Avoiding the Tedium

[BadWolf3]

So I'm playing Saints Row 3. Fun game. But it reminds me of an issue I have with open-world games - distance! Skyrim, GTA, Fallout New Vegas. Traipsing around over new ground is fun, exciting and well worth doing. The eighth time you do it, less fun.

Now fast travel is a solution, but a poor one in my mind. It tears me out of immersion and feels kind of like cheating. Taking a taxi a la GTA is also a solution and perhaps with Aerodyne taxis more tolerable in 2077, but still dull.

I guess I can see two solutions:

1. Very fast sector-sector travel. Using Nitro in SR3 makes travel less boring and coool to look at. A version of this, perhaps by air or fly-by-wire motorcycle/jacked in driving, could be fun. So that no point on the map is more than 20 seconds from another point if you know the route - or your gear has it precalced.

1. Game design that avoids traipsing about. You all know what I mean. No wander quests. No cross-the-city-and-get-the-package quests, at least none that aren't in the same block or the first time entering a territory. First time is different, obviously.
This method, with an almost hub-like quest methodology, is probably my preferred, since you never feel you are driving a long ways because you have to, but always for fun, ( carnage!) or locally. The story moves across the city organically. If you have a quest across the city, it's a strter and will lead to a whole bunch in the same area.

Thoughts?

There is 0 chance that Cyberpunk 2077 will not have fast travel. When a game(any game) has a massive enough map, fast travel is implemented. Elder Scrolls had fast travel from the very first game of the series, which came out like 2 decades ago. It's exactly like you said, walking the same path the 8th time isn't fun.

There are different ways of fast travel, you mentioned Taxi in GTA which I agree is a more immersive way of fast travel. However, if CDPR don't want the player to fast travel to locations the players didn't discover yet(which I think is a good thing), Taxi might be a problem because then it would contradict the immersive factor by simply not being able to get a Taxi to anywhere in Night City you've never discovered.

But, if Night City is very big, there might be some sort of train or bus that goes around the city(maybe a flying bus?). Morrowind had multiple options for fast travel, but they depended on magic and there's no magic in Cyberpunk. Don't think of Fast Travel as cheating, because it's not. This is a very important feature that developers implement in a game for good reason. The only features that count as cheating are cheat codes & console commands.

 

[Zagor-Te-Nay]

Just like nearly all games of that type, GTA's included. It's extremely hard to find the balance between the world feeling empty and feeling crowded where meaningless and everything that suppsed to matter (like the main storyline) loses its importance and drowns under a mountain second hand filler fluff and the player is left thinking "where the fuck am I supposed to be going with all this" (the syndrome that plagues Bethesda's games -- so much stuff, nothing matters or feels special anymore).

That's why I still hope CDPR's sandbox for CP2077 will not be the kind we see in Saint's Row, Watchdogs, GTA, nor Skyrim or Fallout 4 or Dying Light. But rather similiar to how it is handled in Risen 3 (a mediocre game at best, no argument there) with sailing between the island hubs.

Wouldn't say Gothics/Risens are particularly better...played them recently and they definitely have their own issues. Love the lack of handholding, but world is very lacking in exploration/worldbuilding (interesting) sidequests/locations and lore to discover and involves far too much of slaughtering entire world's ( hyper aggressive and damage sponge) fauna. Scarcity of resources was a credit to it though.
Bethesda exploration, is impressive on a variety of locals and entices the player visually...but it completely falls apart under scrutiny. World design is illogical, inconsistent and sidequests/locations do little to extend it while asking little of player's attention.

This is what I'm hoping CDPR will take cues from:

Large scale world like Witcher/GTA world but on point exploration, with a more "intimate" feeling of a hub world...do not waste your time on "activities"/collectibles: they add nothing in long run.

Only thing MD could have done better is a bit more varied approach to discovery...Jensen cannot stop breaking into people's apartments and discovering notes/items like it's owners expect you to. That's the tricky part...game has to give you clues, provoke the player, but without being too obvious or obscure.

 

[kofeiiniturpa]

The core concept of "sandbox formed from hubs" was the idea I was going for, not so much how Risen 3 (or PB games before it) handled it's worlds from thereon out. The concept is really no different from Praque in DXMD, though the hubs in that game were painfully empty and devoid of anything interesting (though - to be honest - that was by design since the game was heavily mission based and exploration was more of an extra), and the subway ride was just a loading screen.

 

[En-en]

How do you even do exploration in modern/futuristic city? Finding random abandoned building filled with some junkies that you have to kill to find ''rifle+3'' and ''kevlar vest+2'' in some random crate? I am totally fine with world just being good looking background for great quests tbh. Got tired of Beshesda formula long time ago. Unless you are playing as thief/robber character, then it makes sence breaking into random apartments.

 

[Suhiira]

How do you even do exploration in modern/futuristic city? Finding random abandoned building filled with some junkies that you have to kill to find ''rifle+3'' and ''kevlar vest+2'' in some random crate? I am totally fine with world just being good looking background for great quests tbh. Got tired of Beshesda formula long time ago. Unless you are playing as thief/robber character, then it makes sence breaking into random apartments.

Hopefully not!

I really don't want to be collecting random junk from random locations because someone feels the need to check off a "Make exploration worthwhile" checkbox ... It doesn't! It makes it annoying and tedious.

Here's a great discussion on how Fallout 4 failed as an RPG
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnmKlmW7vqY

 

[Azriel7]

I would lose my mind and never play the witcher 3 if it did not have some sort of fast travel system and I feel I am very far from alone in his. Sorry, but MOST people simply do not have a lot of time to play games non stop. You should not need 30 minutes to an hour to get from one end of an area just to have to run back again. Fast travel should be in, nothing wrong with it and if you do not want to use it, then simply do not use it. I never understood this insistence to remove an optional feature that can easily be ignored. There needs to be something better than the sign setup in the witcher 3, that was just bad implementation of it. Oh, I have to run all the way back to a sign, just to fast travel to another sign...what?


Honestly, most cars would probably have automated driving anyway, so you could probably call your flying car to you batman style (or hack a car, or taxi), get in, and just tell it where you want to go. Then simply sit back and either enjoy the ride, or fast travel to where you want to go.

 

[cyberpunkforever]

yes, that is a very good point, i played Dragon Age Inquisition and now im playng Mass Effect Andromeda and both games have huge mps and we spend a lot of time of not most of the time just walking or useing the vehicle to go from one point to noather to complete boring quests,
fast travel system is ok, but i hnk most important is to make the map not so gigantic or just put fund, intersting content in it,
no gigantic map and empty, no boring exploration

 

[lord_blex]

You should not need 30 minutes to an hour to get from one end of an area just to have to run back again.

well that's the key, quests should be designed in a way that you don't have to run back and forth all the time. that gets annoying even with fast travel.

 

[Zagor-Te-Nay]

I would lose my mind and never play the witcher 3 if it did not have some sort of fast travel system and I feel I am very far from alone in his. Sorry, but MOST people simply do not have a lot of time to play games non stop. You should not need 30 minutes to an hour to get from one end of an area just to have to run back again. Fast travel should be in, nothing wrong with it and if you do not want to use it, then simply do not use it. I never understood this insistence to remove an optional feature that can easily be ignored. There needs to be something better than the sign setup in the witcher 3, that was just bad implementation of it. Oh, I have to run all the way back to a sign, just to fast travel to another sign...what?

This is a very divisive concept for a lot of players. Some prefer convenience of instant jumping to any point to the map...it's easy, but it can kill exploration.

This is how Morrowind's travel map looks like:



Plenty of people can't stand it.. I absolutely love it. It makes the world feel "believable" with different travel routes...when you examine them you can see they're designed around economic/faction/political value of every location.
World not designed exclusively for you, it felt like you're travelling... to do it best, you had to learn of it.

 

[animalfather]

i prefer a mix between yakuza and gta, more compact so no running around. maybe the "world" could have sections and ur sometimes closed off. instead of just running around or flying around in your air car.

 

[kofeiiniturpa]

How do you even do exploration in modern/futuristic city?

Rather than dungeons - although, there's nothing wrong in letting the player rumamge through someones' apartments for valuables - you rather explore the culture, politics, opinions and their reactivity to how you might percieve and handle them. The gameplay doesn't tell you to explore the garbage in someones dumpster or the sidealleys (e.g. no: "Go check out behind that corner, maybe you find something!"), it tells you to look for interesting people within those interesting locales (and specifically FINDING them, not telling you outright where everything is). That might, as a side effect, lead you to those alleyways, or going through someone's garbage, or acquiring that "+1 AR", but what's more important is that you have made a connection and an impression that might require precautions down the line elsewhere - good or bad. That's what I'd go for. "Empty" GTA/Saints Row/etc cities with cardboard prop sceneries and cardboard prop people... not so much, not at all actually