Malf on 28/2/2017 at 13:01

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I'm in love with Bethesda open world games while I'm playing them, but they're too hideously broken and reliant on an increasingly creaky engine to ever be my favourite worlds.
The biggest criticism for me is that interiors and exteriors require loads. That's been hilariously outdated for years now, but they still keep pushing the same old crap tech out the door.

Another game I really liked the open world of, but is impossible to get working on PC these days, was Mercenaries 2. That had a lot of destructible scenery, a good sense of humour and massive explosions, on top of pretty robust systems. Kind of a proto Just Cause 2, but with more character.
JC2 is absolutely gorgeous and an incredible technical achievement considering when it was released, but the activities they filled the world with got repetitive incredibly quickly.
And again, I'll argue that while on the surface, Rock Star's open worlds seem to have a lot going on, the depth of the various simulations is too shallow to be engaging for long. Interacting with NPCs in MGS V's less populated world is much more interesting and layered.

But I'm a bit obsessed with convincing simulated systems in games being a veteran Dwarf Fortress player.

TannisRoot on 28/2/2017 at 14:47

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The closest I ever got to feeling lost in a believable alternate reality were MUDs and later in their graphical incarnation, WoW. But I must say MUDs slightly get the edge due to their text based nature, which somehow worked subtlety on the imagination better than graphics could muster.

MUDs are impossible for me to play now, but I remember having vivid dreams about the adventures I had, cities I visited, people I met, and wilderness explored and almost nothing left a stronger impact since. It was much like reading fantasy novels as a teenager to an extent that these felt like real places, except suddenly a dimension was added and rather than a mere observer, the reader was an actual character free to interact and explore with the world as desired. While that concept is pretty familiar and mundane now, it cannot be overstated how mind blowing was as a teenager reading LotR, Wheel of Time, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, etc. at the time.

That said the gameplay was pretty primative and grindy, driven more by social competitiveness and novelty than the inherit fun of their systems. Thus when the playerbases moved on to their graphically evolved successors, the worlds and their ecosystems pretty much dried up.

Renzatic on 28/2/2017 at 18:15

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Was for real life. The internet's been bleeding into IRL over the last year or so.

hopper on 1/3/2017 at 10:47

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With this post I'm jumping from 289th to 288th place in the all-time list. Progress is great! :thumb:

As to the open worlds, I gotta say, man you all play a lot of games. I've played Morrowind quite a bit, and while I liked the scenery and the changes from day to night and back again, I could never completely shut down that voice in the back of my head that said, "now why would I even care about going to place x, killing y, and stealing z?". And I frequently encounterd situations where I thought, "oh, so this is the place where I could finally find a use for that thingamajig, which I once carried with me, but had to dump because I literally couldn't fucking move anymore due to all the stuff I was carrying, so all I have to do now is to go back and fetch it, which should take me about half an hour assuming I really left it where I think I did, but probably didn't", which honestly isn't my idea of fun gameplay. Imho, there is such a thing as a too open world. Yes, there's tons and tons of stuff to do, but do I really want to?

I found The Witcher much more fun because a) fighting wasn't only about button-mashing, and b) the world was constructed such that you went to one area, cleaned up the place, and when you were finished, you were really done with it and moved on, never to return. One of the most tedious aspects of open-world games is having to travel over the same paths again and again.

In short, I guess what I'm saying is that I value games that give me a sense of progress over games that give me absolute freedom to roam, but no real motivation to do it.

PigLick on 1/3/2017 at 12:52

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The reason I like just cause 2 so much is you dont have to involve yourself in combat, just cruise the world and enjoy the scenery. Its almost a zen/hpynotic like thing. Also Iforgot to mention Dayz Mod, as in the original, not the standalone. Traversing the wonder that is Cherneraus and trying to survive was amazing.