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

[Zlaja]

I'm sure he is mentally ill.

He's suffering from an ocd which prevents him from not entering every tomb/cave he comes across. Not good when trying to enjoy a game like Morrowind. Personally, I have an ocd which forces me to constantly keep checking my inventory and stats to make sure everything is in order even when I'm 100 % sure it is. It's not always equally annoying but when it gets bad it makes me wanna throw the monitor out the window and play a console plattformer instead. Still, I wouldn't go as far to say that RPG's are 'fucking annoying to play' because I'm at least somewhat self-aware.

 

[Sigourn]

No its not 4 dungeons, you are just retarded.

Then post more. If Morrowind's dungeons are so unique, I'm sure you will easily be able to come up with more and more examples.

It's literally a statue surrounded by sand (?). If you can call that "the best location in all of Morrowind" then there is something wrong with you. The truth is, throughout this whole thread you have no idea what you're talking about.

Hardly a statue surrounded by sand.

Sorry man, but you've yet to post a compelling argument on why I'm wrong which doesn't consist of lies and ad hominems.

 

[mogwaimon]

I dunno about you guys but if I've played a game for 100 hours and I still want to keep going I figured I've gotten my money's worth one way or the other. I typically get bored around that point no matter what's left and switch to a different game, I don't keep playing it and complain about how badly I hate it. If you're not enjoying Morrowind, put it down and move on? That might be the best course of action instead of playing for another 200 hours and insisting it's shit the whole way through.

 

[Sigourn]

I dunno about you guys but if I've played a game for 100 hours and I still want to keep going I figured I've gotten my money's worth one way or the other. I typically get bored around that point no matter what's left and switch to a different game, I don't keep playing it and complain about how badly I hate it. If you're not enjoying Morrowind, put it down and move on? That might be the best course of action instead of playing for another 200 hours and insisting it's shit the whole way through.

I don't badly hate Morrowind, nor am I insisting it's shit the whole way through. All I've said is that the game has a lot of mediocre content, nothing more, nothing less, and thus my question was whether there was a game similar in size of Morrowind that proved you can have loads of content without sacrificing quality for quantity.

 

[luj1]

Hardly a statue surrounded by sand.

Not a sunken shrine, that's a different (also cool) dungeon. I've seen people mention it but personally I never found it

Then post more. If Morrowind's dungeons are so unique, I'm sure you will easily be able to come up with more and more examples.

Nah, you post. You played this game to hell and back, modded it to the eyeballs and (self-admittedly) looked up every dungeon on the wiki to see if you missed anything, annihilating any sense of mystery left. And now you're telling us how it's all bland and uninteresting after 600 hours and 6.000 mods and pages of pages of reading wiki spoilers. Well no shit.

 

[mogwaimon]

I dunno about you guys but if I've played a game for 100 hours and I still want to keep going I figured I've gotten my money's worth one way or the other. I typically get bored around that point no matter what's left and switch to a different game, I don't keep playing it and complain about how badly I hate it. If you're not enjoying Morrowind, put it down and move on? That might be the best course of action instead of playing for another 200 hours and insisting it's shit the whole way through.

I don't badly hate Morrowind, nor am I insisting it's shit the whole way through. All I've said is that the game has a lot of mediocre content, nothing more, nothing less, and thus my question was whether there was a game similar in size of Morrowind that proved you can have loads of content without sacrificing quality for quantity.

That's a fair enough point, Morrowind was better than Oblivion and Skyrim for sure but it's hardly super high quality all the way through. Still, as others have said when you focus on quantity quality does tend to take a nosedive, and Morrowind along with NV are probably already some of the best of the modern open world games. Despite these criticisms, I'd argue that Morrowind taken as a whole is sufficient enough for what it is to provide an engaging gameplay experience even if many of the dungeons aren't suitably memorable. Sometimes there are just easy non-descript dungeons out there, and as others have alluded despite the lack of adventure therein, the presence of the non-descript farms/egg farms adds to the believability of the world.

 

[octavius]

I think Sigourn may have played too much Morrowind.

 

[Mastermind]

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.

fallout NV is mostly empty and the locations, on average, are even more shallow and empty than morrowind.

 

[ItsChon]

Codexers are a strange people. I spent like an hour downloading all the mods I'd need for the game (just visual stuff, bug fixes, and QoL features, no additions), and within half an hour of playing the game I had uninstalled everything and forgot about it. Sigorun has to play the game for a hundred hours before he's able to call it shit. This is why people laugh at some of y'all.

 

[DeepOcean]

Making a truly open world game means alot of wasted space and copious amounts of copy paste, there is no other way, unless you use procedural content.

Procedural content is literally automated copypaste on the fly.

Yes, procedural content cannot replace a game designer, at least not for now, the problem is that many games use procedural content as a replacement for the level designer when it shouldnt be, Daggerfall included. There are a few experiments of using machine learning with data collected from thousands of players to create a game designer Ai that follow the parameters from the data of what the players find fun in general and this Ai would generate the levels taking that in consideration. You could actually select the best Ais with different personalities and have them to play the level and rebuild the level thousands of times until reaching a decent result.

There are even experiments that go a step further of game designer Ais that can generate game rules themselves. It could be possible in the future to have indirect game design, you design not the dungeon itself but you select parameters on the Ai to guide the Ai into an unique result.

Right now, nobody actually took that beyond experiments because making a game being a single programmer on a project is already complicated, having that on top of it is exponentially complicated as this isnt stabilished game programming and the AAA boys dont care enough about that to even try.

Procedural terrain generation is standard on the industry right now, nobody actually design by hand every square inch of a open world game nowdays, you have a tool like World Creator to create a basic topology then you draw over it, you can program those tools for logical terrain placement, the next level is to create such tools that can design the levels themselves without them looking copy pasted. Star Citizen is playing with that on the moment, if they are going to succeed, I really dont know, to me is only hype until I see it.

Many designers when they make procedural levels they assume they will have a few simple elements and that is it and the reason for that limitation is that to have unique results you need to make a flexible system and a flexible enough procedural system is a buggy hellhole waiting to happen where corridors lead nowhere, enemies are inside walls and you cant reach the exit of a dungeon level. Nope, you need a extremely flexible system but with an ai to validate the results. You also need an ai to make the systems work together for the enemy placement work together with level design, for example, so you wont have a mess where enemies arent placed on a completly random manner with no regards to level design like it is on most games that use procedural, in games like Path of Exile, Warframe, Diablo, level design is actually an irrelevant accident as rarely it interacts with the enemy placement.

By Ai here, I'm not implying something that can pass the Turing Test, that doesnt exist and probably will ever exist, but something akin to the google search algorithm for procedural generation in gaming, calling it an ai is easier. If you notice, google can fix your grammar and typo mistakes suggesting the right words, the same could be done to design choices and you have an algorythm to validate its own level design fixing the mistakes with things like: place archers after obstacles and at the end of long corridors, if player uses fireball too much increase the percentage of fire immune enemies and etc..., if the player kite too much, give preference to slow magic. You could even have a dynamic level designer that changes with your behavior.

If you can have an algorithm winning matches at StarCraft 2 against humans, this is actually easier.

 

[alyvain]

Codexers are a strange people. I spent like an hour downloading all the mods I'd need for the game (just visual stuff, bug fixes, and QoL features, no additions), and within half an hour of playing the game I had uninstalled everything and forgot about it. Sigorun has to play the game for a hundred hours before he's able to call it shit. This is why people laugh at some of y'all.

Well, we all have different approaches to gaming.

I also vaguely remember some German guy who had played some truck or Combine harvester simulator, whatever, for a few thousand hours and then gave it a negative review on Steam. Nothing specifically Codexian here.

By the way, if you're are talking about Morrowind, than OpenMW is pretty much the only thing you should install to make your experience patrician.

 

[Carrion]

My criticism regarding New Vegas' dungeons is that Obsidian thought you can turn the shittiest cave into a rewarding cave just by placing an unique item at the end of it.

By that description, New Vegas is one of the last games that comes to mind... How many shitty caves does the game even have? A few, maybe, but it also has some very good and unique "dungeons", like vaults and pre-war factories that may or may not be tied to quests.

One thing that games like New Vegas, Gothic and Betrayal at Krondor (although not open-world in the same sense as TES, for example) mostly manage to do is avoiding the repetition that usually comes with an open world. There are different forms of it, but it's almost always there. Morrowind has fantastic (over)world design, but most of its quests take place in a cave or a tomb or a ruin. Hell, whole Tamriel should've collapsed ages ago considering how many underground tunnels these games have. I'd guess it's a way to make things easier for the devs, to make it more manageable for a large team to create content that doesn't clash with itself, but it does lead to even the good games in the series feeling rather formulaic, since for the whole game you're going through similar-looking places and seeing the same assets recycled over and over again. A different kind of an example of repetition would be The Witcher 3, which has a meticuously crafted world map that features tons of filler content like treasure chests because the devs apparently weren't quite sure what the open world was actually for. Ubisoft games (not RPGs and most likely not worth playing, but whatever) are pretty much the same from what I've heard, maps filled with repetitive garbage content so that you end up doing the same thing a million times over with minor variations at best, and most of your playtime being spent on getting from A to B through all too familiar areas.

Instead of going for these huge maps, someone should make that Warren Spector city block RPG.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

The game is pretty, i give you that but it's a real pain to play, i tried but gave up after a couple of random encounters outside the village.

Is it buggy/has outdated UI/shitty gameplay?

Those screenshots look beautiful.

Controls are terrible, at least that was my problem with the game.

Holy shit, this game looks fucking great. How come I never heard of it? It's sad to know it was rushed, can you tell how much that affected the end result? Is the game still fun, is it worth playing? Because it looks amazing. Such a pity!

Faery Tale Adventure II: Halls of the Dead is probably the best-looking isometric CRPG ever created, and it's also fun to play, though not as good it could have been. Its developer, The Dreamer's Guild, went bankrupt while the game was still under production. David Joiner and the others working on it managed to complete and ship the game, but if properly finished it would have included additional content (a large island, some side quests, and more). It also suffers from an unfortunate design decision to have movement be indirectly controlled via the mouse rather than directly through keyboard keys, and this is exacerbated by poor pathfinding, since two of the brothers follow whichever one the player is controlling (unless you choose to form separate groups). Also, combat is turn-based but only allows the player to control one brother in each turn (you can switch which one you have control over); they should have allowed the player to control all three brothers during combat, while lowering the frequency of combat and correspondingly increasing the rewards. And the music is nothing compared to the original. On the plus side, the game combines real-time exploration with turn-based combat, has much better itemization/equipment than the original, adds a skill system (albeit limited), and has an interesting magic system with a multitude of spells. I completed the game in 2016, and despite its problems I recommend it to others.

 

[typical user]

With 'dex standards I believe there is nor was any RPG that would meet the 'quality' requirement.

 

[Sigourn]

By that description, New Vegas is one of the last games that comes to mind... How many shitty caves does the game even have? A few, maybe, but it also has some very good and unique "dungeons", like vaults and pre-war factories that may or may not be tied to quests.

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply New Vegas is filled with shitty locations as Morrowind is. It's actually very good, unless you are one of those people that think that just because Obsidian gave a dedicated map marker to a random empty shack, that means Obsidian thought it was the pinnacle of dungeon design. Map markers are needed when fast travel is a feature, and Obsidian was bound to add them to meaningless landmarks (or else risk have big section where fast traveling to wasn't easy). But I still believe there are some caves that were pretty boring. Though to Obsidian's credit, for the most part even those boring caves managed to be different: for instance, there's a weapon hidden in a cave full of Super Mutants, which you rarely see in the game.

Morrowind has fantastic (over)world design, but most of its quests take place in a cave or a tomb or a ruin. Hell, whole Tamriel should've collapsed ages ago considering how many underground tunnels these games have. I'd guess it's a way to make things easier for the devs, to make it more manageable for a large team to create content that doesn't clash with itself, but it does lead to even the good games in the series feeling rather formulaic, since for the whole game you're going through similar-looking places and seeing the same assets recycled over and over again.

Agree. It wouldn't be too bad if it wasn't because it seems the player is the only one who can get things done, and thus every single cave the player actually finds is a cave filled with bandits. It would be great to find NPCs with actual personalities and backgrounds living in these random caves for a change, and hopefully get quests from them.

 

[mogwaimon]

Agree. It wouldn't be too bad if it wasn't because it seems the player is the only one who can get things done, and thus every single cave the player actually finds is a cave filled with bandits. It would be great to find NPCs with actual personalities and backgrounds living in these random caves for a change, and hopefully get quests from them.

but that does happen at least once. One of the few quests I remember from my playthrough of Morrowind like 20 years ago was this orc dude decked out in armor that you find randomly in a cave and you can either duel him to get his gear or go off and do a quest for him. Think you get the Goldbrand from it? that can't be the only time it happens though. There was also one quest in Solstheim that my friend was always raving about where he wandered into a cave, found a yeti, and ended up walking out with a severed limb to use as a weapon for his troubles. there's things to find out there, and luj does have a point; if you're combing a wiki then you're kinda sucking the fun out of the exploration, aren't you?

 

[Sigourn]

but that does happen at least once. One of the few quests I remember from my playthrough of Morrowind like 20 years ago was this orc dude decked out in armor that you find randomly in a cave and you can either duel him to get his gear or go off and do a quest for him. Think you get the Goldbrand from it? that can't be the only time it happens though.

As I told luj1, I'm sure interesting things happen more than once. But I've lost count of how many dungeons I've been to, and I think, if anything, I've triggered quest steps out of order (e.g. rescuing an NPC before being given the quest; killing a bandit lord before being given the quest; etc.) than I've gotten quests by NPCs inside of dungeons.

I don't know what luj1 is saying, and I'm not interested in talking to him anymore (he is stupid and can be ignored). I don't use the wiki to choose locations to explore. I only use it to confirm that, once I've fully cleared out a dungeon, I didn't miss anything. And sadly I'm never missing stuff: the dungeons themselves simply don't offer much. There are some very good and entertaining quests in Morrowind. Sadly there are also many filler, uninteresting quests that don't offer much.

 

[gurugeorge]

Originally I wanted to write yet another big rant on why Morrowind is one of the most overrated RPGs of all time. And at the end of the day, the conclusion I reached was this: every single flaw I can think of Morrowind, from how boring its NPCs are, to how boring most of its quests are, to how boring most of its dungeons are, to how boring the moment to moment gameplay is, have to do with one thing. And that thing is its ridiculously huge size.

Morrowind is a 2002 game that is much bigger than that of Fallout: New Vegas (2010), the other "good" open world RPG I've played (for the purpose of this discussion, Gothic won't be mentioned as it is rather small and simply doesn't compare to the freedom offered by these games).

Playing Morrowind, I see my quest log marks around 150 quests completed. That's a lot, but as it is, I'm not even 1/3 through the game's total quests. However, something that constantly lets me down is how boring many of these quests are. How similar and therefore boring most of its caves, ancestral tombs, and Daedric ruins are, all with the same kind of enemies, the same kind of loot that scales with your level (no matter what people claim, Morrowind's loot is hardly "hand placed" any more than Skyrim's leveled loot is "hand placed" just because a developer had to actually place a chest in a dungeon), the same visuals and boring layouts.

Then I thought, "well Fallout: New Vegas' dungeons were somewhat shitty too, but at least they served a specific purpose most of the time, as opposed to serving the general purpose of "this is Vvardenfell and so we need a hundred shitty egg mines, a hundred shitty ancestral tombs, and a hundred shitty bandit caves". And the quests were simply far better as a whole, with more depth, replayability, and simply better written NPCs than Morrowind's. Or, at the very least, NPCs that talked like human beings. But like I said earlier, New Vegas pales in comparison to the scale of Morrowind. New Vegas appears bigger than it is because of its seamless open world: it could be easily translated into the classic Fallout engine and little would be lost (and ironically, much would be gained).

I know many may be thinking "just what is "big" to you?". My answer: anything that comes close to the scale of Morrowind. Has there ever been a BIG open world RPG, similar in size to Morrowind, that was just a quality game all around, and didn't leave you thinking "I've been to this fucking dungeon already, I've done this fucking quest already, I've talked to this fucking NPC already"?

These are computer games, what are you expecting? I mean you could have as vast an open world as you like if you had a team of a thousand developers working for 20 years on a game that takes up 50 terabytes of hard drive space; then every encounter could be unique and hand-made and fill you with joy

As it is, you have to either settle for small hand-crafted worlds or big worlds with lots of procedurally-generated content that gets samey after a while.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I dunno about you guys but if I've played a game for 100 hours and I still want to keep going I figured I've gotten my money's worth one way or the other. I typically get bored around that point no matter what's left and switch to a different game, I don't keep playing it and complain about how badly I hate it. If you're not enjoying Morrowind, put it down and move on? That might be the best course of action instead of playing for another 200 hours and insisting it's shit the whole way through.

The only "open world" sandbox style game I have actually beaten is FNV(and Elex, if it counts.) I always end up getting bored about halfway through, but I never walk away thinking I didn't get my money's worth. If anything, many of these games have too much content of varying quality and it burns me out.

 

[luj1]

I don't use the wiki to choose locations to explore. I only use it to confirm that, once I've fully cleared out a dungeon, I didn't miss anything.

Yeah mate its totally a game flaw that aggressive metagaming and completionist runs exausted the game for you, how dares it to stop be interesting

Spoiler

also an open world game should have no empty space, no roads or empty wilderness, only complex NPC and grandest of quests in a near infinite world!!

 

[AW8]

every single flaw I can think of Morrowind, from how boring its NPCs are, to how boring most of its quests are, to how boring most of its dungeons are, to how boring the moment to moment gameplay is, have to do with one thing. And that thing is its ridiculously huge size.

This is true. An increase in quantity will mean a decrease in quality. The world of Morrowind could have been cut down to a third of its size, and the quality of the game would have been noticably better. This is true for the sequels as well, as well as games in general. Imagine if Fallout had the same development time but was three times bigger - it would have been a flawed gem, instead of just being a gem.

the same kind of loot that scales with your level (no matter what people claim, Morrowind's loot is hardly "hand placed" any more than Skyrim's leveled loot is "hand placed" just because a developer had to actually place a chest in a dungeon)

When people say Morrowind has hand-placed loot, they're not talking about the random leveled things you find in chests. Of course the vast majority of loot will be generic and/or randomly generated when the game world is so large and the rule is that you can loot everything that isn't bolted down.

What they are talking about is the impressive amount of hand-placed artifacts and equipment of rare quality (Daedric, Glass etc.) that have been placed in the world to reward exploration. It's been many years since I played Skyrim, but from what I recall those rare materials don't even exist in the world until the player is at high level, when they start to pop up as if they had always been there. And with a few exceptions, all artifacts are quest rewards that are only made available at certain stages of certain quests.

There will always be a glass helmet in Bal Ur, no matter the player's level. And correct me if I'm wrong, but there is only a finite number of glass helmets in the game, making it a piece of rare, hand-placed and memorable loot. The same can be said of Eleidon's Ward, the Dragonbone Cuirass, Cuirass of the Saviour's Hide, Mentor's Ring etc. etc.

It doesn't change the fact that every other barrel in a smuggler's cave will have the same soul gem, parchment, goblet and three pieces of gold, but it goes a long way to make exploring dungeons more rewarding and memorable. Skyrim's dungeons would be immediately more rewarding if you just added a unique item at the end of 10 of them (although this will be a problem - since every material including Daedric is craftable, you'd have to model 10 new artifacts).

Then I thought, "well Fallout: New Vegas' dungeons were somewhat shitty too, but at least they served a specific purpose most of the time, as opposed to serving the general purpose of "this is Vvardenfell and so we need a hundred shitty egg mines, a hundred shitty ancestral tombs, and a hundred shitty bandit caves". And the quests were simply far better as a whole, with more depth, replayability, and simply better written NPCs than Morrowind's.

Quests and NPCs are definitely better in New Vegas. And New Vegas not only has way fewer dungeons than Morrowind, but also plenty of hand-placed loot in them, including several unique items. I know where to go to find the automatic grenade launcher Mercy, the Enclave Power Armor and the Enclave Power Armor Helmet. They're not thrown in some generic loot list, they're placed in specific places of the world, waiting to reward the exploring player.

This made the dungeons feel much more fun to explore in New Vegas - I think I've cleared most if not all of them, while in Morrowind I doubt I've entered more than a third. Architecture-wise, both games built dungeons out of a modular set but didn't spend enough time to hide that fact and make every dungeon feel unique (an impossibility in Morrowind's case due to the colossal scale). There are some obvious exceptions, like the cave with the ship in Morrowind. But most of them simply wouldn't be much fun to enter at all were it not for the hand-placed loot in them that makes the whole thing worth it.

 

[Twizman]

I like the Dreamer's Guild, they made a couple of classic adventure games.

 

[Funposter]

people seem to have constructed a strawman of Sigourn when all he's saying is that 90% of Morrowind's dungeons are like a single room with three enemies, without any major changes to elevation or any variation in layout. It's like that because there's 92 caves, 92 ancestral tombs, 26 dwemer ruins, 36 daedric ruins, 11 grottos, 12 velothi towers, 44 mines, 34 ships and 11 strongholds. if you cut the number of JUST caves and ancestral tombs in half, the other dungeons would have been more varied and interested due to diverted resources.

 

[JarlFrank]

Hardly a statue surrounded by sand.

Not a sunken shrine, that's a different (also cool) dungeon. I've seen people mention it but personally I never found it

Then post more. If Morrowind's dungeons are so unique, I'm sure you will easily be able to come up with more and more examples.

Nah, you post. You played this game to hell and back, modded it to the eyeballs and (self-admittedly) looked up every dungeon on the wiki to see if you missed anything, annihilating any sense of mystery left. And now you're telling us how it's all bland and uninteresting after 600 hours and 6.000 mods and pages of pages of reading wiki spoilers. Well no shit.

I played it with a wiki at some point, should be over 8 years ago by now, so I could find every dungeon and not miss any content. I got burned out quickly.

I replayed it some years later without checking anything in a guide, just blindly exploring the world, and it was 100 times more fun. I didn't go out of my way to visit every single dungeon in the game, but when I spotted one in the distance I went there.

Morrowind isn't a completionist's game, and if you try to go through ALL THE CONTENT, you're doing it wrong.

 

[JarlFrank]

Yes, procedural content cannot replace a game designer, at least not for now, the problem is that many games use procedural content as a replacement for the level designer when it shouldnt be, Daggerfall included. There are a few experiments of using machine learning with data collected from thousands of players to create a game designer Ai that follow the parameters from the data of what the players find fun in general and this Ai would generate the levels taking that in consideration.

Funny thing, in the small Thief modding community I'm in, we like to say that a mission with slightly odd architecture that doesn't look quite professional but has a certain charm to it and is fun to play through has "soul". There's plenty of missions with soul out there. And usually, if a mission is made by an established author, you notice who it is even without looking at the readme to see the author's name. During one contest, skacky and DrK did a bait and switch where they used each other's building styles to fool people into thinking that one is skacky's and the other is DrK's, when it was actually the other way around. There are long-time Thief modders whose style evolved from amateur to professional, and you can clearly see the small improvements in each release - yet even the very first amateurish one already has clear elements of the mapper's personal style (Christine is a great example of this, and that woman made more than 20 Thief FMs).

My point being, level design is an art, not an algorithm. You can spot an individual level designer's style from a mile away. Good levels have soul, and even mediocre levels can have some elements to them that make them endearing in some way.

Programming some machine learning process that optimizes level layouts based on user feedback sounds extremely soulless and mechanical. And, like all procedural generation, it would become predictable at some point because it just follows a formula.

AIs and algorithms cannot think outside the box. Flesh and blood designers can. I'd rather play through dungeons designed by real people, with intent behind the design, than algorithm-based stuff that's optimized for my enjoyment but is ultimately bland and without soul.