JemyM
Okay, now roll sanity.
- Joined
- October 26, 2006
- Messages
- 6,027
Free-roaming, either empty or broken
Note: This topic primarily discuss RPG's, but free-roaming games in other genrés seems to have the same problem and might be worthy to discuss here as well.
You are in a vast world, do what you like.
That's basically what many games tried to offer throughout the ages. Do not ask me which the first real free-roaming game was. I remember titles like Fallout and Baldur's Gate, but even the ancient Ultima I fits the genré and there are likely many more that do. I will focus on the newer games since this feels like a growing modern problem since free-roaming became popular. What I do remember is that it seems like almost every one of them either fits the description "empty" or "broken" and lately this seems to be the curse of the genré.
The broken part is easy to explain. Here we find games such as Fallout 2, which was initially extremely buggy and many stopped playing it after a patch ripped all old savegames apart. I remember when people of Black Isle started to complain over the games they were making. They were simply too complex and took too much time to be worth it. Complex dialogue and advanced scripts to make unique quests and unique areas that feels different... the more you try, the greater chance it is that something will break. And they are extremely difficult to bugcheck. From Baldur's Gate II and on, all games produced by Black Isle, Bioware and Obsidian have been very linear, save for Storms of Zehir that tries to go back to the roots.
Still, this isn't a problem of the past. We find modern games with this problem such as Gothic 3, which is acording to me THE rolemodel for how to fill a massive world with content (one of the few games that really managed to make the next valley as exciting as the previous one), but wont be recognized at all because the game was broken beyond belief and thus ripped apart by reviews. Many promising games have fit this description, such as Arcanum, Two Worlds, S.T.A.L.K.E.R and Boiling Point. You can really see when playing the game that the developer ran out of time in the middle of the job. Some of these have later been taken up by fans who "fixed" some of it's issues and turned them into great underrated treasures.
The second kind is not as easy to explain, but it seems they are produced when trying to dodge the above problem. Take a game like Oblivion, which by the first glance appears huge, but when you set the quest-list of Oblivion (about 40-50 if you count guildmissions as one quest each) next to the quest-list of Gothic 3 (about 500) you begin to see why Oblivion felt "empty". When you have to fill a gamemap that have a huge map, you will rely more on generated and streamlined content, the game equivalent of "mass-produced and cheap". While easier to keep bugfree, it creates games that feels repetitive, empty and unrewarding. Now these games have bugs, and patchlists are usually long, but those bugs are rare, "hidden" and not rarely so OBVIOUS that every player see them. Because of this, these games tend to score high on reviews, only to be ripped apart by the gamers who managed to play them long enough to see through the first impression. Here are games such as Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2.
So... is this the way things are going to be? Can someone tell me a free-roaming game that is neither ripped apart from gamers for being repetitive/boring/empty or ripped apart for being broken?
Note: This topic primarily discuss RPG's, but free-roaming games in other genrés seems to have the same problem and might be worthy to discuss here as well.
You are in a vast world, do what you like.
That's basically what many games tried to offer throughout the ages. Do not ask me which the first real free-roaming game was. I remember titles like Fallout and Baldur's Gate, but even the ancient Ultima I fits the genré and there are likely many more that do. I will focus on the newer games since this feels like a growing modern problem since free-roaming became popular. What I do remember is that it seems like almost every one of them either fits the description "empty" or "broken" and lately this seems to be the curse of the genré.
The broken part is easy to explain. Here we find games such as Fallout 2, which was initially extremely buggy and many stopped playing it after a patch ripped all old savegames apart. I remember when people of Black Isle started to complain over the games they were making. They were simply too complex and took too much time to be worth it. Complex dialogue and advanced scripts to make unique quests and unique areas that feels different... the more you try, the greater chance it is that something will break. And they are extremely difficult to bugcheck. From Baldur's Gate II and on, all games produced by Black Isle, Bioware and Obsidian have been very linear, save for Storms of Zehir that tries to go back to the roots.
Still, this isn't a problem of the past. We find modern games with this problem such as Gothic 3, which is acording to me THE rolemodel for how to fill a massive world with content (one of the few games that really managed to make the next valley as exciting as the previous one), but wont be recognized at all because the game was broken beyond belief and thus ripped apart by reviews. Many promising games have fit this description, such as Arcanum, Two Worlds, S.T.A.L.K.E.R and Boiling Point. You can really see when playing the game that the developer ran out of time in the middle of the job. Some of these have later been taken up by fans who "fixed" some of it's issues and turned them into great underrated treasures.
The second kind is not as easy to explain, but it seems they are produced when trying to dodge the above problem. Take a game like Oblivion, which by the first glance appears huge, but when you set the quest-list of Oblivion (about 40-50 if you count guildmissions as one quest each) next to the quest-list of Gothic 3 (about 500) you begin to see why Oblivion felt "empty". When you have to fill a gamemap that have a huge map, you will rely more on generated and streamlined content, the game equivalent of "mass-produced and cheap". While easier to keep bugfree, it creates games that feels repetitive, empty and unrewarding. Now these games have bugs, and patchlists are usually long, but those bugs are rare, "hidden" and not rarely so OBVIOUS that every player see them. Because of this, these games tend to score high on reviews, only to be ripped apart by the gamers who managed to play them long enough to see through the first impression. Here are games such as Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2.
So... is this the way things are going to be? Can someone tell me a free-roaming game that is neither ripped apart from gamers for being repetitive/boring/empty or ripped apart for being broken?
- Joined
- Oct 26, 2006
- Messages
- 6,027