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

[Azdul]

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.

I'd rather play Daggerfall than anything created by AI trained to please the players. Implementing the feedback from focus groups in automated way guarantees that the end result will be crap. People don't know what they want, so AI will find local maximum, rather then explore whole spectrum of possibilities.

Just imagine the same idea used to generate dialogues for NPCs - you'll find that the players prefer fart and butt jokes to sequences built using random words - but you'll never find anything resembling actual good script or conversation.

Advanced AI can improve game development - but it should be trained on millions of examples from the real world - and not use subjective definition of "fun" as a feedback loop. Besides, no human has a patience to provide meaningful feedback on 10000 of similar, but slightly different dungeons.

IMO the most important use case for AI is providing voice acting and facial animations based on limited number of samples. We have linear plots and limited dialogue options mainly because recording voices and creating corresponding facial animations requires hours and hours of manual work.

 

[Sigourn]

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.

Precisely this. Of course it seems some people love having absolutely meaningless locations scattered around the map, instead of being able to spot a cave in the distance and telling themselves "I just know this place is going to be worth my time".

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 imagine that looking up every dungeon to complete it will get you burned out unless we are talking about a rather small game. This would be true no matter how good the dungeons are: if there are 300 of them, sometimes you just need to take a break.

But as I've said, I didn't get burned out because I completed many dungeons. I got burned out because most of them suck. Again, I don't lie when I say I must have come across 10 or even 20 (and that's pushing it) truly unique dungeons.

1. The one with the giant throne occupied by scamps and Daedra who killed their conjurers.
2. The one with the Nord funeral.
3. The one with the underwater Daedric ruin.
4. The one with the Eidolon's Ward (I'm not sure if it is the same as the one I mentioned above).

And I think that's... it. The main quest has better dungeons, like Arkngthand and Kogoruhn. But overall Morrowind's dungeon design is very lackluster, how could anyone think the opposite and make it a point that I'm absolutely wrong and Morrowind's dungeons are great is beyond me. Of course if somebody thinks a fucking magical ring justifies even the most banal of designs that even a toddler could pull off, who am I to tell them they are wrong? But even a modder can make a dungeon special.

luj1 Just visited Sha-Adnius, another excellent location with unique loot and very much unique and memorable characters.

 

[urmom]

What about "open world" games that take place in outer space? IWar 2 for instance.

 

[luj1]

Nah mate, you're just retarded. But keep clearing 20 dungeons in a row and complaining it isn't fun, that'll make sense

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

Some people write about games more than they play them.

 

[alyvain]

Some people write about games more than they play them.

I believe that's not the case with this thread

 

[urmom]

Some people write about games more than they play them.

I'm on a budget. Plus, it's really hard for a game to get its hooks into me these days.

 

[DalekFlay]

This idea that only large open world RPGs have repetitive visuals or fetch quests is retarded. Like Fallout didn't have the same ruined car all over the place, or simple ass quests like fix the irrigation system? I do enjoy the hand-placed loot and crafted landscapes of Piranha Bytes games more than I do random loot and AI designed hills and valleys in Skyrim or whatever, but let's not kid ourselves that Piranha Bytes games don't have repeated textures and simple quests you farm for money and XP.

Anyway, New Vegas is a great example of doing it as best you can. The simple fetch quests have well written motivations a lot of the time, and quest design is good enough you notice Fisto or space ghouls more than you do the office textures you've seen a hundred times before on the way to them.

 

[Sigourn]

This idea that only large open world RPGs have repetitive visuals or fetch quests is retarded. Like Fallout didn't have the same ruined car all over the place, or simple ass quests like fix the irrigation system? I do enjoy the hand-placed loot and crafted landscapes of Piranha Bytes games more than I do random loot and AI designed hills and valleys in Skyrim or whatever, but let's not kid ourselves that Piranha Bytes games don't have repeated textures and simple quests you farm for money and XP.

Anyway, New Vegas is a great example of doing it as best you can. The simple fetch quests have well written motivations a lot of the time, and quest design is good enough you notice Fisto or space ghouls more than you do the office textures you've seen a hundred times before on the way to them.

I think it's important to distinguish between "repetitive visuals" and "repetitive assets". There's no doubt Fallout has repetitive assets. But one would struggle to say The Hub looks like Necropolis looks like The Khan camp looks like The Boneyard. And yet these locations share the same assets or very similar assets. So why do they look so different from each other? Because they have vastly different layouts, NPCs and quests populating these locations. And it makes these location stand out from each other.

No doubt it's an unfair comparison to Morrowind: we are talking about a game with not even 20 unique locations. But it goes to show that despite sharing the same assets (in the case of those locations I mentioned) each looks distinctly different from each other, and each plays distinctly different from each other. A far cry from "enter this cave and wipe out all bandits in the same way you did dozens of times before". One quest I like a lot in Fallout is to help Irwin recover his farm, just because the layout of the building and disposition of the raiders makes for an interesting encounter you can't have in an action RPG like Morrowind where everyone will simply swam at you, and maybe three at a time at most (as bandits in bandit caves tend to keep a significant distance from each other).

 

[JarlFrank]

This idea that only large open world RPGs have repetitive visuals or fetch quests is retarded. Like Fallout didn't have the same ruined car all over the place, or simple ass quests like fix the irrigation system? I do enjoy the hand-placed loot and crafted landscapes of Piranha Bytes games more than I do random loot and AI designed hills and valleys in Skyrim or whatever, but let's not kid ourselves that Piranha Bytes games don't have repeated textures and simple quests you farm for money and XP.

I recently went outside and saw the same car model parked several times in the same parking lot (two of them even had the same color!). All the pavement had the same texture, all the grass had the same texture too. There were also only three varieties of trees. Most buildings had the same wall texture: either concrete or whitewash. Same with roofs, all just 2 variations of shingles.

The devs of real life are really fucking lazy.

 

[DalekFlay]

No doubt it's an unfair comparison to Morrowind: we are talking about a game with not even 20 unique locations. But it goes to show that despite sharing the same assets (in the case of those locations I mentioned) each looks distinctly different from each other, and each plays distinctly different from each other. A far cry from "enter this cave and wipe out all bandits in the same way you did dozens of times before". One quest I like a lot in Fallout is to help Irwin recover his farm, just because the layout of the building and disposition of the raiders makes for an interesting encounter you can't have in an action RPG like Morrowind where everyone will simply swam at you, and maybe three at a time at most (as bandits in bandit caves tend to keep a significant distance from each other).

Fallout absolutely had areas where you were just fighting lots of ghouls or mutants in a row, or sneaking by them. I dunno... it seems to me you're just advocating for good quest design, and I agree good quest design is the goal. I think games like New Vegas accomplish that while also being big open worlds. Bethesda (the developer not the publisher) have always focused more on immersive worlds than good quest design, that's just their thing. Most Codex disagreements on reasonably well received games boil down to different priorities. If you just want to feel like you're there, inside a cool alien world, then Morrowind excels. If you're looking for great quest design and a driven storyline, it doesn't.

 

[urmom]

FNV was boring. Everything had a shit brown color.

 

[Dyspaire]

The following will be heresy, I know... but for all the 'open world' experiences I've had, covering most everything listed in this thread, the most fun I've ever had gaming, period, was the first 6 or so months of retail World of Warcraft; November 23rd, 2004, until well into the following summer.

Pre-Thotbot. Way Pre-Wowhead. Pre any wiki or other easily available online compendium. The game was the Wild West there for a little bit. Nobody knew a fucking thing.

Going into Westfall for the first time, and fully realizing what 'zones' meant, and then what the world map really represented... knowing all that unknown was ahead of you to discover and explore... I feel lucky to have been there.

I never raided much. Was never part of a guild. I played through the entire game from day one mostly solo or sometimes with one real-life friend. Only joined groups when it was absolutely necessary.

The game got gamified very quickly. I liked Burning Crusade very much, but it's release was already the beginning of the end. What it's become since Cata has looked increasingly sad. The developers went the exact wrong way with what that game could have become. Now it's just a slot machine and fashion show.

But for about 6 months there if you were lucky enough to have been playing at release, Azeroth was a beautifully-realized, insanely vast and deep open world, full of more interesting things to do and see than any other game experience I've ever had, before or since. The reasons are many, and you were either there and know what I'm talking about, or I'm just another idiot yelling at clouds on the internet.


Heresy, I know, but I was reading this thread and really though about it, and Vanilla WoW really is the most fun I've ever had in an open world game. By far.


(Honorable mention: the first year or so of Everquest for all the same reasons as above. Early WoW just did it better, in my opinion.)

(Honorable mention, single-player games: Honestly, Might and Magic 6.)

 

[alyvain]

The game got gamified very quickly.

I've never played WoW or MMORPG for that matter, but I'm intetested in what you're saying. Could you elaborate? Do you mean like the tempo of further character progression, or design philosophy behind new content, or balance in general, or something else entirely? Thanks.

 

[urmom]

I played LOTRO for a while, until I got to Moria and was like, "Nope. This is bullshit. I'm done."

 

[Invictus]

So lemme see if I got this straight; Sigourn here says that he went into a couple of caves and crypts in Morrowind and was bummed that they almost never had “Epic” loot, maybe a few coins here and a scroll there?

This is ladies and gentlemen why Todd Howard likes dumbing things down; because hell fuck realism where special loot has to be... I dont know maybe “hard” to find?
Maybe every forsaken crypt or tomb was already looted for “epic” shit or hell maybe a tomb is just a tomb?

I understand that you feel that the Mentor ring (one of the first things I do in any game is to get it btw) kind of gets you going where you want to check out a lot of places to see of they have some good loot and most of the time the easy to find places don’t have any of it right?

Exploring weird places in games like Gothic and Morrowind is literally the experience itself for fuck sake!
If anything worthwhile was easy to get and the game was full of epic loot around every corner we would get.... Oblivion

I don’t understand why idiots cannot simply say “Uh my bad” with such retarded ideas where they are gently show the error of their ways but no they have to get defensive and bitchy

Go play Vanilla Oblivion and see what I mean...

 

[DalekFlay]

The following will be heresy, I know... but for all the 'open world' experiences I've had, covering most everything listed in this thread, the most fun I've ever had gaming, period, was the first 6 or so months of retail World of Warcraft; November 23rd, 2004, until well into the following summer.

Hey man if you love bullshit MMO "open world" design then check out Dragon Age: Inquisition, it's right up your alley.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

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.

Have you played dwarf fortress?
The idea that an algorithm cannot have the equivalent of what you call "soul" feels incredibly shortsighted to me. Why can a programmer not make an algorithm that outputs a level identical to how a designer would design a level with so-called "soul"?

 

[Atrachasis]

The idea that an algorithm cannot have the equivalent of what you call "soul" feels incredibly shortsighted to me. Why can a programmer not make an algorithm that outputs a level identical to how a designer would design a level with so-called "soul"?

Listen to any AI-generated piece of music, and you may understand why. AI is quite capable of generating a "texture" of sound that sounds more or less like the real thing from one chord to the next, but utterly incapable of recreating the architecture of, say, a Bruckner symphony as it spans over an hour of tense development. Or read an AI-generated novel. It feels "right" from one sentence to the next, because it is relatively easy to train an AI on such small-scall data, but quickly descends into psychotic ramblings if you look for some sort of overarching narrative.

Likewise, an AI is quite capable of piecing together dungeon segments, as has been demonstrated by Nethack, Daggerfall etc., i.e., the small-scale texture, but capturing the "spirit" of a more complex dungeon would first require you to be able to come up with a method to quantitatively describe a level designer's "large-scale" ideas to train the AI on. I'm not saying that this is theoretically impossible, but the number of programmers in the world that would be able to pull this off is probably much smaller than the number of competent level designers capable of coming up with a dungeon with "soul".

So lemme see if I got this straight; Sigourn here says that he went into a couple of caves and crypts in Morrowind and was bummed that they almost never had “Epic” loot, maybe a few coins here and a scroll there?

This is ladies and gentlemen why Todd Howard likes dumbing things down; because hell fuck realism where special loot has to be... I dont know maybe “hard” to find?
Maybe every forsaken crypt or tomb was already looted for “epic” shit or hell maybe a tomb is just a tomb?

My impression is that he'd rather have fewer points of interest with more depth and character than a large number of shallow, generic dungeons (with or without "epic loot" inside) scattered all over the landscape. And I sort of understand the sentiment. The "tick the boxes", "dip-in-and-out" approach to dungeon design probably stems from MMOs, where the logistical constraints of getting everyone together for any significant amount of time would prevent you from a proper, hour-long dungeon romp. However, I don't mind a large number of generic places of interest as a backdrop to a few outstanding and handcrafted dungeons, which is why I still rank Morrowind much higher in that regard than, for example, Oblivion.

 

[Dyspaire]

The game got gamified very quickly.

I've never played WoW or MMORPG for that matter, but I'm intetested in what you're saying. Could you elaborate? Do you mean like the tempo of further character progression, or design philosophy behind new content, or balance in general, or something else entirely? Thanks.

The best easy example I can give you is something as simple as the addition of quest markers. Just because you can add a system into a game telling you where to go next, what to do next, etc... doesn't mean you should.

Another example would be the random dungeon finder. In the beginning you had to travel through the world to get to where you were going. Then they implemented a way to be automatically transported to the dungeon of your choice. So suddenly the open world itself was something that could be mostly ignored.

They just kept adding more systems and making things easier and easier, until the game turned into what it is now. A slot machine and fashion show, mostly.

Hope that makes sense.

 

[Invictus]

As I understand it he wants a big world open world (So Gothic is not up to his retarded standards) but rather it full of many locations like tomb, crypts, caves, shrines, underwater caves, forts, etc which COULD be the resting place of a unique treasure he want LESS places but all to have “meaningful” treasure (so screw Morrowind or even New Vegas for that matter) and so on an so forth
So.... he wants to play vanilla Oblivion so he will get some epic ass loot from Glass armor wearing bandidos and every time he goes into a cavern or tomb he will be sure to find an epic item, sort of like an MMO
Hell maybe that is exactly what he needs some good old Warcraft with some great color labeled loot, epic dungeon raids and immersive cool downs for his awesome abilities

 

[Keye_]

Have you tried Outward?
It's supposed to be pretty good, especially when played with a friend.
I've heard it has a lot of walking between dungeons, but other than that it seems good. I haven't gotten around to playing it myself though, so this is from what I've read and seen.

 

[JarlFrank]

Have you played dwarf fortress?
The idea that an algorithm cannot have the equivalent of what you call "soul" feels incredibly shortsighted to me. Why can a programmer not make an algorithm that outputs a level identical to how a designer would design a level with so-called "soul"?

I have, and all the soul the game got is from the content Toady manually wrote in. The algorithm just mixes that content up to create backgrounds and gameplay. That often leads to fun stories but none of it has soul. It's just a random combination of the same repeating elements, cobbled together by an algorithm. Dwarf Fortress may have some of the best procedural generation ever made, but it still doesn't even remotely come close to what an actual level designer can do. It's more of a "have some fun and fool around with cool systems" game than a "get immersed in an intricately crafted world with intent behind it" game.

 

[Sigourn]

So lemme see if I got this straight; Sigourn here says that he went into a couple of caves and crypts in Morrowind and was bummed that they almost never had “Epic” loot, maybe a few coins here and a scroll there?

No. Learn to read. This is what Sigourn says:

"Sigourn went into hundreds of caves, crypts, Daedric ruins and eggmines, and was bummed that he can hardly remember any of them because there's nothing that makes them stand out from each other."

Why some retards insist on the words "loot" and "treasure" when I've specifically said that OP equipment doesn't make for a good location is beyond me but eh, people with no reading comprehension can be like that. I never asked for a big open world game either; my question was just that, a question, to know whether there was a big open world RPG that was actually great. Gothic is not up to my "retarded standards" as you call it for the same reason a 4 inch dick isn't an appropiate answer to "are there 9 inch dicks that can get erect?". If you take the "big" out of "big open world", why are you even answering my question?

Atrachasis said it very well. It's not about loot. It's about getting a memorable experience out of the dungeons Bethesda saw fit to place in the game. Whether it be because they look amazing, whether it be because there are worthwile NPCs or great quests to be found there, anything that tells me "someone truly wanted me to see this".

 

[Morkar Left]

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.

Fallout 4 is a great example because it has several elements that appear regularly in dungeons, but they would be a lot more interesting if they appeared only a few times. Like inactive protectrons you can activate by hacking a nearby console. If this happens once or twice, it's a super cool detail you will remember. If it happens in every second dungeon, it becomes routine and boring.

And since development time and budget aren't infinite, if you go for quantity you have to recycle ideas like that. A large team can make 20 to 50 unique dungeons maybe. But 100? 200? A lot of open world games go for bigger and bigger sizes, with dungeons numbering in the hundreds. At some point you just have to recycle elements from previous dungeons you've built, cause you don't have the time to make another dozen that are all unique (and you don't have the creativity left to put a unique spin on all of those).

That's why huge quantity is always going to be to a game's detriment.

Generally agree with that. Except I think if you have good game mechanics which are designed to support big open world design and procedurally worlds you get some intrinsic gameplay out of it. HP management, camping, food, climate obstacles, different factions with changing relations etc. It's just hard to design and that's the reason most devs fail. Especially if you want to realize it in modern 3D.