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What crpg has the best exploration aspect?

DalekFlay

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New Vegas "exploration aspect" is getting a bit annoying after a while, btw. Game turns into 80% scavenge hunt for skill books and craft recipe components.

New Vegas is a huge favorite of mine but I wouldn't say it excels in exploration at all, honestly.
 

baturinsky

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New Vegas "exploration aspect" is getting a bit annoying after a while, btw. Game turns into 80% scavenge hunt for skill books and craft recipe components.

New Vegas is a huge favorite of mine but I wouldn't say it excels in exploration at all, honestly.

Overworld is a little bland, yes, but vaults and especially DLC are interesting to explore.
 
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New Vegas exploration is annoying after a while because every place you come to has like 2000034 containers with all kinds of crap you don't really need anymore, and yet, the inner OCD compels you to look through them anyway. It would've been much better if it was more survival oriented, and instead of being able to purchase/find tons of weapons and ammo, you would've had to scavenge for everything constantly, like in System Shock 2.
 

DraQ

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Hmm. This discussion is NOT unique. I recall the same discussion in a Thief thread in another forum. Essentially it was about whether something was lost when all items on the screen are glowing? Some posters commented in the original Thief items didn't glow and important items could be buried in a desk. Some said they liked it that way, but it seems most agreed it just led to try-every-single-container-posible and were thankful it was abandoned.
That's the problem with bad and thoughtless design. Rummaging through a hundred of identical desks/crates/barrels is neither challenging, interesting, nor fun.
The problem isn't whether this hundred of containers is searchable or not, though. The problem is that there is no external information to be obtained regarding their contents. Player should be safe to assume that a typical barrel contains only typical barrel contents and not, for example, a +5 sword, unless there exists some external clue that such a sword has been hidden in some particular barrel. When this "contract" holds, player will be able to treat barrels as generic sources of typical barrel contents rather than potential sources of easy to miss phat lewt. When such contract fails you're basically patching one failed design with another.

Well hidden items are not those hidden in unreasonable places. They are those hidden in perfectly reasonable spots player won't think of.

You know I think this boils down to minimaps, radars, automarkers on maps, glowing paths, linear maps and other such things. I may get flamed for saying it, but I think the crucial element in exploration is NOT being shown where things are and furthermore not being excessively nursed by the game designers with the intention you follow the correct path and hence don't get lost.
Basically this.

Pretty much any mechanics is made or broken by how involved it is (or how involved the bigger whole it's part of is, but then we can't really say that the game X has good Y, if Y's only role is being a component of some Z, possibly as insignificant as an attention sink minigame - can you say that Wizardry 8 has good lockpicking system or System Shock 2 hacking even though they do their job in those games?).

When it comes to exploration the involvement generally comes from interpreting information.

So compasses, automaps, highlights, and so on have ability to destroy exploration that directly correlates with their usefulness for it, as they are all gameplay aids (not be confused with AIDS, although, come to think of it...) translating complex and often ambiguous information you get from looking at environment, into basic stimuli such as simple, easily recognizable tokens.

When you're told to find something incriminating NPC X, you have no precise idea what it might be, so you basically have to take all your environment in and constantly make and modify hypotheses regarding what might it be and where it might be hidden - is it a document? in desk? *behind* desk? hidden in shoe? it might even be scratch mark in some particular spot.

Enter quest compass and you no longer have to take anything in, just note relative position of pizza slice, approach and click on whatever is pointed by it.

Similarly, when exploring in raw 3D or pseudo 3D you don't really have any idea regarding what "interesting" means. It might be anything - some particular detail about environment, seemingly unreachable scenery, cryptic textual clue, obscuring clutter, or some peculiarity in large scale layout of the area. You have no shortcuts and no luxury of filtering information out as irrelevant.
OTOH, if you take something like BG, you have very clear idea of what constitutes "interesting" - blackened areas indicating unexplored terrain and anything that flashes teal or changes your cursor on mouseover. You can parse everything else out, especially given that not only are aforementioned stimuli reliable and unambiguous, but anything else can be just not helpful - an area of interest may be an obvious container like barrel or chest, but it may just as well be several pixels in the middle of copypasted rock, while many obvious containers may fail to be hotspots.

tl;dr
IE style makes for good (or any) exploration if and only if QTE makes for good (or any) combat system.
In both cases relevant information is reduced to simple, unambiguous stimuli and relevant gameplay to conditioned reflexive response to them.

If you adore one when condemning another, you're a hypocritical moron, if you adore both - just the latter.
 

Doctor Sbaitso

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Eye Snack suggests: Ultima Underworld. I dare anyone to play it and not search every nook and cranny.
 

WhiteGuts

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I thought exploration in New Vegas was actually great. I loved all those abandoned locations with their own mini story to be found there. That's how you do good world-building without dropping tons of "lore" on the player.
 

Surf Solar

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I find that i enjoy exploration more in first person rpg's, like Skyrim, New Vegas and Morrowind, than on isometric ones. The environments in first person look more immersive and you just want to go to interesting places you see on the horizon, while in isometric rpg's the field of view is very small and you will never see much more than a few meters around your party.

For me it's the exact opposite. In FPS games I have everything put in my face and very quickly start noticing "oh, its NPC face xy, see, there is building art asset #3238" and so on. I never have this problem in isometric games.
 

V_K

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Any changes since?
A few:
West of Loathing for all its slapstick comedy, has a good deal of slightly Lovecraftian lore and a very non-linear exploration driven plot structure.
Voidspire Tactics has an open, if relatively small, world with lots of secrets, small puzzles and highly interactive terrain. Don't let the JRPG-like looks fool you, it's a proper RPG with full party creation and very free-form development, non-linear main quest and a minimal amount of dialogs and cutscenes. The third game in the series (the second is a sort of roguelike), Horizon's Gate, came out this year and adds elements of naval exploration strategy and a much bigger open overworld to explore - though open to a fault, it feels directionless a lot of the time.
Lords of Xulima and 7 Mages aren't half bad if you're into puzzle-heavy blobbers (Xulima is technically not quite a blobber - it has isometric exploration - but its approach to level design is very blobber-like).
Unexplored is a roguelite, but its level generation algorithms are some next-gen shit creating more interesting levels than many human designers could ever aspire to. In its exploration feel, it's the closest thing to Ultima Underworld in many years.
 

octavius

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Evil Islands: Curse of the Lost Soul has pretty good exploration, at least the first part of the game.

And as I suspected, so did Gothic 1, although not quite as much as I'd thought.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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Any changes since? I'm about to start playing Outward.
Outward is a promising first effort at combining survival elements with typical single-character, action-RPG gameplay.

Kenshi offers a bleak, deadly setting in which civilization tenuously clings to survival amidst the ruins of advanced technology and the environments are frequently hazardous to human life, reinforced by game mechanics such as slavery and limb-loss.

Legend of Grimrock II was recently released at the time this thread expired, and it notably features a substantial degree of non-linearity in its structure, with some other additions to the traditional real-time blobber (Dungeon-Master-like) gameplay.

Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar boasts an immense scope matched to its traditional turn-based blobber gameplay (with 8 PCs!):

DcC5LxF.png


kA3m1cp.png
 

anvi

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I'm gonna tell you how exploration works in EQ and then you guys can decide for yourself which game has the best exploration...

I decided to play as a Half-Elf Bard, and my friend chose a Gnome Necromancer, and our other friend chose a Troll Warrior. They would be perfect together but all the races have their own cities all over this huge realistic world, so it would take a long time until we could even find each other. I started in a wooden treetop village made by the Elves called Kelethin. The forest was dark all the time because the trees were huge and there was a fog. So you had to be careful not to walk off the side of the treetop village and splat on the ground below. Many people did. All we had was a compass. There was no map in the game, and no map on the internet either. All you got was a cloth world map that came with the game which showed the continents but not much else. So we had to figure out where to go by just exploring and making mental notes of landmarks.

I learned from trial and error that if I run straight from the village towards some weird Druid stones and keep going, I eventually reach a huge tree and I can turn right at that and it leads to a mountain pass. Through those long paths you reach a port at the ocean. I wait for a boat which took me across a huge ocean with islands full of various crazy sights. Like an island covered in huge Cyclops just roaming around, an island with an evil looking Stonehenge being guarded by giant Spectres holding scythes... or an island with little wooden huts and some ladies standing around in armor, etc.. etc... It would be years until I cast levitation on myself and jumped off the boat to explored all these places. For now I just carried on to the mainland. I arrived in Freeport which felt like a city finally, and from here I could go 2 directions. One way lead along the coast to through 3 desert areas, and eventually it became a swamp. That's where I needed to get to, to reach my buddy. I did all that to get him, and then together we went back to Freeport and then took the other route towards where the Dark Elves live, called Neriak. I couldn't even go in there or the guards and merchants and anyone in there would attack and kill me on sight... Beyond that place was a volcano with lava and caverns inside it but to get there I would need to wait until I could invisibility my way through the Dark Elves.

But this route split off another direction too, which was through some pretty grassy plains, but then into an evil forest which during the day is just some little wasps and bats, and at night time it becomes one of the most dangerous places in the game with Undead armies roaming around. And even as a newbie, I had to get through here, which was tricky. Beyond that forest you could go to visit the Halflings or carry on to Highpass Hold which is where I was heading to buy some Bard songs. It took weeks to do and see all this and I had still only seen about 5% of the game world. Nothing was procedural, it was all hand crafted, and the dungeon design was better than any other game.

Exploring was serious business, you had to use spells like invisibility to reach some places. And the undead could see through it so you had to use invis vs undead instead which made you invis to them but visible to live enemies... And you couldn't have both so you had to be careful. There was a spell called Spirit of Wolf which let you run faster which made a big difference, but only some people had the spell so people would travel to someone and pay them for that spell before they go on an even bigger journey. There were also teleports but they were used sparingly so the world and the distances had to be respected. And if you died while going somewhere, you would respawn all the way back where you previously bound your soul. And you could only bind your soul in a city so travel was dangerous and could end up wasting a lot of your time if you screwed up.

But anywhere you went, you could potentially find something that could transform the game for you, and nobody else knew about. It might be a quest or a creature that only appears for 1 hour a day or something. There were dungeons inside other dungeons that people didn't know about for ages. There are still mysteries even after 22 years.
 

Hag

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Kenshi offers a bleak, deadly setting in which civilization tenuously clings to survival amidst the ruins of advanced technology and the environments are frequently hazardous to human life, reinforced by game mechanics such as slavery and limb-loss.

Yup, Kenshi is a dream to explore. It is made for exploration, all the other game mechanisms are there to support it. I haven't felt this enthusiastic about running around simply discovering new places in a very long time. It has however certain late-game issues (well actually there is no end game, so it depends whether it's problematic for you or not), and after 50 hours sank I'm getting a bit stuck with my current game.
Nevertheless, if you are a Morrowind kind of guy, the one who is ready to spend two hours fighting his way in those deserts (and forests and swamps and fogOH GOD) just to see a sunset over the sea (and you won't be disappointed in that regard), I heartily recommend it. It is a lovely place, filled with colorful people and scary creatures.
 

Falkner

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Wasteland 2
Sorry, but the only games for which I ever broke my personal rule of "If you cannot into proper controls/configuration you're not worth my time - GTFO" were SS1 and TN:SFC and they were still a fucking pain to play (at least there exists a mouselook patch for SS1 which inclines it several-fold despite being just an interface hack lacking actual gameplay changes).
This is not giving me any rest. What does TN:SFC stand for?
 

DraQ

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Sorry, but the only games for which I ever broke my personal rule of "If you cannot into proper controls/configuration you're not worth my time - GTFO" were SS1 and TN:SFC and they were still a fucking pain to play (at least there exists a mouselook patch for SS1 which inclines it several-fold despite being just an interface hack lacking actual gameplay changes).
This is not giving me any rest. What does TN:SFC stand for?
Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri.
A powered armour simulator by Looking Glass.
:obviously:
Bit short but pretty sweet.
Actually it seems to have been dusted off by Night Dive and is on GOG:
https://af.gog.com/game/terra_nova_strike_force_centauri?as=1649904300
 
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Darth Canoli

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Might and Magic 6, 7 - part 6 is so big it can make you dizzy: the world and the dungeons are MASSIVE, and it's all non-random and unique (except treasure - for the most part.); part 7 is smaller but still big

Fallout 1 (small world but almost every location is a total surprise/awesome) and Fallout 2 (bigger world).
Wizardry 7 and 8.

Fallout 1&2 overworld exploration is quite good, not because of the system which was used in so many games since then and feel worse and worse after each subsequent attempt but because they got the most out of it and their special lucky encounter certainly help.

Might & Magic from 3 to 8 exploration is really good, early M&M rewarding exploration even more with hidden trainers, NPC, dungeons and weapons caches.
VI to VIII is still good because of the flying spells and the unique use of verticality which isn't a gimmick here but a real feature.

Arx Fatalis is also up there because the world is dangerous and mysterious and because of the fantastic OST and sound effects on top of the good dungeon crawling.

Wizardry 8 monastery has one of the best dungeon layout, great ambient too and with real traps, not infinite red tiles that magically blow fireballs which would prevent even the residents to move around.
Trynton is one of the most unique Dungeon/City from a cRPG.

If anything, Grimoire improved upon Wizardry 7 exploration, i only played the first quarter of the game but the exploration is quite good.

I'd rate them approximately like this
  1. Might & Magic III & Arx Fatalis
  2. Grimoire & Wizardry 8
  3. Might& Magic IV (Red Dwarf Mines aside), VI , VII
  4. Fallout 1 & 2
  5. Might & Magic V (a lot of trash mines locations unfortunately) and VIII
 
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Darth Canoli

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Morrowind is beyond all or most competition.
I don't know how Wiz7 compares to it, but Wiz8, while not bad, certainly isn't quite there.

Empty hiking space, that's certainly the pinnacle of cRPG exploration...
Did you noticed it was about cRPG or did it slip your mind?


Ultima 7
Wizardry 7
Might & Magic 7

You forgot to mention 7 mages...
 

CryptRat

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My notebook could certify that the Lurking games certainly offered me the best trip and exploration-related mechanisms from the recent games I've played. With the number of interconnected problems you're constantly and actively solving (be ready to take notes and type keywords, that's a big part of the meat of the games and the reasons why they are so good, if you don't like this then you probably won't like the games), the number of hints you're constantly trying to decipher and with always one more secret to discover, one more song to learn from a teacher, you really have no time to get bored during the long ride that their big worlds offer. The worlds are fleshed-out, for example there are some optional quests you can't solve during any season because some plant needs to blossom or some animal needs to be there.
 

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