Has there ever been a BIG open world RPG that was also QUALITY?

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

Morrowind

 

[None]

Tamriel Rebuilt. Especially any of the content from 2016 onwards.

 

[Shadenuat]

Pirates!, Space Rangers, etc. so basically open world games where there are other agents but the player or world changes and develops work, it's the static and mechanically shallow checklist big worlds which do not work because they have no ways to create events while player is doing their routine.

 

[Funposter]

Morrowind could be very easily improved by simply culling half of the pointless content (leave some of it for flavour) and then directing those resources to larger dungeons for questing, more in-depth quests and faction questlines etc. I think that Bethesda could absolutely improve upon the problems of Morrowind while maintaining its mechanics and scale, if they had any wish to do so given the enormous amount of resources at their command.

 

[Sigourn]

Arcanum is large but it is mostly empty space.

Yes, but Arcanum is

1. Much smaller than Morrowind when it comes to content.
2. Its world is also clearly not meant to be travelled on foot.

I love Morrowind, but I generally agree with you. I noticed this while playing through Fallout 4 recently. It's decent enough as a shooter with RPG elements, as some of the dungeons have excellent level design.

But at some point you get worn out because everything feels samey after a while.

And I noticed this pattern in pretty much all open world games, be they RPGs or not.

The main reason for this is that due to the quantity, the devs can't make sure everything is of high quality. You got a couple of standout locations, but everything else is recycled. Even worse: elements from the standout locations are recycled elsewhere, which makes special things feel less special.

I agree. I am seeing this on Morrowind as well. And this is not due to my long time playing the game: playing it for long just changed my mind from "theory" to "fact", because one may at first think they are simply not looking hard enough for the good dungeons, but the truth is that for every truly unique dungeon, they will find at least 10 (or 20) filler dungeons. And like you said this is a problem with the quantity of the dungeons, because no matter how hard the dev team tries, there's only so many ways to arrange your usual rocks, ropes, and pools inside a bandit cave before every one of them looks the same.

It's a shame to admit it, but at this point I feel like I'm playing Morrowind out of inertia. I enter dungeons expecting nothing and get nothing in return. Even quests start to feel generic after a while, the same "rescue this NPC" who is located at some location yet they may as well be located anywhere as there's no relation with the NPCs or creatures enslaving them, a far cry from Fallout's kidnapping of Tandi for instance, where at least there's context for her capture and you can talk to her enslavers.

Ah, that game one likes less the more one plays it and thinks about it...

Sadly I find this to be particularly true for both Morrowind and New Vegas. It must be because unlike other RPGs I've played, these have the most content and the most filler by far. Naturally I can't expect a game as Deus Ex to be so full of filler due to its mission-based structure, but Gothic proved you can make a great open world game if you don't go retarded with the amount of content offered to the player.

I don't really get this logic. What you're essentially saying is the game would be better if it just ended after X hours before you had a chance to see too much of it. That's pretty much the goal of the design; to have a game actually large enough for the player to get their fill, instead of ending and leaving them wanting more for 20 years while it never gets a sequel, or milking them with 40$ 5 hour expansions (which Bethesda does anyways, to be fair.)

To put it bluntly, you want the player to have their proper fill of the game as opposed to having to search through the boredom to find the good bits. In Fallout, if I find a location I know the devs put a minimum bit of effort into it. In Morrowind, if I find a location I'm met with generic enemies, loot, and NPCs which have the same generic, Wikipedia-style dialogue. And by Wikipedia-style I don't mean "hyperlinks", but NPCs that literally talk as if they were Wikipedia articles. Asking about a given topic doesn't yield me that NPCs opinion or personal view on the topic, but rather a generic information dump of the worst kind.

Yet another example of how in their search of quantity Bethesda dropped the ball on quality: many Morrowind fans exalt how every NPC has many topics to speak of, but the truth is many aren't saying anything at all.

Funposter I agree. I personally would have loved to see a Fallout-like Morrowind that spanned the entirety of the province instead of just Vvardenfell. Eggmines? Get rid of all of them, minus the ones that are essential for a quest. I prefer to be sent to just one or two eggmines to do quests than to arriving at 20 eggmines by my own just to be met by copypasted eggminers with the same generic "don't hurt the queen".

Spoiler

 

[anvi]

Vanguard was better than everything.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The exact same quicktime sequence might be a fun diversion as a special moment in the story, but become a stinking rote chore as a regularly repeated minigame.

But that's only true if it's forced on you. The whole point of an open world is that, if you don't want to go hunting 800 trolls, you don't need to. You can wander around and fight every new type of monster once if that's your obssession. If you're sick of egg mines, stop going into fucking eggmines. Go explore the ocean. Murder a village. Burgle a shop. Give your favourite beggar enough money to buy out every shop in town. Make a personal library. LEAVE SHIT BEHIND.

I feel like there's a generation of people that grew up wringing every last word out of the games they played because there wasn't enough to go around, and some of us haven't yet realized you don't need to any more. I'll take a hundred dungeons based on ten templates with minor quirks over 11 bigger dungeons with unique templates that you MUST go through in order any day of the week. I'll probably only visit 20 of them but it'll be my adventure, not a guided tour through a themepark where some asshole has to point everything out so it doesn't go unappreciated.

 

[Sigourn]

The exact same quicktime sequence might be a fun diversion as a special moment in the story, but become a stinking rote chore as a regularly repeated minigame.

But that's only true if it's forced on you. The whole point of an open world is that, if you don't want to go hunting 800 trolls, you don't need to. You can wander around and fight every new type of monster once if that's your obssession. If you're sick of egg mines, stop going into fucking eggmines. Go explore the ocean. Murder a village. Burgle a shop. Give your favourite beggar enough money to buy out every shop in town. Make a personal library. LEAVE SHIT BEHIND.

The problem is that if I want to go into a cool ancestral tomb, I simply have to keep entering ancestral tombs and going through the shit ones.

To put it in other words: according to your logic, I should stop playing Morrowind right now. After all, I've found every aspect of its design (dungeons, NPCs, towns, cities) repetitive by now, and trying to look even further and finding more boring content would be entirely my fault for not "learning" how to enjoy an open world game.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Morrowind is fucking tiny, what are you guys smoking. Go play openmw and turn the fog off, you'll be surprised at just how much you can see from seyda neen.

Morrowind is a 2002 game that is much bigger than that of Fallout: New Vegas (2010),

Vvardenfell is 84x88 TES4-size cells. FNV Mojave is 128x129 TES4-size cells.

 

[Damned Registrations]

To put it in other words: according to your logic, I should stop playing Morrowind right now.

I mean, yeah. I sure as hell never did 150 quests in morrowind on one character. I might not even have done that with all of them combined. How many hours have you sunk into the game? What are you expecting out of it?

 

[Nano]

No. All open-world RPGs ever released would only be better if they weren't open-world.

 

[Sigourn]

I mean, yeah. I sure as hell never did 150 quests in morrowind on one character. I might not even have done that with all of them combined. How many hours have you sunk into the game? What are you expecting out of it?

I expect a game to be good, and just because it is big it shouldn't allow people to handwave its flaws with "just don't experience the content bro". Bethesda certainly saw fit to have over 300 quests in the game. Why couldn't they see fit to have only good quests in the game?

 

[Ysaye]

What about Ultima 7's Britannia? Or Ultima 5's Britannia? Or not big enough to be discussed here?

 

[overly excitable young man]

Nah. That's the lesson one should take from Gothics and Fallouts.
A big open world doesn't work while also maintaining high quality.

Today in modern open world games its the same like in Fallout only that they felt the need to translate the fast travel map from Fallout in actual game world which leads
to a lot of travelling through empty land from poi to poi.

If you would design it with interesting stuff to explore aside from the points of interest (like in Gothics) you would never have finished a game of the map size like Skyrim e.g.

Big open world is always big empty world.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Big open world is always big empty world.

The problem is that they aren't even big.
Added onto that, most of them suffer from massive amounts of copy+pasting to the point where you wonder if you'd be better off playing a game with an actually big procedurally generated world rather than seeing the same fucking cave over and over.

 

[ItsChon]

Morrowind was always gay, only decline-enabling third-person and first-person faggots enjoyed it. 2D-Isometric is the best, hands down.

 

[Wunderbar]

Kingdom Come Deliverance

 

[Casual Hero]

Dorateen already said this, and he's totally right: Might and Magic games.

Something I've always said about Might and Magic is that they are a distillation of everything that makes an RPG experience fun, without too much of the extra filler that you don't really care about. To make an easy comparison, Wizardry 7 went with a more to-scale size of its world while M&M's overworld is more abstract and up-scaled. I don't know if this is inherently better than a more detailed world, but it does ensure that each section of the world is fun to explore. The main difference is that there is a lot of winding forests in Wizardry 7 without a whole lot of substance behind them other than to make the world feel larger. M&M can have things like fountains to buff your party, spells hidden in mountains, quest giving NPCs, and enemy bases all within a small 10x10 section of the map. I think the more abstract world actually lends itself extremely well to exploration; you will never find a sector of the overworld without any quest or some kind of progression for your party. This may not be as immersive (lol) for some of you, but it definitely captures the essence of what I want in an RPG, and distills it into the most digestible package.

The structure of M&M games is very open-world, but the world layout of the games themselves is always driving the player forward.

 

[AArmanFV]

One of my problems with open world games is that I will be doing the scripted main quest, the way the developers want, so having a big world which is too big and boring to travel on foot is a problem and bothersome, an obstacle to beat the thing quickly, because the rest is uninteresting filler.

If some game could manage to make the player's goal a bit more inespecific without making the game feel homogeneous maybe could solve it, but the only game I played that go in that way is Darklands, it's not perfect but I feel that does it well. The game start me in a random location and doesn't give me too much exposition (It's not like being in a jail and then having a guy telling me that had a dream about me everytime I make a new game), just have adventures and get your name in the hall of fame, the fetch quests feel more like a job to survive and another step to become recognized and a logic step to start doing more exiting quests rather than an excuse to give 200 hours more of gamplay or make the world "alive", traveling on foot can be slow but have some random moments that make me feel like I'm adventuring, etc.

 

[sullynathan]

Breath of the wild

Increased walking speed is a godsend

 

[Drowed]

I think open world games, by nature, create that kind of problem. You actually "need" an empty space separating the various points of interest, not just because it's practically impossible to fill the whole map with relevant content, but especially to create a credible world.

One of the most common problems with many open world games is that they end up looking like gigantic amusement parks, with attractions every 10 meters. You start a quest to defeat a group of raiders and discover that they live in a cabin that is around 20 seconds walk from where you were before. You move from one village to another, but it's a two or three minute walk. In this sense, a certain level of empty space is necessary so that the world makes the least sense and you can breathe. The problem is that if you're going to do this to encourage map exploration, the things you're going to find really need to be worth it, and not just be more recycled and procedurally generated content.

I can't give you examples of open world games that have really done this right because I don't think they really exist. Which doesn't mean that all open world games are bad by definition, many are good even with the world like that, and not because of it. Personally, I think the best way to deal with exploration would be to make games with "semi-open worlds," where you have different hubs with hand-placed content, and that you can go from one to another to explore them. Ironically something like what Obsidian tried to do in Outer Worlds, although they ended up failing in the end. I think the idea was going in the right direction, the failure was in the implementation.

So, in the end if you have an open world, either the world is too small to make sense, or it is too big and ends up with recycled and useless content. I think the idea of creating worlds like this is something that's going to lose breath in the coming years, because I believe that this was very much a consequence of Bethesda's initial success allied to the fact that "open world games" have become an empty sales term - it's something that's now being put into games by default as a way of attracting players (to impress them by the size and because "you can go anywhere you see"), rather than being the main focus of game design.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I'd rather have a choice between 4 mediocre areas/dungeons/quests/etc. than be forced into 1 good one sometimes. It's a tradeoff. If you don't value that freedom aspect at all, you're playing the wrong genre.

I think open world games, by nature, create that kind of problem. You actually "need" an empty space separating the various points of interest, not just because it's practically impossible to fill the whole map with relevant content, but especially to create a credible world.

One of the things I actually miss about Everquest was how difficult it was to travel. You could spend half an hour just walking between towns, avoiding monsters. Trying to travel really far required waiting around for ferries, and they didn't show up every 60 seconds like they do these days, when they aren't replaced by instant fast travel to begin with. Traveling and exploring is a thrill all on its own, especially when it's mostly filler. It's like getting excited when you gamble. Slot machines are more fun than rock paper scissors even if they have worse odds and almost always give you the same shit.

 

[Drowed]

Well, it's a fact that not every game is for every kind of player. There are people who literally devote their time to games like EVE Online, it's often the main focus of their free time and they even spend a lot of money on it. I tried to play it years ago, but I never really got into the game. From what little I know about it, traveling to certain parts of the universe to deliver something can take almost an hour. And there are a lot of activities to collect resources that most players would find boring, but that no doubt brings some kind of satisfaction to the people who are fans of the genre - because from what I know, those who likes EVE, really likes the game and defends it fiercely.

On the other extreme side you have games like Skyrim where you have a "point of interest" at every 15-20 seconds walking. Each cave is filled with loot chests and randomly generated weapons. Personally, I prefer a middle ground: a world that's not so full of garbage that you can't walk a few meters without tripping over the next random dungeon, but a world that's not so empty that I have to do long trips and need to dedicate hours of my life to it. Call it decline if you like, but in the little free time (and energy) I have left, I prefer to use for interesting things and feel that I am progressing in the game. Walking around isn't very interesting, especially if it's something I have to do over and over again.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

The Faery Tale Adventure (1986) boasted over seventeen thousand screens worth of an Overworld, with varied terrain and unique locations.

 

[Desiderius]

Death Knights of Krynn