Proper map design in open world cRPGs

[Dorateen]

Here is a fun, open world island map:

 

[RapineDel]

The problem with a game being too open is if you come across excellent gear early on, exploration starts to feel pointless which kills the purpose. Morrowind does suffer from this somewhat.

Bethesda's solution however was much worse, taking away the chance of you genuinely finding something interesting and replacing it with a linear path of you only ever getting items that you "should" be getting through level scaling etc.

BotW tried to tackle this a unique way with the weapon breaking feature, you can find a fantastic weapon but it won't last long. To me the system is a dud however as given the game wants to be an RPG but doesn't go all the way, you're basically rewarded if you skip the majority of combat encounters in the game. and therefore the world basically becomes a hub for you to actually reach content (Shrines).

Piranha Bytes are the only developer who've mastered it, have different parts of the open world slowly open up to you as you level whilst the option being there for skilled players to tackle things however they want. The fact no bigger developer hasn't copied this is damning to me.

Also Divinity OS isn't a fair example IMO. You start populating the world with random level enemies and every encounter becomes a total shit show given how much of an area becomes a combat zone when you aggro something.

 

[Zanzoken]

The problem with a game being too open is if you come across excellent gear early on, exploration starts to feel pointless which kills the purpose.

This may be a minority opinion, but I've never found items to be that interesting in cRPGs, at least not to where I would curtail the player's ability to explore just to protect loot drops.

If you want to keep the player from getting really strong gear too early in the game, then just put an appropriate challenge in front of it that will prevent players from being able to obtain it prematurely. And if a smart, experienced player manages to find a way past said challenge... maybe that's good? There is an argument to be made that you don't necessarily want your systems to be completely airtight, because some people really enjoy finding secrets and/or breaking the game.

And just like with player progression, I'm also a big fan of flattening power curves on items. I really dislike systems where finding the Epic Sword of Cutting suddenly makes you an unstoppable badass. I have an even greater disdain for loot treadmills that bombard you with an overwhelming amount of items and force you to constantly cycle through gear (D:OS is a major offender here as well).

 

[CryptRat]

Just have the player control 8 characters with 12 equipment slots if you want the next single strong piece of equipment to be relevant but not game breaking.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Just have the player control 8 characters with 12 equipment slots if you want the next single strong piece of equipment to be relevant but not game breaking.

yea but this is about rpgs not strategy games

 

[JarlFrank]

Gothic 2 and Morrowind are the examples of open worlds done right that come to my mind.

Morrowind has clearly differentiated biomes. Levelup frequency isn't too quick, and if you're clever about your use of spells and other tools fighting a higher level enemy isn't too impossible, so the whole world is open to you immediately but some areas are harder to get through than others. The center of the island is taken up by volcanic badlands swarming with nasty creatures, and you should only enter it in mid to high levels - but there's a clear lore reason for that, it's where Dagoth Ur is building up his forces. Dungeons with dangerous shit in them exist all over the place, when you see a daedric ruin chances are there's high level daedra in there. These are sprinkled all over Vvardenfell, not just concentrated in some high level area. Generally, the biome you are in tells you what kind of wildlife you can expect there, and the areas further from civilization tend to be more dangerous. Areas directly around settlements tend to be pretty safe, while areas further away tend to have more dangerous wildlife. But sometimes there are dangerous dungeons in the vicinity of a settlement, and the locals will warn you about that.

Gothic 2 has absolutely great world design. Roads tend to be safe, with some exceptions (the occasional bandit preying on travelers). The deeper you go into the wilderness, the more dangerous it gets. Sometimes, you can encounter high level fuckoff beasts that eat you in one gulp right in the "starter area". The first forest you find has a shadowbeast lurking in it, and that thing will fuck you up easily. Gothic 2's exploration consists of going from civilized place to civilized place, exploring the surroundings, then pushing into the wilderness as far as you can, and taking notes on what you find there. After a couple of hours you'll end up with an annotated map that has a lot of "come back here when I'm stronger" markers. It leads to a very organic way of exploration, and a very strong feeling of progression as you regularly get that feeling of finally being able to beat up the bastards who fucked you over 5 levels ago.

 

[thesecret1]

Gothic 2's exploration consists of going from civilized place to civilized place, exploring the surroundings, then pushing into the wilderness as far as you can, and taking notes on what you find there. After a couple of hours you'll end up with an annotated map that has a lot of "come back here when I'm stronger" markers. It leads to a very organic way of exploration, and a very strong feeling of progression as you regularly get that feeling of finally being able to beat up the bastards who fucked you over 5 levels ago.

Not only that, but the way the beasts are positioned, once you take out the high level bugger, you often open up a far quicker route to an important place (where you took the roundabout way before precisely to avoid it). Often, near the end of the game, you realize that the maps in Gothic 1 and 2 are actually fairly small (Gothic 1 especially), but that they didn't actually feel that way precisely because of this design.

 

[oasis789]

So... Should the Chosen One have no problems going straight from Arroyo to Navarro? Is that the design you want?

 

[markec]

The problem with a game being too open is if you come across excellent gear early on, exploration starts to feel pointless which kills the purpose. Morrowind does suffer from this somewhat.

Bethesda's solution however was much worse, taking away the chance of you genuinely finding something interesting and replacing it with a linear path of you only ever getting items that you "should" be getting through level scaling etc.

BotW tried to tackle this a unique way with the weapon breaking feature, you can find a fantastic weapon but it won't last long. To me the system is a dud however as given the game wants to be an RPG but doesn't go all the way, you're basically rewarded if you skip the majority of combat encounters in the game. and therefore the world basically becomes a hub for you to actually reach content (Shrines).

Piranha Bytes are the only developer who've mastered it, have different parts of the open world slowly open up to you as you level whilst the option being there for skilled players to tackle things however they want. The fact no bigger developer hasn't copied this is damning to me.

Also Divinity OS isn't a fair example IMO. You start populating the world with random level enemies and every encounter becomes a total shit show given how much of an area becomes a combat zone when you aggro something.

The problem of Morrowind and finding great equipment early on is only prevalent on a replays, when playing for the first time its easy to miss some great gear. Morrowind real problem is that even if you have decent equipment bought from merchants you still get powerful enough at mid game to overcome every challenge.

What I really disagree with you that exploration is about finding better gear and that is why in my opinion Morrowind easily has the best exploration experience. What Morrowind does better then any other game is fill the world with different locations that arent only about finding loot or fighting enemies but are used to build upon the world and lore. And make a interesting world filled with uniqueness and mystery, both of the world itself and its inhabitants.

I remember one time I was exploring Morrowind and finding a cave I missed on my previous playthrough. It had a small entrance hidden in body of water, inside was just one room with some furniture and a few pages of a diary, which i read with great interest. To me that was more interesting then if it was just a bandit lair with a some decent equipment.

Also what makes the designing a good open world is building it in a way that the world itself is a obstacle you need to overcome. Morrowind was a large world with a tricky environment to move around (especially with slow movement speed), the fast travel was very limited with ports and silt striders. So in 90% of situations you had to go everywhere on foot, carrying supplies like repair hammers to fix your gear after constant attacks. After playing the game for some time I found shortcuts, remembered unique environmental formations that provided orientation and used spells and items to speed my way over long travels. I felt a sense of satisfaction when travelling long distances in most effective way, it felt as I have mastered the world.

This is something you no longer can experience in nuBethesda games. You no longer need to prepare for a long trips with, since your can just teleport anywhere. There is no longer need to do that extra effort to make unique world design to make your orientation easier, just follow quest compass and not your diary note of "walk north until you find a stone formation that looks like a hand and then travel to the edge of Red Mountain."

That is way I love Morrowind and why I think its a best open world game RPG.

 

[purupuru]

Actually level-scaling content (or at least leveled enemies) is part of the answer, just not in the Oblivion way. Morrowind itself uses leveled list for random spawned enemies, when you are low level and encounter a daedra along the road it's gonna be a Scamp, when you are higher level you get Hungers, Winged Twilights, etc, and of course you still get Scamps from time to time. So as opposed to fighting generic bandits with crazy HP and Daedric armor, you "unlock" more kinds of enemies as you level up and the world gets more interesting.
Also I think the problem with DOS is not it's map design but rather the exponential increase that comes with each level, if you put that map in, say, a fallout game, it wouldn't feel very restrictive at all.

 

[Stavrophore]

Procedurally generated, free roam of differently leveled monsters across landscape/between lairs or zones, roguelike RPG. If its too strong you should be able to escape combat. Also i wonder -was there any RPG with scouting mechanic? Where you would scout, and then it would show you monsters -type, level on the map?

 

[Bad Sector]

Open World necessarily includes a seamless map at a constant scale where the player-character(s) directly traverses the overworld environment.

Open world isn't really about having a seamless world (nor having a seamless world means you have an open world - these two are orthogonal), it is about how you can gain, approach and solve objectives in the world itself - it has little to do with how the world is presented or even traversed. For example, Fallout 1 and 2 are open world games even though your character only has an abstracted representation in the "boring" parts between the interesting areas - it is an open world game because you can go anywhere you want, pick up any quest you come across and solve these quests in any order you want. On the other hand a game like Dragon Age Inquisition, while having big worlds it is not open in any way - new areas pop up and close whenever the game decides so and while there are side quests, etc there is an overall linear progress (note: i used DAI as an example because it is a game that really gave me a feeling of "this really wants to be an open world game but doesn't seem to even understand what open world is all about" - also i can't think of any game with a big seamless world that still had a linear progression though i'm 100% certain that it exists).

Of course nowadays "open world" has become synonymous with "seamless world" even though if you start digging into that you'll see that it doesn't make much sense and several games that are supposedly "open world" do not really have a seamless world (e.g. Bethesda's games as Butter mentioned - and it isn't just cities, you get a separate area even for things like houses and stores).

(you also mentioned "constant scale" but TBH that feels very arbitrary, like someone once telling me that a game isn't an open world game if you can't look up to see the sky :-P)

EDIT: or to put it briefly, "open world" is largely about what the game lets you do in the world and "seamless world" is largely about how the world is presented, with these two being independent of each other and with games having "open world", "seamless world" or (often, but not always) both.

 

[Pink Eye]

Stone Prophet! Stone Prophet!

The moment you enter the land of Har' Akir. You can explore the dungeons in any order you want. Very open! You can even rush to the end dungeon if you so desire - though you won't be able to defeat Anhktepot; as you need two items to do so, which are gained by exploring the other dungeons first. Anyways, the land of Har'Akir itself contains lots of cool secrets; such as loots, lore, and quests. On the overworld you can find NPCs, they're a real joy to speak to; they offer interesting conjectures about the mysteries of the land. However don't expect them to be approachable. The majority of villagers despise outsiders. Even blaming the evil that haunts Har'Akir on your party.

The overworld mainly serves as a means to connect all the different zones, dungeons, that you'll find. The enemies within the areas have varying degrees of difficulty - though I didn't have much trouble defeating them with my Ranger and Paladin. Except for Trolls, they're in an end game area, pretty tough! When you enter the zone. You'll find both an NPC and a letter that explicitly tells you that trolls are tough enemies. But that just means that you need to throw a fireball at them after you strike them down, else they get back up. You can find a bunch of firewands all over the place to combat the creatures. That is why the exploration is so rewarding!

One thing I took great delight in. Is how the dungeons and zones have different themes to accompany them. You gots unique musical scores for each dungeon. Lore scattered all over that contains the history of the place. Riddles as well as puzzles that are unique to the given area.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Anyway, this post is long enough but I hope that it generates some interesting discussion. The point is, avoid strict zoning and level scaling in open world games, and just design the content in a way that gives the player an appropriate amount of freedom to explore but also presents mid- and late-game challenges. It's difficult but if you have the right design goals in mind it can be done.

DOS first half was quite well designed (traps & barrels aside, too much of a mediocre thing...) and you could tackle the beach and pirates area 1/2 level early, for example, it's not Might & Magic level of openworldness but it's decent.
Your approach seems like the right one.

Don't ward the world into zones. Make it so that player may encounter high-level mobs even in starting areas. Just give him tools to avoid them if needed. That makes the world feel more realistic.

I don't think it has been done much if at all in western RPG but would really like having a good western tactical party-based & TB RPG having some light scaling/upgrading monsters options.
It'd allow the player to add some Elite/boss monsters to the world through customized difficulty settings and/or a light scaling option.

Meaning either you generate some elite monsters through difficulty settings (like how Battle Brothers champions works, 5% chances to get one, or more with mods) or through scaling, for each level of your party outgrowing an area, X% chances to get stronger monsters spawning.
There's also a jrpg option, when you killed X monsters of one type, you can encounter elite versions of that monster under some conditions (some only at night for example) and when you killed Y versions of the elite monster, here's comes the legendary one.
X and Y doesn't have to be huge numbers, just 25%/50% of the this monster population for X and half or a quarter of this for Y.

Either of these systems as long as the player has some control over it (through scaling options or difficulty options) and the better versions give more xp and potentially better gear/drops.

Just something to add variety.
Of course, it's even better with hand-crafted encounters (where one of the upgrades will just replace a basic monster or just join the frey in one of the optional handcrafted extra monster position)

I know players tend to hate level scaling but i believe a good handcrafted light scaling system is way better than none with an open-world design, because if when you decide to tackle difficult areas and come back to the easier ones, there's no challenge nor surprises left and that's how you turn half the areas into trash mobs areas. (Well, it's alright if you add meteor shower and Armageddon)

 

[Stella Brando]

 

[Bastardchops]

He died doing what he loved, trying to assault a minor.

 

[Serus]

More importantly, are "Minor Attracted People" necessary to have an open world crpg?

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

More importantly, are "Minor Attracted People" necessary to have an open world crpg?

Absolutely. Bumping into antifa shitheads is modern day equivalent of a random encounter.

 

[JarlFrank]

Kenosha's map design was very restricted though, too many roadblocks to funnel the player into pre-determined paths.

 

[Black Angel]

Also i wonder -was there any RPG with scouting mechanic? Where you would scout, and then it would show you monsters -type, level on the map?

Does Fallout 1&2 with its Outdoorsman skill count?

 

[luj1]

You could go anywhere on Vvardenfell, except maybe Red Mountain/deep Ashlands/the Grazelands, from the start.

No, you could go anywhere

 

[deuxhero]

Physically yes, but practically those areas have enemies that are very difficult for a new character to survive in (Even an ash slave or scamp is certain death, and the scamp is outright immune to normal weapons) without being in the hands of a knowledgeable player.

 

[luj1]

That's the fun of it

 

[Zeriel]

Kenosha's map design was very restricted though, too many roadblocks to funnel the player into pre-determined paths.

Counter point if you give the players too much freedom, you're just wandering around an endless plateau of low level antifa mobs that are too easy to blow away with your starter weapon handed to you by your family quest-giver