mirrors Edge is a good example of how the move to open world can break immersion and slow down game play. Sometimes, linear works best.
Hang on... 2 hrs to cross Skyrim at roughly 8 miles distance. So 8 hrs would be 32 miles yes? Not the 25 miles depicted in the analogy... I mean it's still small obvs. And it absolutely does not make a difference to the point being made... But anyway, did I miss something? I expected to see a example given at 32.4 miles distance or something.
The thing with Zelda, even though people complain about BOTW bing empty... it still is a lot more involved than the likes of OOT or Twilight Princess, which had significantly smaller worlds with much less to do. I think the only Zelda game that handled scale better than BOTW is Wind Waker, but that's if you can get behind the sailing in the game.
I agree. This is something that’s bothered me at least as far back as playing WoW, and having the thought that all of Azeroth-as it’s presented in walking distance in the game-would really be like Hawaii in size, roughly, if that. But it’s supposed to be a whole world. Just pulled me out a bit, and there wasn’t a good form of abstraction provided to pull me back in. I could never see that “world” as anything other than tiny islands.
Well... If you play Euro Truck Simulator 2 (or any other title in the series) then, even though the world is scaled down (around 1:25 I guess), you would still feel the world being large. But that game is entirely about driving, rather than RPing. I think having a scaled down world is entirely okay, but the thing is, the player must want to go through it rather than want to fast travel. Otherwise it would be just a boring world. I mean, I don't think anyone would walk around towns in Elder Scrolls 2 rather than fast traveling, because, well, there's no fun doing that. And thus it's really hard to see an inter-city map with no scale down. Even if it's possible, I think the game would just force you to stay on road and allow you to fast forward. Except in one case: when you are playing an MMO. But only if most part of the world is for user generated contents. (Minecraft is 100% about UGC and that's why it's possible for people to choose to play in a very large world rather than a small one. If there's no UGC, people wouldn't want to go off-track anyway and thus what's the point.)
I don't play a tonne of open world games, but I definitely agree with this idea. Playing through Horizon last year, when I first zoomed the map out, and saw all the icons and the scale of the world/how long It would take to get there, I was honestly kind of irritated. Sometimes having a smaller world can make it more satisfying to explore/play through. The techniques you highlighted in FFXII and Xenoblade Chronicles can help to make the world feel large and diverse, without making it a slog to traverse. It brings up the whole fast-travel debate too, a meaningless world I just want to fast-travel through might as well be a small world I can use natural movement to explore
Thats why I am not too keen towards open world genre myself. Its too overwhelming, I love open level much more than open world, something like in Deus Ex or Prey 2016 gave us. Constrained experience but permit a bit of deviance and more than single a solution to get through the level that will enrich our experience and immersion. Meanwhile, open world give us vast and large level to explore and even to messed up, but when we pick the story mission there's just only single linear too constrained solution to resolve it, contrasting its nature as 'open world' game. The other activity we can do in open world game maybe just pick up collectible, or other unrelevant activity while not giving us much chance to craft our own experience.
Surprised no one mentioned Monster Hunter yet in the comments. The first 4 generations of Monster Hunter games have all employed the abstract zone based map design. When you accept a quest in MH, you go out into a unique locale that can vary in the type of biome or landscape it is. Each locale has varying regions or zones and they are connected with each other via loading screens. The sense of scale you get from each of these unique locales is very grand, as if you are hunting and chasing a monster in an area that spans for miles. But with the 5th generation of Monster Hunter (MH World and MH RIse), they changed the design philosophy of their maps and instead of having interconnected zones, you have one seamless map, which to be fair, are decently sized, but it is missing that sense of grandeur that existed with the classic MH games (gen 1-4). I definitely agree with your video. I prefer the abstract approach, it helps make the maps feel larger. Loading screens don't bother me either unless they are really really long.
To me they feel small because they are so big you are never going to walk from location to location except the first time you need to go there. When you get fast travel (typically immediately after you first arrive at a new location), you are going to use it exclusively. So now, generally, even though you are in a giant continent, you are actually only warping instantly between small self-contained locations. BotW ameliorated this quite well by placing so much emphasis on hanggliding and climbing, which constantly gives you a very wide view of the landscape and gives you an accruate sense of how large it is. In games where you're restricted to ground traversal, your view is mostly of the immediate surroundings, which are obviously much smaller in scale. So if you are warping instantly from place to place and the farthest you can ever see around you is about the size of a room or forest clearing or whatever, the game will feel small.
Great and very interesting video Mike. I am in two minds, I love open world like the Witcher 3 and Skyrim, however I recently played through an older game that I hadn't played before, Tales of Symphonia and absolutely loved it's smaller world and overall structure and story :)
I like Shadow of The Colossus. It is The Forbidden Land so it is kinda okay to be a a barren wasteland. The only problem is the lack of animals. Maybe because most animals doesn't want to live there? Who knows.
Only played the first game, but I agree. Conversely, I think Trails in the Sky didn't do a good job at selling scale (to be fair, that wasn't one of its goals). But it's pretty immersion breaking when people take airship rides to locations just a minute away on foot. That's why I'm glad Falcom added the required use of transportation to sell the scale of the Erebonian empire.
Here's a real size world map: Pokémon Go..... Actually, I still play its older brother: Ingress. The world is huge. So large no one can complete the full map in one life time. Usually, other players aren't dangerous while still being competitive, but depending on the part of the map you play, the NPCs and hazards can be a bigger threat. I'd like to see games like these to have a better RPG elements implanted in it.
This video articulated something that's been nagging me regarding open-world games. I've always felt the same way. Having played FF12 and FF15, I can say I felt the same way. FF12 feels massive because you get that sense that you're covering so much of the world. In FF15, they even tell you how many miles away something is. When an entire continent is something like 6 miles across, it pulls you out of the world. I also have a problem with open-world games sacrificing the main plot and focusing on all the sidequests. FF15 and Skyrim are both good examples of this. While I enjoy both games, the main story in each game is very weak. Then you have games like Dragon Age: Inquisition. Each area has some of that open-world feel, but the separation into different areas makes the world feel bigger.
Or.... you go the Daggerfall route and create an actual continent and give the payer a fast travel system that isn't free, that also borrows from the encounter system in that it's possible to get inturrupted by mobs or npcs you'd find on the map were you crazy enough to go manually.
I really enjoyed this content. To further your point, you didn't talk about the density of meaningful things to do in some open world games that further the feeling of boredom as one walks from one corner of the map to the other
There are only three people in this world who are walking across all these maps: "8-Bit Bastard", "TheyCallMeConor" and "How Big is the Map?" Just to let you know :)
When are you updating the Dark Pixel Music channel? Still waiting for How to Play Final Fantasy 7 Battle Theme ( Still More Fighting ) on Guitar - Part 3 ;)
Depends on how much the developer put into the game. I spent 150hrs+ on Witcher 3 and Morrowind easily and replayed them several times. I like games that limit fast travel and force the player to put some effort in exploration. In Morrowind there are some ways to fast travel, but they are limited and most of the time you have to traverse by foot. Betrayal at Krondor have one world map, but it's dangerous and there is a ration system. Right now I'm playing The Long Dark where you have to go everywhere by foot.
I prefer smaller more detailed maps to size. Like a Dragon games. Two exceptions, I can think of are Death Stranding, which makes the actual traversal more of a challenge I initially and MGSV where it basically becomes a Zone in every main mission. Also Kingdom Come: Deliveeance strived for adapting a small kingdom and it also feels pretty authentic. I think it depends on how you fill these open worlds. You need to bring traversal or resource management or true exploration to the table to make traversing the world engaging and not boring „push forward only“ affairs.
![Noob To Max With DRAGON REWORK In Blox Fruits [FULL MOVIE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LnBMOinoOvA/mqdefault.jpg)
I want to pin a new comment here because there is something I failed to address in the video that is really important to the discussion, and that is the fact that Day/Night cycles are abstractions that suggest the passage of time in open world games, which means that the 2 hour trip from Solitude to Riften was actually several days in the game. This is the strongest counter point to what I'm saying in the video, and one I'd like to address in a future video, but I might as well bring it up here for the sake of the conversation.
My response to that (in short) is that this kind of abstraction falls apart more quickly in my mind than zone construction does, and admittedly that is a matter of personal preference. It is easier (for me) to accept scale when we fade to black, suggest the passage of time, and change the climate or environment, than it is to watch a snow driven landscape turn into a desert in a matter of minutes. Again, it's a matter of personal preference, but the way these transitions in open worlds are handled breaks immersion more quickly for me, and the larger the environments are made to try and blend them more realistically, the more empty space will be created that is difficult to fill with interesting things to do. In other words, if they are made even bigger they only become more boring to traverse. I prefer abstraction, which gives me the sense that the world is big while allowing me to get to the next town in a couple of minutes and get on with the good stuff.
Breath of the Wild might not have been the best choice for your thumbnail.
Borderlands is another example of the Zone concept done real right
Everything in a game is an abstraction tho
the open world itself is just an abstraction of a real world.
You just never get a “break” in the visuals. Like the zones offer.
Maybe the fade to black is easier to detach from, cuz it’s MORE of an abstraction. More is left up to the players imagination for sure.
I really dig the video. Very interesting concept.
I think you're a pretty unique person and thus I think this probably bothers you more than others. Logically speaking there isn't any arguments that could be said against your good breakdown and reasoning, but I think immersion is in itself is very subjective to each individual. For example many people hail BotW as breaking new grounds of immersion and concept in open world games. However I've found Skyrim to be much more immersive despite it's speedy zone changes. Some people may find immersion in realism whereas like yourself, others may find immersion in abstraction.
David Kwon I agree, skyrim may be the at the very tip top of “immersing” me in a game, personally speaking.
For me I think part of it has to do with its first person perspective. As well as having no mini map. BoTW was certainly doing its job tho. Especially for a third person game.
Also where do you look for “realism” in your games? The visuals, or the mechanics?
Games that look “real” but don’t play real- just cause 3.
Or games that play real but might not look it- BoTW? (Besides the sheika slate I guess haha) I dunno, I never really dug the “realism” argument being leveled at games. But it is still an interesting topic for sure.
Games that both look and play realistically?? Basically SIM games, maybe the Ubisoft shit? (Wildlands, Maybe even farcry)
Which are boring me to tears lately... battlefield is a better example
Although pretty much EVERY game has a HIGHLY abstracted health system.
Basically abstraction is a vital part of games in one way or another.
(This wasn’t aimed at anyone just rhetorical thoughts, feel free to respond tho!) peace ✌️
A lot of open world games are like driving through the back roads of Texas. On your right...nothing,on your left...nothing and two miles ahead...nothing.
That's literally Final Fantasy 15
Excalibur01 Hey they said it was a fantasy based on reality...to bad it hit too close to home for me. Final Fantasy XV aka Morning Commute The Game.
Michael Lewis I live in Texas so true 😂
_This_ is the reason openworld games feel small to me, even ones based in a city like GTA. There's very little to actually explore in the world.
I'm a simple man. All I want is an overworld map Final Fantasy XVI.
THANK YOU for this. Narrative is about limitation, not freedom. FF7 and early JRGs felt bigger than any open world game I've ever played. Abstraction as you put it, or symbolism in less than real looking characters, allowed for infinite interpretation both in characters and scale. Much love man
Dark Pixel Gaming overworld map. All the way
Wishlist for FF 16:
- Overworld map
- Complete and engaging story at launch
- More strategic combat
Am I delusional?
FF 6, 7, 9, when I think back on these games I remember how massive they felt, how rich and deep the story and the world was. These open world titles, Witcher 3, FFXV, etc, they just feel hollow and soulless, like a bad film adaptation of an incredible novel. It seems like developers have forgotten that graphics != good gameplay. Bravo to you for calling this out, bring back abstraction, stop spending millions making shitty games with great graphics.
I agree entirely with this video. I think actually with how crazy costs are to make games nowadays, you would think they would be open to going back to forms of abstractions. FF13 may of been too linear, but FF15 was the exact issue in the other extreme. If world maps are no longer allowed to be a thing, then I hope FF16 does take inspiration from FF12 or Xenoblade. FF14 however is structured similar to FF12 where there are zone lines to each area. Making the world feel big despite only two continents technically being available. It also however gives that grand feeling of wanting to explore even more as new content comes out. Hopefully Square-Enix does take the criticism of the open world.
Great video dude, you have some excellent points.
I think Zelda BotW did it right. I don't think Zelda games were meant to be as a grand scale as say....Skyrim. Hell, Miyamoto said it himself that he wanted players to be able to fit a "miniature garden inside their drawer" not a Continent. Which works perfectly. BotW is just big enough to enjoy, and yet not get boring at the same time. Same goes for Zelda 1, and Link to the Past. I also think games like Far Cry 5 are smart enough to address that the open world is a "County" and not the entire State of Montana to bring a more realistic scope. I prefer that. It would have bothered me of they said that it was the entire state..it would have definitely felt too small at that point.
I have a similar problem. It really breaks the immersion when you see the capital of a kingdom be a few houses big. How can I care about this grand epic war when the population of the entire nation is less than a thousand people?
I still prefer moderately sized, well made zones/dungeons, that are filled with interactivity, rather than a large bland world, that feels empty.
Great video. One counterpoint for me is that overworld maps often leave the world feeling super empty. Sure it’s abstract representation, but flying a ship around FF7,8,9 and only seeing one big city and a couple towns per continent is just as distracting to me as running across Skyrim in an hour. Both have their pros and cons.
You could do it like in Bioware games where you just "fast travel" to other areas that are supposed to be hundreds of kilometers (or lightyears in the case of KotOR and Mass Effect) apart. This avoids boring overworld maps but keeps the sense of a huge world.
This could have been solved by continuing to innovate the concept of the map to give players more stuff to do. It's kind of an obscure example, but you can look at Mount and Blade: Warband for a more complex overworld. Travel time between towns is massively important, army size can affect movement speed, you have map-specific skills you can level like tracking and spotting distance, and you can have both friendly and hostile encounters with NPCs on the map itself as they follow their own schedules. Now, it is an open-ended WRPG and a lot of this probably isn't applicable to story-based JRPGs, but it's still an interesting example.
I agree all the way, man. I wish more game devs/producers/executives would stop and ask themselves "does this game benefit from having open world design, as opposed to segmented world design, or traditional levels"
I do call out the bullshit problems with open world sandbox is that despite being vast and beautiful, it's the same as if you go outside your house. If you have nothing to do, it is background to you and irrelevant. In a game, it's literally wasted data to give you the illusion of space.
Excalibur01 Yeah. Everyone has giant monsters in their backyard
What I meant is, there's lot of space but nothing to do and basically that empty space is in itself a challenge because you need to travel THROUGH all that nothing
Maybe vast open areas. Developers need to stop doing that. But they also shouldn't pull a God of War 4 and have a lot of narrow places because they feel way to small in scale.
this is what i was thinking about when comparing ff12 to ff9, ff12 had massive zones to travel through, but it felt empty and it didnt help that the cities and towns there felt empty too, basically their just places to buy stuff,
but 9 felt big in terms of content and story, the locations in 9 though small, had a alot of character and by the way the story uses the locations it felt like there's something to do there,
like for example its in ff9 where the locations feel like they have culture, there are kingdoms there where you attend a hunting festival, or a city where theres a card tournament and an auction house,
there towns also where there are mini-sidequest with the people inside that unlocks new locations/mini-games, it felt like there was something to do for players who are curious enough to roam around the small location.
my main point is that open world games are great and all, but what matters to me is making the locations meaningful either story wise, or through content.
Exactly the world most advanced sandbox already exist. It's called OUTSIDE. You have a million ways to interact realistically with it.
You hit the nail on the head buddy. The ironic thing is that as the game maps have grown the scope of their narratives have gotten smaller
That's the problem with games trying to achieve a level of realism by doing away with abstract interpretations. When something is supposedly "realistic" there's no incentive ask questions of want explanations. The rules that govern the universe are plopped in your lap from the first moment and you never revisit it again. Abstractions however forces you to look for answers to the why, what, where, and how of the game's purpose and design proving a deeper relationship between the player, the developers, and the product. FFXII is huge because time was spent to incorporate answers into every detail of every zone. Everything was hand crafted to give you and idea of the scope that was both present in the zone you were in and also applicable to the overarching world of Ivalice. Many open world games don't share that level of depth. It's simply make the world, generate NPCs, and scatter side quest around the map. They're more akin to a high production but smaller scale MMO rather than a fleshed out and rich single player experience.
I couldn't put it into words but that's how it felt playing Skyrim and BotW towards their end games. We can suspend logic to leap between fictional and practical scales, but it doesn't make the problem go away. Really interesting insight.
This feels very relevant now that the Final Fantasy VII Remake is on the horizon ... it's going to be interesting to see how the two compare in terms of world design.
This is what worries me with the eventual next FF7R installment. Some people argue for an open world style akin to FFXV. I don’t think they can do that world justice with current open world design. I hope they implement the overworld in some way. Make my imagination fill in the blanks.
Awesome video Mike, I agree wholeheartedly. One of the biggest examples of this is mass effect 1-3 vs. Andromeda. The galaxy map alone plus the various planets and races you visited did an amazing job of selling the complete vastness of space without ever opening too much of it up to the player. In comparison, andromeda feels tiny, and it's a bit disappointing when you compare it to the diversity of its predecessors.
Would have been interesting to hear your take on Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall.
For an open world game to feel truly big, the far reaches of the map must feel truly remote, and inaccessible, compared to your current location. It must feel like it's a serious amount of time and effort to reach the other side.
Red Dead Redemption (haven't played 2) feels big even though you have a horse. From the far reaches of Mexico all the way to the deep forests of Tall Trees feels like a proper journey, and the soundtrack goes a long way towards establishing that diverse atmosphere
I almost didn't click on this because BotW's world (your thumbnail) does not feel small to me. But I'm glad I watched this anyway because of your main points on abstraction. I don't think you even referred to BotW directly at all.
Abstraction can be used to make larger feeling world, but it can also require a greater suspension of disbelief. If you go from an open-world version of a game to one where you have a separate map screen to travel from location to location, it can feel like a let-down. An example of this I can think of, although not exactly going from Open-world to over-world is Tales of Symphonia and its sequel Dawn of a New World. The original had an over-world you could traverse on to go from place to place. In the sequel, you only have a menu selection showing the map. If you can remember people being disappointed over FFX having that menu selection on the airship and not being able to manually fly around the world, it's kinda like that feeling, but instead with Symphonia, you have something that was traverse-able before which is now only a menu option.
You should check out Razbuten's video on open-world games "I Hate Fast Travel" if you haven't already.
Kinda off topic: Strangely, I'm looking forward to FFVII REMAKE having less abstraction than its original. Not because I don't like abstraction or prefer open-world games, but because I'm more interested in seeing a retelling of FFVII's world from a different perspective. I really don't like how some people have been upset with the prospective that REMAKE will have a different battle system, etc, than the original. I don't want to play the exact same FFVII with only better graphics. I've played the original plenty of times that I'm ready to experience this world in a different way.
Super interesting point and discussion, and something I definitely feel tugging at my suspension of disbelief while playing games like Skyrim. However, is it possible that this seamless traversal across, say, a 1:100 scale Skyrim is a kind of modern abstraction like an overworld map? Just like I know my character is not a giant stomping across a continent, I know my Skyrim character didn't stroll across an entire province in a couple hours. Of course, both of those things did happen on screen, but I know what they represent. I definitely agree cities have worked better, and you're right about larger scale world's necessarily becoming smaller, but perhaps Skyrim wasn't meant to feel like a 1:1 representation.
Yeah, you could definitely be right about that. I suppose that could have been the intention. I'll add that I enjoyed the crap out of Skyrim when it was released, and had a blast exploring the world.
Open world becomes small when you can just teleport everywhere.
THANK YOU! This is exactly what I've been thinking for the last couple of years. Games like KotOR and Dragon Age Origins seem MUCH larger to me than Skyrim, even though their worlds are tiny compared to Skyrim's. In Dragon Age, you have the country of Ferelden, but you can only travel to a few areas. When you travel to an area, you can see the path of your party on the map. Even the capital city of Ferelden is implied to be much larger than the few areas you can visit. This is what proper RPGs should do. It not only leaves the size of the world and what happens during travel to your fantasy, it also is more lore-friendly. Man, I remember playing KotOR as a kid and when I went on board the Ebon Hawk and traveled to another planet, I figured the flight would take several days and imagined how my party would talk with each other, eat and sleep during the flight. It was also clear to everyone that the areas you could walk around in were supposed to be a tiny part of the planet. This is something modern open world games fail to reproduce. They feel so empty, meaningless and boring compared to classic RPGs. Old school RPGs are like interactive novels, while modern RPGs are basically walking simulators that are all about finding useless stuff spread randomly accross the world. I mean how can a game like Skyrim, whose world is like two kilometers wide, make you feel like an important hero who saves the world from a dangerous evil? If this evil is so dangerous, how come that the people of Cyrodiil, just a few hundred meters south, aren't affected at all by this?
The best open World games are in these genres Metroidvania/JRPG/Isometric RPG
Except none of those are necessarily "open". Heck, "Metroidvania" is, by design, NOT open world at all. The whole point of "Metroidvania" is for most of the map to be closed off (largely in corridor mazes), with more and more becoming possible to traverse as you gain new tools or abilities. Seamless, interconnected traversal is not necessarily the same thing as open world.
@@Lugbzurg well isometric rpg like Fallout 1 and 2, baldurs gaste series and arcanum are kinda open
Just my two cents - FFXII feels small. The abstraction there never worked that well for me. I felt it worked better in FFX but in both it felt "small". Actually for size something like FFIX felt large - the cities genuinely felt big. All of these games suffer from the issue that open world suffers though - once you step back and look at the sparsity of everything, everything feels small. What I'd love is a game that could make you feel like there were small outposts and villages while travelling with huge city scapes or middling towns to actually explore. Abstraction would be key for this, but I feel like until we get that none of these games will feel HUGE. The single exception maybe - FFVII. Because of the "midgar moment" it genuinely feels like FFVII is HUGE just because you suddenly leave a large area to enter an even huger one that (for me at least) I didn't realise was coming. It was amazing. I just wish we could get that feeling again.
There is already such a thing as a 1:1 computerized virtual world that gamers sometimes forget about: Microsoft Flight Simulator and X-Plane. I realize these aren't "games" per se, with world conflicts, hit points, stories, or bosses. But still, it's a 1:1 virtual world that you can explore on your computer. But there isn't much point in flying across the continent because it usually entails just sitting and staring at a still screen for hours and not doing much (leave it on autopilot while you listen to DPG podcasts about open worlds in games - so meta). A 1 hour flight is sufficient for enjoying the purpose of the simulator. But there are simulator nerds who have flown around the entire world just to say they did (probably wasn't much fun).
For games to be fun and captivating, I agree abstraction is KEY. The most fun I've ever had with a computer flight simulator was when I was a youngin' playing Pilotwings 64, the gyrocopter in Little States. I could use my imagination to feel like I was exploring the country, and I could get from NYC to LA in an enjoyable amount of time. The less games leave to the player's imagination, the more they fall short of captivating make-believe experiences. I think this is why many people say games today in general aren't as fun as they used to be, and I'm inclined to agree. The fun per megabyte and pixel is much lower today.
I've always wanted to get into flight simulators... someday.
Couldn't agree more with this observation. Even though I still favor Square's PS1 style of pre-rendered backgrounds and overworlds, I think it would be possible to have a piece-wise world to traverse like FFX, FFXII and FFXIII that also included a traditional overworld with airship navigation.
Take the overworld map of FFXII for example. Say that once airship navigation became possible, you boarded the airship and then saw an overworld that looked something like it did in the games prior to VII. When you landed your airship in the "zoomed out" version of the overworld (the prior to VII version), you landed in the equivalent space in the FFXII style overworld. In short, there are two styles of traversal in this scenario: on foot in Square's "zones", or by air in Square's old school overworld. One problem with this is the space the loading screens represent at an abstract level which bridged different terrain (you walk to the edge of the snow level zone and end up in a woodland after the loading screen- what happens to the space in between?). I would say that it would only be possible to land when a prompt came up in the airship which designated the landing zone of your choice as a place that can be navigable by foot. So the simplified overworld with airship navigation could be "zoomed out" pretty far, even farther than it was in VIII, and would rekindle that notion of a huge world to explore. I could see my idea aggravating some players though as you would not be able to land everywhere, and it would be difficult to approximate where you were landing in relation to the "zones" navigable on foot.
12ealDeal Ni no kuni open world map does it just fine
Thank you for this video. While watching E3 presentations this year, they kept saying the word "seamless" to describe their gameplay transitions and it bugged me in a way that I couldn't quite describe, but this video articulates it perfectly. Thank you.
Hey Mike! Today I played the very first Ultima game which is the game that created the idea of traversing an overworld as a giant towering cities which Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy then followed and I noticed something interesting. In Ultima 1 there is a food ration count and as you move around the map your food ration count decreases in number which forces the player to traverse the map carefully and pay attention to where you are going. It also discourages exploration which I actually really appreciated because in a real life scenario, if we as people were to go on these grand journey's we would never want to explore just for fun and curiosity because we would waste so much time and resources while putting ourselves harms way. In a realistic scenario, we would want to get to where we need to go as safely and efficiently as possible. I thought that this element of survival was pretty neat and proves your point in how overworld map design philosophy from the very beginning was always meant to be a deliberate abstraction for a much grander journey as opposed to being taken literally. It also makes me wonder why JRPG's that followed suit with Ultima's overworld format didn't expand on interesting survival mechanics but instead stripped them away. From playing the first Ultima game, I now feel like JRPG's could be doing so much more to implement meaningful abstractions for danger and survival than just random battles with random monsters over and over again and I find it kind of funny how Ultima, a game that came out in 1981 provided that layer of depth which Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy seemed to ignore. I just thought I would bring this to light in case it's something you want think about, talk about or expand on in the future. Huge fan of the channel. Keep up the great work.
This is my biggest concern for the FFVII remake. I’d love if it the found a way to abstract the world map somehow. I just fear that’s not going to happen and the size of the world is going to be so small in comparison.
However, sandbox Midgar would be amazing.
I jump to the progression through environments in Half Life 2 as an example of how to sell scale pretty well too. I felt physically exhausted when I first beat the game because it felt like you had travelled SO far. They sprinkle vehicle sections and interiors just at the right moments to add up the feeling of distance covered and Half Life's a linear game. Yet it feels a lot bigger and the world is much more convincing to me than a lot of open world games. This video brings up a lot of cool ideas to think about. Nice job.
I completely agree. I'd rather explore a level in banjo kazooie then a whole island with nothing different to see.
Banjo is empty, the only thing in those levels are a ton of tedious chores.
Billysan291 what's a game that you consider not a tedious chore? Not even jiggy is gotten the same way. Different puzzle and you need to explore to find them all. I find most these open world games you don't need to explore these environments making them feel empty on a gameplay level, not a graphic /npc level
Mario Galaxy. Retroactively looking at it, Banjo is essentially nothing but the worst parts of Galaxy like throwing trash away. Just very derivative style task.
Billysan291 but Mario galaxy is liner... And Mario 64 and sunshine is closer to banjo. I just want an open world with things that actually reward you for searching. Not just collectables that do nothing to progress your character
It's pretty much the same with GTA games imo. Even tho GTA 5 in fact have a much bigger map than other previous GTA games, i still got the impression that GTA San Andreas' open world is bigger than the GTA 5. Of course the level design and the games draw distance can affect how we perceived the scale of the open world in video games
I disagree with the premise here, at least for me personally. In Skyrim, I have no problem seeing the 30-45 minute trek from Whiterun to Riften as an abstraction of what should be a days-long trip. In that time, I walk across winding mountain paths, fight bears, meet merchants, discover ruins and caves, etc. It functions just like a a JRPG trip from town to town. Just because it's more realistic than than a 16-bit game doesn't mean I expect it to be a 1-to-1 recreation. Like in classic rpgs, we're presented with a condensed version of what should represent an epic quest. It's still up to our imaginations to fill in the holes.
And I think it's worth noting that just because you CAN go border-to-border in 2 hours doesn't mean that you will. Most players will go to Whiterun, receive quests that gradually expand the explored area outward in all directions, then use fast travel from the furthest edge whenever they need to go somewhere new. This illusion won't work for everyone (and some folks will decide they have to walk straight to Makarth in the beginning of the game for some reason), but for me Skyrim feeling small was never an issue.
That's not to say that there aren't aspects of Skyrim that hurt immersion - I just think they're mostly gameplay issues rather than world design. Being so combat focused means you meet (and kill) more people in caves and bandit camps than you see in most towns (why do so many people prefer a life of crime in a dank old ruin to living comfortably in one of the many towns? Or at least joining the rebellion?). Returning to town should be all about getting a good meal and a warm bed to sleep in, but instead it's about BUYING ALL THE IRON THEN FORGING 70 IRON DAGGERS BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO LEVEL YOUR SMITHING.
I see where you're coming from. The other thing that bothered me personally about Skyrim though is that the capital city had like 80 people living in it. There's a surprising lack of people populating those cities. Just felt really, really small for something that was trying to give me a sense that it was so huge.
Yeah, that's fair. It doesn't help that townsfolk just yell their problems at you as you pass by. They don't really interact with each other or the world around them. Maybe they'll learn from Witcher 3, but Fallout 4 doesn't make me too optimistic.
Anyway, thanks for the great content!
@@ResonantArc/videos Tiny cities, indeed. I'm certain people make larger and more complex cities DMing in D&D. So as usual, we have to rely on mods to make Bethesda's AAA games as big as they easily *should* have been from the start.
FF7s "open world" blew my mind as a kid. Traveling around an entire planet.
You just gave me the idea of a game where the journey between locations of interest has FTL/80 Days style encounters in addition to battles. I wonder how different games would be if abstraction was pursued more than it is.
There's also the tedium of traversing said open world. Like for me in GTA, I am always entertained by the story but hate the long drives to get from point A to B.
I fully agree about this sensation around open world games. Doesn't matter how much you can provide you always be smaller than our real perception. Abstraction of world maps is great and I really miss that. Since Final Fantasy X, lack of world map makes me feel like these worlds have no soul. The last game that I remember a good sensation of full complete world is Tales of Legendia. In fact this can be a good opportunity to create more and more content to unexplored areas in the map once you just have a symbolically images of what it could be.
A great example of this (and a great pair of games to use as a comparison) is Mirror's Edge vs. Catalyst. Not only did I like the atmosphere of the city in ME1 much more, but the fact that you are only every traversing small sections of the city makes the game's world feel so much bigger. Compared to Catalyst where you can physically traverse a MUCH larger portion of the city seamlessly (unless you consider the swing-shot a seam), it still feels like a much smaller game world in comparison. The first game's division by missions helps create that sense of abstraction and allows your imagination to fill in the in-between spaces, and the way the map jumps around with the buildings corresponding to the mission you're selecting highlighted in red is such a nice touch.
Great analysis DPG!
Hey I agree exactly! Thought about this when I played FFXV. One observation of mine is that as games get more "realistic" per their design intent, they become "darker", too serious. Compare FFXV to FFVII, both stories with good vs evil where FFVII is way more playful. Childhood me enjoyed the good vs evil in FFVII while adult me felt uncomfortable with the good vs evil in FFXV- a bit much...
Anyway, you are very smart and observant and critical. Well done.
Since this open world trend started I've come to appreciate more the small hub games. Packed with intertwined stories, npcs. Small maps I can learn faster but it will take me long to uncover all it's secrets.
That's why I prefer Demon's Souls to Dark Souls. Demon's Souls levels may not have all been physically connected, but each archstone and the levels contained within gave a great sense of scale and atmosphere to each region, like the world was truly large. Dark Souls on the other hand, has a much smaller feeling world because there are dozens of little "areas" connected together. Areas like Valley of the Drakes (like a 20-foot path) left me extremely disappointed, since I didn't see the area as a valley at all. On the other hand, the Valley of Defilement spanned multiple levels in Demon's Souls, and was a much more memorable area, even compared to Blight town.
StickySock Dark Souls is indeed an undergraded Demon's Souls. I was pretty disapointed with it when I started playing after Demon's Souls, but eventually the game grew on me. Bloodborne got the formula right, tho
Final Fantasy Mobius does the "abstraction" you talk about fairly well; you're mostly fighting on the same "stages" over and over, but since every area uses its own world map with different paths you traverse to get from point to point you get a suprising sense of scale out of it. Pretty impressive for a phone game aswell.
I think that when videogame developers had limitations for game design and videogame mechanics, they had to be creative in order to develop the game that they wanted to create with all of that _"limited tools"_ in the industry at that time.
But right now the variety to create games is massive but the time to develop them is limited or sometimes they have a lot of time to develop a game but have a lot of problems in the development.
I'm a big fan of detailed zones and level design vs open world.
I agree with all of this. I feel that many corporations want their game worlds to be big rather than feel big. After all it’s a lot easy to sell a game on the fact that it is “so and so” square miles rather the promise that world will feel big.
Xenoblade Chronicles 1 (and to lesser extent 2) handle scale significantly better than many open world games through the use of abstraction and a unique world concept. When you first get to the Bionis Knee and see the Mechonis off in the distance, the knowledge that you will most likely go there creates a sense of scale that is unmatched even by games on modern hardware. Despite being several times bigger, Xenoblade Chronicles X never felt as grand, because there was never a moment that matched that sense of scale due the world being one seamless area (and the poor writing and story structure didn’t help, but that’s argument for another day).
Great visual essay!
He's right. The fading blackout screens definitely gave an illusion of time and distance
Devs need to realize that not every game works with an open world. Zelda doesn't need to be open world. Metal Gear doesn't need to be open world. These are the two best examples for me. Both have huge empty worlds that are gigantic for the sake of being gigantic. I hope this trend will come to an end eventually.
Breath of the Wild's world is not empty. There are tons of things to do along the way to a destination that it is very easy to get distracted finding secrets.
Well said. It wasn't a problem for me in MGSV since it still had tight levels at its core, but I do hope we get to a point where not every AAA game has to be a massive open-world sandbox. There are so few games that manage to stay interesting over 50+ hours, much less 100.
Zelda has always been open world, IMHO (just not sure about Zelda 2) there is not really that much abstraction, and this is the charm of it, its a story about a small group of individuals trying to live their lives.
Metal Gear Solid 5 was a smart open world IMHO, the execution didn't always worked, but the idea of having a tactical action/stealth shooter where you could decide upon how to engage the targets is fantastic.
*Core Gameplay* There are 3 rewards whenever you find a "secret":
Korok Seed(The most annoying repetitive reward you can find in the game)
Shrine(With a puzzle, which can range from Motion controls to Actually decent puzzle(Or be an instant reward shrine(Or a combat shrine, yay)))
Small goodie(Usually either a Weapon/shield/bow/armor(Super rare), Ore or Rupees)
And when most of the "rewards" you find are Korok Seeds. Nothing is more depressing to "find" than a rock that is just laying alone on top of a hill. Is it even a discovery when you know already what you are gonna find? Its like discovering a signpost when you walk across a road.
@@clayton_games "Breath of the Wild's world is not empty. There are tons of things to do along the way to a destination that it is very easy to get distracted finding secrets."
The problem though is that all of it feels meaningless. It feels like randomly generated filler to keep the player busy. Previous Zelda games had much smaller worlds but everything had a meaning. Everything was placed with thought behind it and had a purpose. You didn't have thousands of random items that are going to break anyway, instead every major item you got was an exciting milestone. Also, due to the fact that the games were more linear, the story was better and felt much more important. Even in Majora's Mask, which was mostly about its side quests, due to the small size of the world, everything had a purpose. In Skyrim for example, everything feels so random and meaningless. I mean sure, it's a good sandbox for people who like that sort of thing, but for people like me, who want an immersive experience with a good story and characters, this game design doesn't work very well. The last open world RPG I enjoyed was Oblivion and that game is 12 years old. In my opinion, semi open world games are the best.
Thing is, simulation is the direction things seem to be going in, and that includes the boringness of stuff. What happens then is, they cut back on size to prevent players from being bored from the realism, while purporting to be going for realism in the game. That kind of paradoxical push and pull is only troublesome. That's the "X seconds rule" thing.
I agree that abstractions get along with gaming and storytelling far better. While reading a novel you wouldn't want to read about all of the boring shit a character would do on the way to work if nothing relevant happened.
I think a solution to this kind of problem would be to implement a more immersive shortcut system that isn't exactly fast travel but rather kind of resembles it.
For instance, in Skyrim you have those carts that can take you from one city to another, and that system wasn't bad. What would be interesting would be to have tons of nothingness around each city and roads, then also perhaps quests or maps that would point towards treasure and loot meaning that guided or purposeful exploration would be rewarded but walking around just for whatever reason would get you lost or in danger. That would force players to try and get along with the systems in the game and also acquainted with the world itself. Going back to Skyrim, it could perhaps be information requested from inn and tavern keepers.
Some video on RUclips about Morrowind was all about the player-character connection in it due to having to really ask around for directions and learn the ins and outs of the game. That inaccessibility created meaning and engagement, and it's largely absent these days.
This conversation is fascinating, honestly. The more the industry veers towards huge worlds, the less of a connection there is with the world itself during the experience. AC Odyssey is just running around towards the next undiscovered location, which will invariably be an enemy stronghold, cave or little town. Once you've explored one area you've explored them all mechanically speaking.
Fact: The entire Half Life franchise offers more memorable moments, content and storytelling than many open worlds combined...
I couldn't agree more. This video so well done. The part about FF15 taking 15-30 minutes to drive through the entire 'continent" is super on point. It even takes 3 hours to drive across the largest Island of Hawaii. The reason I feel Open World works for BOTW is because other Zelda games makes no attempt to cover an entire planet, other Zelda games just cover one city (Hyrule) and it's surrounding geography. BOTW simply does the same but makes it 1:1, so you don't lose out on epic scale. I think BOTW is closer to the GTA model than the FF15/Skyrim model.
Can't say I agree. Skyrim (especially with some atmospheric mods) was just such a joy to walk through and I didn't need it to feel actual continent sized. It's about sunset chasing, seeing a random battle or new area far in the distance as you crest a hill. The abstract style world could only hint at such moments by scripting them, whereas discovering them on your own is an unparalleled feeling in gaming.
The sad reality is the reason why open worlds are so commonplace is because "Open World" is the easiest form of single player campaign gameplay to consistantly monetize. Also, they're not very hard to design, comparatively-speaking.
What I dislike about modern open world games is that they resort to vast but empty and artifficial open-ended environments filled with pointless loot resources to collect, checklist requirements and main/side objectives in order to complete the game but nothing much to do instead of being dense open-ended inter-connected world with tons of activities and livelyhoods that almost feels real in players eyes.
It's like the developers implemented that mindset where bigger on a default means better, so they resort to making bigger areas but don't know what to put in them so they add pointless filler and call it a day. It's like they were forced to make bigger open-ended worlds because it's becoming the modern standard in video games. Not to mention the urge for photo-realism in games which, in my opinion, is the reason why it takes a considerable amount of time to develop video games lately.
It's a shame though, because I remember when I was completely amazed by the dense and seamless open structure of the first Jak and Daxter game where it all feels inter-connected and lived in, which made me excited about the possibilities of a wider potential in post-PS2 era. And they used all of that memory capacity for useless checklist filler where the only purpose is to earn the platinum trophy instead of exploring plethora of new towns and landscapes.
And that's where my disappointment lies when it comes to modern FF games, especially with FFXV. I enjoyed it, but I expected more than just two towns to explore. I'm more in favor of overworlds instead of open-world environments, but if there needs to be an open-world game, I'd rather it be a smaller scale one with tons of fun activities to do where it feels bigger in return rather than a huge scale one with empty environments, tons of looting and nothing much else to do.
Yakuza games will impress no one with the scale of its open ended structure, but it works on the franchise's favor when they shouldn't be considered as open-world game. They're basically open-districts with tons of fun side activities that almost simlute the real modern life-style.
I love it when you analyze video game design choices and techniques. Whether in a standalone video like this or in a podcast or even in the middle of a game's analysis/review, they're the most interesting and informative videos you come up with.
You might not realize the service you're doing the whole gaming community, but I won't let it go unappreciated. I'm sure young people as well as aspiring developers are watching your videos and their opinions, ideas and practices will certainly be influenced by videos like this.
All I'm saying is, you're a force of good in the gaming community, and I'm very thankful for that.
Thank you for taking the time to say this, Roani! It means a lot to me.
Omg I been preaching this for years but didn't know how to interpert it exactly and people just thought I was so full of it. My deduction was that with new rampant evolving technologies, have restricted alot of ways to incorporate these enthralling fantasy epics both in terms of expansion and creativity for a japanese role playing game. That is why many devs still resort to create their ambitious projects using a style and approach that is more rooted to traditional design such as Dragon quest XI or Ni no kuni as opposed to utlizing all of the near photo CGI open world seamless transioning of many of todays western games and newer Japanese role playing games like FF XV. Simple speaking the many massive worlds you visit in the polygon and sprite era's were just enormous in terms of its design being 2d background art and pixel landscapes and the scope felt more like you were exploring a large thriving world but making that same sort of scope TODAY, is just almost impossible with today's tech. Look at FF VII remake as a pure example of that. That is basically only the midgar portion of FF VII's world, yet its expanded with all the graphic fidelity it can handle but its still relativly a small space in the game, were as FF VII's world from the PS1 was enormious with 3 continents across a massive ocean, with volcano's mountains, towering castles, desserts, snowy landscapes. I just think the implementation and design for those traditional styles felt much larger to me then open worlds of today's tech if that makes sence. You probably explained it a bit better in this video though.
Absolutely agree, the world of Xenoblade 1 feels humongous to me
I've been saying something similar for years, that giant open worlds often feel empty compared to "giant open areas". Like you said Xenoblade did this best, but I think one that's often overlooked is Dragon Age Inquisition, it had all these huge open areas, but you switch between them. I also always found that more compelling as frankly, it limits how frequently I'd otherwise use fast travel systems, which I hate but exist out of neccesity in open world games.
Oh also, an "open world" that is detailed and fascinating for me is Link to the Past or Resident Evil. They're contained large zones but for the most part within this sandbox you can play.
A pretty neat solution would be to incorporate the two. You know how riding the car in FFXV is supposed to show the bonding part of traveling between areas? Developers can do something similar on world maps. Maybe visually have an overworld map that gradually grows into details, showing the transition between areas. Like the tedious parts during trips. These could be character building portions, and then players arrive at a city, and these cities can be small areas like you'd find in Xenoblade 2. These transition areas can be arrived in anyway. It's a win win I think.
Great video essay! Love your videos man. Keep it up!
Old jrpgs filled me with this idea that there were secrets worth finding in the strangest reaches of a map. A perfect example: Duncan’s house in Ff6. All you see is a group of trees and you say to yourself: “that’s a weird pattern, I’m going to go down there and check it out”. I also think that since the surprise of the discovery was always worth the effort of exploration, you began to think and dream about what else could be out there that you missed. The importance of the discoveries,encouraged you to believe there just might be more out there, which made the world feel bigger. In Skyrim, most of your discoveries, even ones that seem consequential, don’t give you any real reward. So the world might be full of things to do, but they’re boring, which discourages you from looking for more and dreaming about what else you might find. It discourage the imagination from wondering about what else could be out there. The concept of a bigger world dies out when we, the players, stop wondering what else there might be.
On an almost completely different side note:
In the real world, sights, animals and things that are rare are valued and make us stop and admire them. We think about how big and beautiful the real world is. How we still haven’t “seen it all”. Games can do this similarly by having exploration show us things and items that are rare and different from what we already have seen or had. Most open world games fail to give you rewards that move your imagination to WANT to think about what else you could be missing. It’s filled with padding and quests that are identical to the last 30 that you completed. That padding makes you feel like you’ve already discovered and seen everything that’s worth seeing; making the world seem small.
In Skyrim’s favour, discovering the dwemer underworld was amazing and made the world feel bigger and more interesting than what was just on the surface. Like, there might have been more on the surface that I missed. So my imagination stirred and I wanted to see more. It was probably the one discovery that made me feel like the world bigger than it let on.
Going back to having large instances does make worlds bigger in my mind just on the fact that areas can be seen beyond your playable area. Such as the Prince of Persia series where a map can be big or small but visuals go out as far as your character can see. In all I like both for there various gameplays. Also great vid👍
I agree, and at least part of why I preferred the last third of FFXV over the rest is that sense of scale you get. Going from place to place on the train makes the world feel immense.
Very well stated! I was always wondering why gameworlds then felt so much bigger and more lively to me than modern games do now. I don't hate open world games, I just prefer them not to be. I stopped playing lots of them because I couldn't immerse in the large worlds presented, even though immersion is the thing open world games strive to provide. But I hope this is a just trend that will come and go like others have. A game doesn't have to be open world to be good and to feel real.
Great video! I'm curious where Dragon Quest VIII falls into place here since it kinda of falls into both categories. Abstract and 1 to 1 ratio depending how you are traversing.
I never really thought about this until i played Final Fantasy Tactics with the calendar being active as you go from point to point. Seeing that it was taking a entire day to travel a half inch on the screen and having a full scale battle that sometimes took 15 minutes plus. In an open world game do you think that the day/night cycle would be considered an abstraction? Or a effective one at that?
You bring up a very good point with day and night cycles. This is the strongest counterpoint to my argument, and one I want to address in a follow up video. Thank you for your comment!
Just so we are on the same page, I much more prefer the over world map in most cases. I really liked what Ni No Kuni 2 did with it actually and i think it is a awesome representation of how it can be successful in current gen.
Awesome vid. This seems like an extension on the points you made in response to my last patreon question.
I definitely agree with this, and the points you made about xenoblade and ff12 is why I was hoping that ff16 would adopt using zones over the way they went about it in ff15.
What do you think would be a good way to implement this in games now, that are more immersive? Obviously, it would be silly to see a giant Noctis running around a tiny overworld. Maybe larger sectioned off areas than we've had in the past? Something similar to Witcher 3, or Dragon Age Inquisition. Where you have to fast travel via the world map to get to a different region or country, but they still contain huge, convincing areas to play in, that don't feel like the little dioramas of something like FFXII? You could even include abridged travel cutscenes similar to Red Dead Redemption II's fast travel mechanic.
And that's actually why I am actually more curious than hyped to see the FF7 remake. Just how are they going to do the world map? Ni no Kuni would be a good inspiration, but it would clash with the seeming realism they seem to want to take...
This is why I love the Xenoblade games. They actually give you something to do in the worlds, and they are ALIEN worlds with features we’d never see IRL
Nicely put man. I think this helps explain why I was so happy to see the return of the overworld map in Lost Sphear. Aside from nostalgia, anyway.
I think that the other problem with open world maps is that they need to be "filled". I remember one of the problems I had with Twilight Princess' Hyrule Field, (yeah, remember when that was considered a large map?) was the fact that it was immense, but pretty much empty. Now, with Breath of the Wild, they've "filled" the world with things that aren't meaningful. Collecting Korok seeds, is a prime example of this.
Now don't get me wrong, I enjoyed BotW, but I think that creating an open world, and filling it with these meaningless things to do only serves to decrease the overall impact that you could have had, if the game had instead used abstraction, as you said. Hand crafted worlds are more interesting than procedurally generated ones, even if artists went back over the world and spruced it up a bit after-the-fact.
This is why I prefer games like Dark Souls and Nioh. It feels like you are in a small part of a much larger world. Skyrim just felt ridiculous to me. Like, its cities are suppose to be massive, but you get to them and there is only a dozen or so houses. It completely takes you out of the game.
great video!, you put into words something I felt "wrong" but I didn't know how to explain.
The original Mirrors Edge, which although not perfect, had linear levels that gave a real feeling of progression through unique locations and highly focused challenges. Mirrors Edge Catalyst, although not completely terrible, replaced these for the most part with a bland and lifeless open world that is slow to navigate through. I think Mirrors Edge is a good example of how the move to open world can break immersion and slow down game play. Sometimes, linear works best.
Hang on... 2 hrs to cross Skyrim at roughly 8 miles distance. So 8 hrs would be 32 miles yes? Not the 25 miles depicted in the analogy...
I mean it's still small obvs. And it absolutely does not make a difference to the point being made... But anyway, did I miss something? I expected to see a example given at 32.4 miles distance or something.
I still like traversing Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule more than the overworlds of past 3D Zelda games, but this is an excellent editorial.
The thing with Zelda, even though people complain about BOTW bing empty... it still is a lot more involved than the likes of OOT or Twilight Princess, which had significantly smaller worlds with much less to do.
I think the only Zelda game that handled scale better than BOTW is Wind Waker, but that's if you can get behind the sailing in the game.
Interestingly enough, Wind Waker was my favorite Zelda game before I played Breath of the Wild.
I agree. This is something that’s bothered me at least as far back as playing WoW, and having the thought that all of Azeroth-as it’s presented in walking distance in the game-would really be like Hawaii in size, roughly, if that. But it’s supposed to be a whole world. Just pulled me out a bit, and there wasn’t a good form of abstraction provided to pull me back in. I could never see that “world” as anything other than tiny islands.
Well... If you play Euro Truck Simulator 2 (or any other title in the series) then, even though the world is scaled down (around 1:25 I guess), you would still feel the world being large. But that game is entirely about driving, rather than RPing. I think having a scaled down world is entirely okay, but the thing is, the player must want to go through it rather than want to fast travel. Otherwise it would be just a boring world.
I mean, I don't think anyone would walk around towns in Elder Scrolls 2 rather than fast traveling, because, well, there's no fun doing that. And thus it's really hard to see an inter-city map with no scale down. Even if it's possible, I think the game would just force you to stay on road and allow you to fast forward. Except in one case: when you are playing an MMO. But only if most part of the world is for user generated contents.
(Minecraft is 100% about UGC and that's why it's possible for people to choose to play in a very large world rather than a small one. If there's no UGC, people wouldn't want to go off-track anyway and thus what's the point.)
Best way I have ever seen the world map abstraction work is the Airships of Skies of Arcadia.
I don't play a tonne of open world games, but I definitely agree with this idea. Playing through Horizon last year, when I first zoomed the map out, and saw all the icons and the scale of the world/how long It would take to get there, I was honestly kind of irritated. Sometimes having a smaller world can make it more satisfying to explore/play through.
The techniques you highlighted in FFXII and Xenoblade Chronicles can help to make the world feel large and diverse, without making it a slog to traverse.
It brings up the whole fast-travel debate too, a meaningless world I just want to fast-travel through might as well be a small world I can use natural movement to explore
Thats why I am not too keen towards open world genre myself. Its too overwhelming, I love open level much more than open world, something like in Deus Ex or Prey 2016 gave us. Constrained experience but permit a bit of deviance and more than single a solution to get through the level that will enrich our experience and immersion.
Meanwhile, open world give us vast and large level to explore and even to messed up, but when we pick the story mission there's just only single linear too constrained solution to resolve it, contrasting its nature as 'open world' game. The other activity we can do in open world game maybe just pick up collectible, or other unrelevant activity while not giving us much chance to craft our own experience.
Surprised no one mentioned Monster Hunter yet in the comments. The first 4 generations of Monster Hunter games have all employed the abstract zone based map design. When you accept a quest in MH, you go out into a unique locale that can vary in the type of biome or landscape it is. Each locale has varying regions or zones and they are connected with each other via loading screens. The sense of scale you get from each of these unique locales is very grand, as if you are hunting and chasing a monster in an area that spans for miles.
But with the 5th generation of Monster Hunter (MH World and MH RIse), they changed the design philosophy of their maps and instead of having interconnected zones, you have one seamless map, which to be fair, are decently sized, but it is missing that sense of grandeur that existed with the classic MH games (gen 1-4).
I definitely agree with your video. I prefer the abstract approach, it helps make the maps feel larger. Loading screens don't bother me either unless they are really really long.
To me they feel small because they are so big you are never going to walk from location to location except the first time you need to go there. When you get fast travel (typically immediately after you first arrive at a new location), you are going to use it exclusively. So now, generally, even though you are in a giant continent, you are actually only warping instantly between small self-contained locations. BotW ameliorated this quite well by placing so much emphasis on hanggliding and climbing, which constantly gives you a very wide view of the landscape and gives you an accruate sense of how large it is. In games where you're restricted to ground traversal, your view is mostly of the immediate surroundings, which are obviously much smaller in scale. So if you are warping instantly from place to place and the farthest you can ever see around you is about the size of a room or forest clearing or whatever, the game will feel small.
Great and very interesting video Mike. I am in two minds, I love open world like the Witcher 3 and Skyrim, however I recently played through an older game that I hadn't played before, Tales of Symphonia and absolutely loved it's smaller world and overall structure and story :)
I like Shadow of The Colossus. It is The Forbidden Land so it is kinda okay to be a a barren wasteland. The only problem is the lack of animals. Maybe because most animals doesn't want to live there? Who knows.
I think Trails of Cold Steel 2 does a good job with making its continent feel large
Only played the first game, but I agree.
Conversely, I think Trails in the Sky didn't do a good job at selling scale (to be fair, that wasn't one of its goals). But it's pretty immersion breaking when people take airship rides to locations just a minute away on foot.
That's why I'm glad Falcom added the required use of transportation to sell the scale of the Erebonian empire.
Here's a real size world map: Pokémon Go.....
Actually, I still play its older brother: Ingress. The world is huge. So large no one can complete the full map in one life time. Usually, other players aren't dangerous while still being competitive, but depending on the part of the map you play, the NPCs and hazards can be a bigger threat.
I'd like to see games like these to have a better RPG elements implanted in it.
Good video. Explained well and thought out well.
Great video. You make some really good points. New subscriber here, and I'm loving your channel
This video articulated something that's been nagging me regarding open-world games. I've always felt the same way. Having played FF12 and FF15, I can say I felt the same way. FF12 feels massive because you get that sense that you're covering so much of the world. In FF15, they even tell you how many miles away something is. When an entire continent is something like 6 miles across, it pulls you out of the world.
I also have a problem with open-world games sacrificing the main plot and focusing on all the sidequests. FF15 and Skyrim are both good examples of this. While I enjoy both games, the main story in each game is very weak.
Then you have games like Dragon Age: Inquisition. Each area has some of that open-world feel, but the separation into different areas makes the world feel bigger.
Or.... you go the Daggerfall route and create an actual continent and give the payer a fast travel system that isn't free, that also borrows from the encounter system in that it's possible to get inturrupted by mobs or npcs you'd find on the map were you crazy enough to go manually.
I really enjoyed this content. To further your point, you didn't talk about the density of meaningful things to do in some open world games that further the feeling of boredom as one walks from one corner of the map to the other
Pretty much Monster Hunter World/Rise versus the old games. I remember the old volcano maps being awesome.
There are only three people in this world who are walking across all these maps: "8-Bit Bastard", "TheyCallMeConor" and "How Big is the Map?" Just to let you know :)
When are you updating the Dark Pixel Music channel? Still waiting for How to Play Final Fantasy 7 Battle Theme ( Still More Fighting ) on Guitar - Part 3 ;)
Haha! I don't know... maybe when Casen and I retire this channel we'll jump back on to that one.
The point of this video is a rather intelligent observation - goodie.
Depends on how much the developer put into the game. I spent 150hrs+ on Witcher 3 and Morrowind easily and replayed them several times. I like games that limit fast travel and force the player to put some effort in exploration. In Morrowind there are some ways to fast travel, but they are limited and most of the time you have to traverse by foot. Betrayal at Krondor have one world map, but it's dangerous and there is a ration system. Right now I'm playing The Long Dark where you have to go everywhere by foot.
Great discussion on scale, an underrated subject
So you are saying it is 100% possible to make a 1:1 recreation of the skyrim game world as a theme park?
I prefer smaller more detailed maps to size. Like a Dragon games. Two exceptions, I can think of are Death Stranding, which makes the actual traversal more of a challenge I initially and MGSV where it basically becomes a Zone in every main mission. Also Kingdom Come: Deliveeance strived for adapting a small kingdom and it also feels pretty authentic. I think it depends on how you fill these open worlds. You need to bring traversal or resource management or true exploration to the table to make traversing the world engaging and not boring „push forward only“ affairs.