Anyone else have Open World Fatigue?

[BjornTheBandit]

Lol u guys dont know that the maps gonna be smaller. For all we know itll be twice the size of all the witcher 3 maps put together. Only thing i remember is one of the devs saying the game was going to be "far, far bigger than anything weve done before." Its supoosed to be a sprawling urban enviroment. Its gonna be huge. And i hope it is huge. I wanna be able to explore the whole city n "see the sights" so to speak. Im not worried tho. I yrust cdpr n whatever they come up with im sure will be friggin fsntastic.

I only meant that it might not be large in a typical sense. if there are MASSIVELY tall buildings, then you could fit more horizontal space into a smaller diameter. Look at how big everything is in the trailer, like a modern looking bladerunner city

 

[cyberpunkforever]

im tired of bad open world games

the open world of the witcher is the best, but still has some flaws

so, i'm ok if the mp in cp is big but not open world, i want that the map has a great cntenxt, ambient, environments that really show a cyberpunk city and the society must feel alive, living breathng, just like the world in tw3, people doing their things, livng their lives

im ok if the map is not open world, i care abut the story, charcters, aliveness of the map


dargon age inquisition and mass effect andromeda have those unnecesarily gigantic maps, lifeless, boring, dull, repetitive, npc's are statues waiting for the player to talk, please no that again

im sure the red devs will do it right, if they mke it as good or better than tw3 is going t be great

 

[DarthRaver8686]

Imo in the case of andromeda it wasnt the fact that it was a huge open world that was the problem. They made huge open worlds for all the different planets you could roam and just made them boring and lifeless. For a game that emphasizes exploration there wasnt exactly much to explore. I dont think shrinking down the size of the open areas would of fixed anything whether the worlds were small or large the content would of still been boring and bland. I have ni doubt that come the time of release for cyberpunk 2077, no one will be saying the ssme things as was said about mass effect andromeda. I have complete faith that the open world cdpr creates in this game will be filled with content and things to explore.

 

[Calistarius]

they have said the map will be smaller but more compact.

Where did they say that? Because from what I have heard it might be larger then even Witcher 3.

A quote from an interview with MCVUK:

“Cyberpunk is far bigger than anything else that CD Projekt Red has done before,” visual effects artist Jose Teixeira told MCV. “Far, far bigger.

“We're really stepping into the unknown in terms of complexity and size and problems we encounter.”

Now, I have said befor on the forum that part of this "bigger" might be counting the virtical aspect that we might get in CP2077 as well... with possible multiple floors in large buildings and such. So as souch the top down view of the map might be smaller then The Witcher 3, but by sheer volume might be larger.

Of course with "bigger" they might also mean in tearms of story and customization and what not... but I have so far interpreted it as the world it's self as well.

 

[BjornTheBandit]

Where did they say that? Because from what I have heard it might be larger then even Witcher 3.

A quote from an interview with MCVUK:


Now, I have said befor on the forum that part of this "bigger" might be counting the virtical aspect that we might get in CP2077 as well... with possible multiple floors in large buildings and such. So as souch the top down view of the map might be smaller then The Witcher 3, but by sheer volume might be larger.

Of course with "bigger" they might also mean in tearms of story and customization and what not... but I have so far interpreted it as the world it's self as well.

Exactly what I was getting at, with the buildings.

 

[SarahGabriella]

So, any news on closed beta or pics at least? Would love to see something to be able to comment on it like City size and the like.

 

[DarthRaver8686]

Ya i wish we had pics or anything...n i dont think theres gonna be a beta for this game as its primarily a single player rpg...with some multiplayer aspect we dont know about yet but as far as i know no beta...i could be wrong tho if someone else wants to chime in

 

[whiplash27]

No Title

I think TW3 map just needed to be a lot smaller. In the attachment below, the area that's within the eraser should have been plenty. Also making skellige smaller as well (less islands or at least less water to explore). The game could have been more focused and more detail could have been put into each section of the map to make them more memorable. The problem with these huge maps is that you spend so little time in each area that the locations become very unmemorable.

 

[kofeiiniturpa]

I don't think the overall size was necessarily the biggest problem. It was just offered in too big singular chunks. There could easily be as much playable square kilometers in CP2077 as there is in Witcher, and even more, but I would posit that it needs to be offered in a different manner. In freely taversable individual (but interconnected) chunks.

Such that would offer location specific content and reactivity and also obviously stuff that requires traveling to other parts of Night City. These differently sized hubs might work similiarly to the hubs in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines so that you can hire a transport or hop on a bike of your own and travel on an overland satellite map of the city, though obviously the hubs should be much, much bigger and with much, much more content than those of VtMB.

You might find vista points that - to give some sense of scale - allow you to see an living panoramic image on how the city spans to the horizon in all directions, and even landmarks that you can visit in other hubs. Everything doesn't need to be rendered touchable (and I certainly hope CDPR doesn't try to make Night City a GTA style miniature city that loses the illusion of scale and shrinks with each passing minute of gameplay, yet remains an empty chore to hoof through, back and forth back and forth, all the time).

Map traveling might even have a variety of random events occuring where the player might opt to take part in (in procedurally generated scenes), and the traveling there might even be made a gameplay event of it's own... Adjusting the pace of personal travel to suit your needs, like needing to meet a certain timetable and already being late or simply wanting to go faster (driving faster might get some unwanted attention from the police, and other kinds of events; gang fights, arrest situations, spontaneously put up rock concerts.... you name it).

Fast travel options (not unlike those of GTA 5 or the subway rides from Deus Ex MD, but much more interactive) like cabs and trams where you could opt to skip the travel and "teleport to the location" or sit through it in realtime and admire the generated (specifically for the feature) scenery, and possibly even strike a more or less useful conversation with the cabbie or the fellow passengers in the tram (possibly even getting smaller jobs/missions that otherwise might not be found -- certainly an incentive to use those methods of travelling).

Gameplay in the hubs wouldn't differ much from Deus Ex in concept, though obviously the gameplay, narrative and reactivity opportunities would be much, much more diverse than in DX.


That's all very rough, but I think the central idea comes through. That's something I would much more like to see rather and a concentional sandbox (like W3 or GTA or Skyrim).

 

[whiplash27]

Creating small hubs that add up to a big total can work out fine. It's just a matter of how massive of a game do you want to create. I think a 100 hour game is too long, others would disagree with that. I do think it's important to have central areas that the player has to spend great quantities of time in. If a player visits an area and then never goes back, it's a waste IMO. What's the point of sending a player on a quest that's so far away to only have them spend 5 minutes there never to return? Obviously such things are unavoidable no matter what, but forcing a player to travel such a long distance to do that is wasted time. There's nothing memorable about that. You could fill a handful of city blocks with massive amounts of detail and quests while making it unique, and if its executed well the player will remember that part of the game forever.

In TW3, I felt like very few of the places in the game were memorable because you were rarely in a place for more than an hour or so... always on the move. Compare that to TW1 or TW2 where you'd spend hours running around a smallish map before moving on to the next act. I could tell you more about the locations in TW1 & TW2 than any part of TW3. I'm sure the little dots telling me where to go all the time didn't help either. It doesn't force me to learn my way around.

 

[Calistarius]

To actually answer what the thread asks. I am not tired of open world sandbox games. The only problem I have with them is that these are usually the kinds of games where I a lot more easily can reach the gameplay time where I might have played my self so tired on a game that I need to put ut away for a long time (sometimes even years for some games). That amount of time where that can start to happen for me is somewhere around the 50-200 hours played mark... it compleatly depends on what kind of game it is I play (most RPG's will be towards the 100+ hour thing... where as most types of RTS games or FPS/3rd person shooters, etc will start to drop out for me around 50 hours... of course some games I drop much earlier then that, but those are more special cases rather than anything else).

I have to say though, that I am a very different kind of gamer then most people. I tend to spend a lot of time on things which your average gamer would jsut not spend more then "enough" time on. So when someone might spend 50 hours finishing a RPG game, I might spend anywhere from double, to five or more time in doing the same. I have two characters that I have played in Dragon Age Origins, and both of them I have played a bit over 150 hours, but I have still only managed to reach to just befor the Landsmeet (I have done everything else I am able to do befor then, I have just not yet done the landsmeet in either of them). The two main characters I have played in Skyrim I have played for well over 100-150 hours, but neither of them have goten far in the main story (the first one has not even talked to the greybeards yet, and the second one has talked to the greybeardss and goten his first quest outside of their mountain). The Mass Effect series... I have finished 1 2 and 3, all where finished in somewhere around 70-90 hours... but Andromeda, I don't know how long it will take me to finish that one... probably several hundreds of hours... becacause currently in MEA I have finished roughtly 1.5 planets in that game, but I have played about 111 hours so far.

So as I said... I take A LOT more time in doing things then most. Due to being a natural grinder (I grind without even realizing I am doing it, and when I deliberatly grind I can spend actual days in a row doing it with no problem)... I realy dislike leaving things behind me, be it items or quests/missions, or what ever... so I will spend huge amount of time making sure I have seen close to every single inch of an area, found every single item I can find, and done every single quest/mission in an area befor I go on to the next... etc... XD


As for having several small hubs... a base of operations that you work out of in each area... That is something I would like.

I would be totally cool with it being something like that the one you might work for has these places and lets you use them...

But what would be much cooler would be if you your self had to establish the safehouses/base's of operations that you worked out of in each area/hub.

Where to do this you would get, or already have, a mission for a certain hub where you have to do what ever it is you need to do to establish your safehour/base of operation in that hub. And the way you have to do this in each hub is different for various reasons. Maybe in one hub you need to kick out a gang somehow, in another you might need to do enough missions for a certain contact from another hub for them to gift you it, in another you just might need to gather enough money to buy it your self, etc. And what kind it is could depend on which hub it is in.

Another cool thing to would be if in each hub area you had a choice of maybe 3 or 4 different locations in the area to pick from. Where each different safehouse/base of operations location give the player different kinds of bonuses/effects. Like one location could be a lot more secure, so that the chance of you being found/attacked in your "home" is a lot smaller. Another location could maybe give you bonuses to finding information that you need in the area. Another could maybe offer you lower costs on equipment because you have a deal with the store owner in the building for their protection or something. Or what ever else it could maybe be.

 

[Sydanyo]

I'm personally sick and tired of on-the-rails, or "tunnel run" games, especially when most of them have horrible artificial-feeling reasons why you can't go a certain way. I would actually prefer an actual sandbox where you can destroy everything and go through everything and into everything, rather than any kind of invisible wall BS. I mean, more freedom is the future of gaming, not artificial, invisible walls and boring tunnels.

 

[Calistarius]

I'm personally sick and tired of on-the-rails, or "tunnel run" games, especially when most of them have horrible artificial-feeling reasons why you can't go a certain way. I would actually prefer an actual sandbox where you can destroy everything and go through everything and into everything, rather than any kind of invisible wall BS. I mean, more freedom is the future of gaming, not artificial, invisible walls and boring tunnels.

The thing is though... more often then not your average "tunnel runners" tends to have a much better story, and occationally gameplay as well, then your average open world sandbox game. Atleast in my experience. Because with most tunnel runner types of games you can spend a much bigger portion of the money on the story and gameplay, rather then on creating a huge world.


The chance of most people actually seeing the end of the story of the game is also a lot more common in tunnel runners vs open world sandbox games I would say. Seeing as it takes a lot longer to finish most open world sandbox games, then it takes to finish most tunnel runner games. Read some article some several years ago that it seems like on average only a 3rd of players actually finish games these days. Oh... found the article.

And looking at the games they give example of in there... you can quickly see the difference between tunnel runners and open world sandbox games. Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 (both essentually tunnel runners) at 56% and 42% respectivly... where as Skyrim and Borderlands 2 (both open world sandbox games with loads and loads of freedom) at only 32% and 30% respectivly.

So yeah... people might be asking for and wanting "more freedome" or "no artificial, invisible walls and boring tunnels"... but in the end those things don't seem to matter at all when it comes to how many people end up finishing them... and in fact it seems like the more freedom you have, the more space you have to work with and do what ever you want in, the less likelly people are in finishing those games at all. And I can say that is true for me as well... because if I look at what games I have and have not finished over the past 10-15 or so years... then I can see that where I have finished games like Mass Effect 1-3, I have not finished any of the Elder Scrolls games I have played.

I still like open world sandbox games, I really do... I would not have spent hundreds, or multiple hundreds in some games cases, of hours in a game like Skyrim or Oblivion or other Elder Scrolls games, or Fallout 3/New Vegas/4, Borderlands, etc... or heck something like Minecraft... if if I did not like open world sandbox games. But for the most part I have never finished any of those games (although... there is not really a "finish" and "end" to Minecraft, so that is a bit moot to mention that game... XD ).

 

[Sydanyo]

The thing is though... more often then not your average "tunnel runners" tends to have a much better story, and occationally gameplay as well, then your average open world sandbox game. Atleast in my experience. Because with most tunnel runner types of games you can spend a much bigger portion of the money on the story and gameplay, rather then on creating a huge world.

Well, that's personal experience for everyone, and that's all people are discussing here anyway; opinions. Personally, I have the opposite opinion.

The chance of most people actually seeing the end of the story of the game is also a lot more common in tunnel runners vs open world sandbox games I would say. Seeing as it takes a lot longer to finish most open world sandbox games, then it takes to finish most tunnel runner games. Read some article some several years ago that it seems like on average only a 3rd of players actually finish games these days. Oh... found the article.

And looking at the games they give example of in there... you can quickly see the difference between tunnel runners and open world sandbox games. Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 (both essentually tunnel runners) at 56% and 42% respectivly... where as Skyrim and Borderlands 2 (both open world sandbox games with loads and loads of freedom) at only 32% and 30% respectivly.

So yeah... people might be asking for and wanting "more freedome" or "no artificial, invisible walls and boring tunnels"... but in the end those things don't seem to matter at all when it comes to how many people end up finishing them... and in fact it seems like the more freedom you have, the more space you have to work with and do what ever you want in, the less likelly people are in finishing those games at all. And I can say that is true for me as well... because if I look at what games I have and have not finished over the past 10-15 or so years... then I can see that where I have finished games like Mass Effect 1-3, I have not finished any of the Elder Scrolls games I have played.

I actually don't see never finishing the main story as a bad thing, at all. Gives me a game I can always go back and play, and thus I basically get infinite bang for my buck. But, again, nothing but personal opinions. Some like it one way, others like it the other way.

 

[Calistarius]

Well... like I said... I still really like open world sandbox games, even though I never finish most of them, I would neve rspend those hundreds of hours on them if I did not. So I don't see not finishing the main story as all that much of a problem.

But it is still one of the negative aspects of these kinds of games, no matter what one might think about them in general.


Also... the replayability of games, for me, usually don't come down to if I have finished them befor or not though. There are games I keep coming back to which I have finished a huge amount of times over the years, and there are other games I come back to which I have so far never finished. The size of the world matters little, open world sandbox or not matters little... actually, the games story does not matter to me either (if I have seen it once, then I really don't need to see it twice, because I already know it... I am the same with movies and tv-series, I very seldom rewatch things, especially tv-series... although, some movies I do rewatch a bit more often, specificly comic book movies, because those are the movies I have always wanted to see since I found comic back in 1992.. books are different though, I can re-read my favorit books over and over again with no problem... strange really... XD ). When I come back and play games again the only thing that really matters to me is the gameplay and the gameplay-loop. Styles of gameplay and gameplay-loops which I highly enjoy wins out every day when it comes to replaying them.


That is why I have replayed/restarted Fallout Tactics A LOT more often then I ever have Fallout 1 and 2. And I rate FO1 and FO2 as MUCH better games then FOT. Still though, FO1 and FO2 have only ever goten 1 full playthrough each, and a few started tries which I never finished, over the last 15 years... where as FOT has during the same 15 years gotten a new restart every 6-18 months, I have probably only finished the game 2 or 3 times though. Because even if FOT is totally inferior story-wise to FO1 and FO2, FOT is compleatly superior gameplay-wise. I love the combat in these game, and FOT does that a lot better then FO1 and FO2 ever did.

Currently the games I most often keep coming back to though is XCOM 2. It used to be XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Within, but I dropped that one as soon as 2 came out... I enjoy the stealth aspect of XCOM 2's combat a lot more then XCOM1's, especially with the Long War 2 mod added to it. There are maybe 2 or 3 handfull or so of other games I keep coming back to as well, some almost as much as XCOM 2, and others only once every 6 months to a year or two. None of them are open world sandbox games though, or FPS/3rd person shooters for that matter (actually... one is... I do come back to Minecraft every now and then, but usually only for a day or two befor it's out of my life again for another year or two... what draws me there though is the minging and building of stuff).

And if you look at my "top X favorit games of all times" list, then one would find that you would probably have to go down somewhere outside of my top 15, or even top 25, to start finding the majority of the games I keep replaying. I guess different parts of my brain handles and get's enjoyment from different kinds of things in a game in a different way... and as such I can have a game in my top 10 which I have only ever played once, where as a game I keep replaying multiple times in a year ends up 10-20+ places further down the list. XD

 

[DannyCortz]

I wonder if we could remedy this by having characters with preset personalities.

That is the key to enjoy a true open world. Many games in the market has been already saturated, there is nothing new. And that is a thinking of someone that perhaps has a lot of open world games in it's library. (who knows)

We know that the core success of CDProjektRED is giving us compelling stories and open worlds that tells stories. With a protagonist and an assemble that has some of the most interesting personalities. The only games that I know of that give a empty and bland open world is Bethesda sadly enough. That is not new neither. And this other indie games that are the other type of market in which it is being saturated even more. Heck even R* knows how to do it.

If this games gives me a main protagonists in which I can change his whole appeal from top to bottom. But still has a core personality in which can be accommodated towards my play, besides the most important subject that is the world. in Dying Light, the outstanding source of the game was everything, done right. From the protagonist, story and the most important thing in a open world, the world itself. Nothing felt out of place unbalanced and neither empty. Very cohesive telling a story and fully enjoyable to the very core because of it.

P.s. So Long.

 

[felixsylvaris]

I am not that tired.
It is more about identification of core feature of game and make it strong.
If we make crpg it have to have good story and characters. If you make that, after that you can anything, could be open world or not.
It helps if main gameplay mechanic is somehow interesting. Like combat being fun.

The threat for open world is that there is too many mandatory activities which are not really fun, like too much crafting, or too much traveling.
Or if it gets reapeative fast.

There are still made games which make some good use of open worldness. Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. Witcher. Car games have potencial with open world. Monster slayer games have potencial if monsters are different from each other. There is always Journey game, which in theory was open world, and it made all the sense.

Witcher 3 openworldness is ok. High quality of content, good story, fun gameplay, not that much crafting and traveling. Collecting markers optional.
You probably can do it again in Cyberpunk.

As for generic hero: Deus Ex or Witcher gain from the specific hero, with specific story. But there are two ends. Some players value higher ability to create own hero. Hard to tell which is better.

There could be open world as form of map, when we have different quests on same map (different parts of it).
There is open world as game design genre? Where we are running around and collect markers.

Was Baldurs Gate open wrold game?

 

[Suhiira]

In the latter it is more of a tag line (hey look it is an open world, they are popular, right?) stuffed with filler and endlessly spawning bad guys, as a result it is not done well at all and people get sick to death of it.

Funny how distributors/producers always seem to fixate on the simplest possible explanation for why a given feature is popular in a game.

Well ... maybe not ... after all we're all 11-18 and/or living in our mothers basement ... right? I mean, how smart/savvy can we be?

I mean, these guys have MBAs, they know exactly what we want!

 

[Talonvor]

I guess I'm starting to kind of get an open world fatigue.
But I think it's because of all the damn filler content as you say, just repeating the same things over and overa gain, and how the game just keeps shoving shit in your face in spite of the urgency of the main story.

You do realize that side quests are not required to complete the main story in the vast majority of open world RPGs, don't you?

 

[Talonvor]

Actually I wouldn't mind if I wasn't getting attacked every 50m.
What the hell do all these raiders, supermutants, and etc. eat and prey on normally ???

Well that's the reason they instantly attack you, they aren't eating and you represent a rare opportunity to do so!