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

[Dwarvophile]

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.

There's truth in that, look at M&B warband, the world is shallow, the quests are retarded; and yet it feels lively and immersive just because of the faction's dynamics.

Also in most open world games like Bethesda's or Ubisoft's, things gets repetitive when your try to systematically and maniacally complete every quests. Ubisoft should get rid of the markers on the map, or make it an option and in TES games, some guild's membership should be exclusive.

 

[Tigranes]

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.

A game filled with 800 boring dungeons is a bad game. It's an even worse game if all of the 800 dungeons are forced on you. But making them optional doesn't stop your game from being filled with boring shit.

Yeah, it'll be your adventure, where you can choose which combination of the 800 boring banal generic dungeons to go through. Not very enticing.

Hand-made dungeons, or gameplay gimmicks which are carefully placed instead of being copy-pasted many times, are a good thing. It's very strange to read your very specific imagination of the railroaded theme park. PS:T had basically one area thematically dominated by the cranium rats, building up to a cranium rat boss with a specific gameplay gimmick, which was designed all around the related story and area. Or you could play an MMO where there are generic 'swarm' mobs randomly pasted onto procedurally generated dungeons a hundred times. That's what we're talking about.

 

[thesecret1]

I think Gothic's approach to open world had never been surpassed. The map is tiny in comparison to others, but by making sure there is no filler and every spot on the map is somehow important or interesting, it feels so much bigger. Quality level and encounter design is present on your every step rather than leaving anything up to procedural generation and you never feel like you're going through repetitive dungeons.

 

[Darth Canoli]

I think Gothic's approach to open world had never been surpassed. The map is tiny in comparison to others, but by making sure there is no filler and every spot on the map is somehow important or interesting, it feels so much bigger. Quality level and encounter design is present on your every step rather than leaving anything up to procedural generation and you never feel like you're going through repetitive dungeons.

But Gothic's problem is Gothic combat system, it'd have been way better as a top-down zelda-like, it's a real mess.

 

[Azdul]

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

Many designers cannot properly handle open world, and try to use old narrative tricks as if it was "Fighting fantasy" paperback or Sierra point-and-click adventure. You can no longer have dynamite stick that does 10000 points damage to debris blocking the access, and 0 points of damage to everything else.

Open world exposes all design flaws. If you'll let player wander around, he'll quickly find out that economy, ecology and politics of the world does not make sense, and amazing, epic story is full of logical inconsistencies.

However, the open world is the way forward. As the realism and processing power increases, designing closed worlds is no longer easier or cheaper.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Might & Magic VI 15/16 maps pulled together :

Same Goes For Isles of Terra (M&M III) and WoX (M&M IV + V)

Might & Magic VII and VIII having gradually less content (still beats the procedurally generated shit)

Nothing comes even close.

 

[Silly Germans]

I don't see the benefit of large open worlds. All large open world games sacrifice quality on the altar of quantity. These games strike me as the "fast food" of gaming, highly popular despite being subpar in quality. I prefer games that condense quality content as much as possible as long as it doesn't hurt the atmosphere.

 

[purupuru]

Xenoblade Chronicles X

 

[Terenty]

Red Dead Redemption 2 has the best open world, but its not an rpg so

 

[alyvain]

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.

Exactly, so they actually work like open-worlds, not open amusement parks that you go through at your own pace.

I'd say that today's open world philosophy is the exact opposite, especially in Morrowind, where everything is static and nailed down to the ground. But the fact that they tried to go for "realism", with understandable cities placement throughout the continent, with kwama mines where you possibly couldn't possibly expect to find anything interesting, with farms and all that stuff, kinda make you roll with it. Well, maybe not everyone, but it's fine for LARPing, although the problem with mechanics still stands, and when you're, say, level 40, and you still haven't explored the continent through, all the unchecked content becomes a chore. It's worse with Skyrim, though. I think they decided to get rid of the fetch quest, to add interesting encounters and dialogues, but it all only highlights how dead this world actually is. It is more or less the same with Inquisition and TW3, which are more content-heavy.

 

[guestposting]

There are lots of people who like the walking sim aspect of these big open world games. You could say they have shit taste and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree, but that’s the itch these games are trying to scratch and they do a good job of scratching it.

If you don’t have that itch—I sure as hell don’t—it’s always going to feel like a hollow experience. That said, they’re doing what they set out to do and what their vapid audience wants.

 

[JarlFrank]

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.

No, my logic is that spending devleopment time and resources to add lots and lots and lots of areas forces developers to recycle ideas and half-ass some designs, so some of the dungeons in the game won't be as good as the others. The quantity of the content leads to some of this content being mediocre compared to the rest.

The game would be better off with half as many dungeons, but they get twice as much effort invested in their creation so they're all unique instead of copypasta'd clones of each other.

When a similar idea gets recycled often enough, it stops being interesting. In Skyrim, fighting a dragon was cool for the first couple times... then it became routine and finally an annoyance. Had they stuck to fewer dragon fights, they'd be more memorable and fondly remembered. The way it is, they became routine and were turned into a meme due to their frequency. Same with the dragon claw puzzle where you have to look at the claw in your inventory to see the pattern that opens the gate. It would be a cool thing to have it once or twice in the game, but when you get the exact same simplistic puzzle a dozen times, it becomes routine and boring. Same with the inactive protectrons in Fallout 4. Same with the activities in Ubisoft's open world games, where the exact same activity is placed a dozen times across the map.

Copypasted content is lame and boring, but if you make each quest and location unique you won't be able to make 200 of them. I'd rather have a game with 30 hours of content but all the content is unique, than a game with 300 hours of content but everything you see after 10 hours is just a copypasta of what you've already seen.

 

[JarlFrank]

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".

The eggmines have to exist for verisimilitude of the world. They explain where the food people eat comes from. After you've checked out two of them, you know that they have nothing to offer and don't go into them unless a quest tells you to. Same with all the farms dotting the world.

But they need to be there to make the world feel believable.

 

[JarlFrank]

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.

Who says that you must go through every dungeon if they're all unique? Baldur's Gate 2 has lots of unique places, and most of them are optional. The first quest is to amass 10k gold, and how you do it doesn't matter. Several cool one-of-a-kind dungeons with associated quests await, but you don't have to do any of them. You can skip all of the cool unique content if you want.

A great examples is trolls in Gothic 2. There are maybe two or three of them in the entire game, and just one black troll. You can completely avoid them, you can even miss them entirely because they're in off-the-path locations.

Making everything explicitly pointed out because you don't want the player to miss it is a bad habit of narcissistic game designers. A good game has unique content that can easily be missed.

 

[Desiderius]

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.

No, my logic is that spending devleopment time and resources to add lots and lots and lots of areas forces developers to recycle ideas and half-ass some designs, so some of the dungeons in the game won't be as good as the others. The quantity of the content leads to some of this content being mediocre compared to the rest.

The game would be better off with half as many dungeons, but they get twice as much effort invested in their creation so they're all unique instead of copypasta'd clones of each other.

When a similar idea gets recycled often enough, it stops being interesting. In Skyrim, fighting a dragon was cool for the first couple times... then it became routine and finally an annoyance. Had they stuck to fewer dragon fights, they'd be more memorable and fondly remembered. The way it is, they became routine and were turned into a meme due to their frequency. Same with the dragon claw puzzle where you have to look at the claw in your inventory to see the pattern that opens the gate. It would be a cool thing to have it once or twice in the game, but when you get the exact same simplistic puzzle a dozen times, it becomes routine and boring. Same with the inactive protectrons in Fallout 4. Same with the activities in Ubisoft's open world games, where the exact same activity is placed a dozen times across the map.

Copypasted content is lame and boring, but if you make each quest and location unique you won't be able to make 200 of them. I'd rather have a game with 30 hours of content but all the content is unique, than a game with 300 hours of content but everything you see after 10 hours is just a copypasta of what you've already seen.

Crowdsource the dungeons, invest big in editing.

 

[Sigourn]

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

This is yet another of my problems with Morrowind, as well as New Vegas. There comes a point where you have explored everything you could explore in a given area. And at that point, you are simply fast travelling from one point of interest to another.

"But Skyrim's fast travelling sucks! Morrowind's transport system was so much better!"

Yes. Yes it was so much better, when I still had things left to explore. When I don't have anything else to explore, I find myself wishing for a fast travel system just so I could instantly go from Gnisis to Pelagiad, instead of having to make my way to Seyda Neen through Silt Striders, then having to use a Divine Intervention spell/scroll/enchantment to get me to Pelagiad. Eventually seamless open worlds become a chore to traverse because you have effectively exhausted all the content in between the places you really need to get to. This problem simply doesn't happen in Fallout, because every single location is a point of interest, and the world map is something you can easily traverse. Even better, as encounters are truly random, and not the usual "there's the cliff racer that usually spawns here, there's the rat that usually spawns here, oh look yet another cliff racer".

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.

But how does this thinking works? Are you telling me that if I add 300, unique, carefully thought out dungeons into my open world game, you would rather have 1200 mediocre dungeons instead?

You can have 50 quality dungeons or 200 mediocre ones, there's a certain amount of human creativity that doesn't run out after just a single unique dungeon (ironically in Morrowind I've only come across five or six truly unique dungeons...). Hell, I installed a dungeon mod that overhauled the very first ancestral tomb the user is likely to come across, and it had much more detail put into it than some of these unique dungeons I'm talking about.

 

[Sigourn]

There are lots of people who like the walking sim aspect of these big open world games. You could say they have shit taste and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree, but that’s the itch these games are trying to scratch and they do a good job of scratching it.

If you don’t have that itch—I sure as hell don’t—it’s always going to feel like a hollow experience. That said, they’re doing what they set out to do and what their vapid audience wants.

I mean I'm all in for a walking sim if the environments are truly interesting to see... but I ironically find more interesting stuff to see by talking a walk in real life, in my boring ass neighborhood, than seeing yet another low poly tree/rock and low res textures.

The eggmines have to exist for verisimilitude of the world. They explain where the food people eat comes from. After you've checked out two of them, you know that they have nothing to offer and don't go into them unless a quest tells you to. Same with all the farms dotting the world.

But they need to be there to make the world feel believable.

It's the big flaw with open world games: they must have uninteresting content to make the world feel believable, which leads to them being overall less interesting than a smaller, more focused experience. After all, had this been an isometric game like Fallout, you don't need much more than seeing a few eggmines and knowing they are spread all over the world to know that is true. On the other hand, if Morrowind tells you eggmines are a big part of Morrowind's economy, and you only get to see two in the entire map, something is fishy.

 

[Neroon]

Ultima 4-7

 

[Ranarama]

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

Those invisible walls do a huge number of the cell count.

 

[Lawntoilet]

Wing Commander: Privateer
Crusader Kings 2
Battle Brothers

As far as Witcher 3-style open world, TW3 is the best one I've played.

 

[Lemming42]

It's already been said, but you might have played Morrowind for too long if you've got 150 quests completed on a single character. The big strength of these types of games is also their weakness - the experience you have has to be almost entirely self-led, meaning you have to go for what interests you and ignore the hundreds of other things the game is trying to coax you into, leaving them for another playthrough. I'm not trying to say "you're playing it wrong lol" or anything like that, I agree that Morrowind is full of trashy copy/pasted content and that the majority of the quests are mundane, C&C-less and boring, but the game invites you to interact with that content at your own pace and only to the extent that you wish. If you're bored with samey ancestral tombs and caves (and again, I agree - after you've seen about two of each you've basically seen them all), the game won't force you to go into one ever again.

I always saw the main quests in these games, including New Vegas, as a sort of escape mechanism. When you're starting to get bored of exploring the world after however many hours, you can just go do the relatively short main quests and have the game end relatively quickly. New Vegas's main quest really tries to lure you into a lot of side content (most of it high-quality), I guess, but all the Bethesda-made games have main quests almost completely disconnected from the rest of the game world that you can just blast through in a couple of hours no matter how much or how little of the rest of the game you've explored.

 

[Abu Antar]

Ho Tu Lo Shu: The Books of Dragon is open world and it's a great game. Ask abnaxus he'll vouch for it.

 

[Sigourn]

It's already been said, but you might have played Morrowind for too long if you've got 150 quests completed on a single character. The big strength of these types of games is also their weakness - the experience you have has to be almost entirely self-led, meaning you have to go for what interests you and ignore the hundreds of other things the game is trying to coax you into, leaving them for another playthrough. I'm not trying to say "you're playing it wrong lol" or anything like that, I agree that Morrowind is full of trashy copy/pasted content and that the majority of the quests are mundane, C&C-less and boring, but the game invites you to interact with that content at your own pace and only to the extent that you wish. If you're bored with samey ancestral tombs and caves (and again, I agree - after you've seen about two of each you've basically seen them all), the game won't force you to go into one ever again.

I always saw the main quests in these games, including New Vegas, as a sort of escape mechanism. When you're starting to get bored of exploring the world after however many hours, you can just go do the relatively short main quests and have the game end relatively quickly. New Vegas's main quest really tries to lure you into a lot of side content (most of it high-quality), I guess, but all the Bethesda-made games have main quests almost completely disconnected from the rest of the game world that you can just blast through in a couple of hours no matter how much or how little of the rest of the game you've explored.

Agree that the main quests are a great escape mechanism. I think New Vegas' world design was much stronger in that most locations in the game were tied to a quest, which automatically made them more unique because, unlike Bethesda's quests, quest and location were significantly linked to each other.

For example, If a Morrowind quest sends you to rescue a character, it will be in the same generic dungeons you have seen so far: the only difference is that instead of a wall you have a door of sorts and the NPC sits right behind it. If a New Vegas quest sends you to rescue a character, you will find them in locations unlike the rest you see in the game (Vault 3 occupied by a raider faction with a unique story; Vault 34 completely flooded and irradiated, and the player being able to choose whether to spare the NPCs or let the crops thrive). If a Morrowind quest sends you to retrieve a very important artifact, it will also be found in the same generic dungeons youh ave seen so far, whereas if a New Vegas quest sends you to retrieve an important object, you will find it in a logical place that is also unique: whether a factory that housed that kind of objects in the past, or a Vault that housed spare parts for a ventilation system.

 

[Thal]

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.

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

Jagged Alliance 2, divided into sectors but otherwise it has no barriers. Much more static compared to Space Rangers 2, has minimal amount of quests but doesn't suffer from these points because of the flawless combat. There is only one quest really, killing Deidranna, which you can achieve how you please. It would be interesting to see a main quest like that in an open world crpg. Come to think of it, it would be interesting to see a Morrowind version, where you'd have to piece together how to defeat Dagoth Ur more or less on your own after Caius Cosades leaves for mainland. Make it the undertaking more complex than just walking to final dungeon but add some additional ways to overcome obstacles in return and just unleash the player and see what happens.

It seems to me that open world games need rely on somewhat similar principles as procedurally generated games such as UFO: Enemy Unknown, Nethack or even Diablo. Which is that basic gameplay systems must be competent enough to to make up for repetitive content. If you can pull that off, you can make the open world work for you instead of against you. Incidentally, Skyrim Requiem combined with Frostfall or some other hypothermia mod improves the game massively precicely because of this, at least until you become overpowered.

 

[Shadenuat]

Jagged Alliance 2, divided into sectors but otherwise it has no barriers. Much more static compared to Space Rangers 2, has minimal amount of quests.

It has economy/management/time management. you need to deal with money and injury issues to progress.