Fallout and RPG veteran Josh Sawyer says most players don't want games "6 times bigger than Skyrim or 8 times bigger than The Witcher 3"

Yeah, that game gets it right. I played it with the map turned off and the sleep walking perk and had the best time of it.

Think the second one will finally make me buy a ps5

Daggerfall was like this, if I'm not mistaken (I got into TES with Morrowind, and I've never found the time to play the older games).

The map was about the size of Great Britain, and mostly empty, even if it had about fifteen thousand locations spread about it.

Not quite KSP whole planet scale,, but uh, Kenshi.

Its a pretty damn big world, pretty sure it is significantly larger than Skyrim.

You've got world speed controls, rpg style mechanics and progression, and you can have multiple members of your party, and you can build your entire own town if you want to.

The game is filled with many roving factions, who all have a sort of reputation dynamic with all other factions, as well as yourself/party.

The game is full of many different story lines, many of them conflict with each other and cannot all be done, there is no such thing as a plot armored, impossible to kill npc, and there are tons of unique, npcs you can meet and have many kinds of interactions with.

If you want to take on a huge faction, you can, but you're probably going to need to literally raise your own army to do so.

Main downside is the control scheme is fairly awkward / old school... its basically like an mmo from the early 00's, but single player; click to tell your peeps where to go sort of thing, awkward camera controls by modern standards for an ARPG.

You don't directly control the combat of your character like in Skyrim, the game basically rng rolls based on you and your opponents stats to determine who uses what kind of attack or block or dodge... but you can set different combat stances, basicsally.

... So its not an ARPG in the sense of Skyrim or AssCreed or Dark Souls... but it is an ARPG in a more loose sense, that its an RPG mechanics style game and world, without rigid turn based combat, which all revolves around action.

But the scale you are looking for is there. If you don't set the time to fast forward, it can easily take 15 minutes to an hour or more to walk between settlements or major landmarks, depending on what part of the map you're in.

Nothing is really obvious from the onset of the game in terms if what you are supposed to do, beyond not get murdered, eat, drink and sleep to stay alive.

It's very much a sandbox approach, but theres tons and tons of stuff to do if you are capable of directing yourself.

Also, lots of mods that add more content, immersion, and deepen or alter gameplay mechanics.

Kenshi 2 is in the works with upgraded engine and graphics... ETA totally unknown.

Outward is your game.

It's not real life scale but I have yet to see another developer attempt anything like the slice of time that we got with Majora's Mask

I found it to be so immersive, that the large map size was a bonus to me. I wanted to see it all, and by god I did. I have done every single thing on that game.

I found it even more immersive by camping when it got dark out, cooking to eat, and then going to bed. When I woke in the daylight, I would sit there and have Arthur drink a cup of joe, break down the camp, and continue on with my journey to wherever.

Now I want to play it all over again for a fifth time. >:(

ever played Death Stranding?

The whole reason I burned out on W3 was trying to be completionist and doing all the map markers before moving to the next area.

I would be happy if they never touched wayer again. Swimming and boating were awful in The Witcher series.

OSRS has obliterated my sense of what constitutes a grind. I've communities for other games tearing their hair out over a 1/300 drop.

I do think Botw and Totk would have benefited from having the map 50% smaller to condense the content. The underworld in Totk basically ended up just being collecting DLC armor from the previous game.

I'd love the option in a tutorial that for "I've played plenty of this kind of game - tell me what's specifically different in this game".

I still prefer gta 4, the city was worn out, lived in, cramped and dense.

I recently rewatched Rango and the size of the main settlement in that is about the size of those in RDR. Reflecting on that, I suppose I want the map to reflect the kind of scale and focus seen in other media. A film or TV show doesn't show us every street (usually) but it gives a sense of the scale of the place. If a game map couldn't be used for an establishing shot without looking daft then it doesn't really work for me, I reckon.

It's something I like about the overhead perspective used by games like Fallout and Wasteland - I perceive what's on screen as the area of the settlement that's relevant to me but with the understanding that there's more off screen. A character might mention going somewhere, much like in a play, and then reappear. Perhaps the player can go there, perhaps they can't even see it, but it makes the world feel larger.

I suppose, much like in reality, we rarely visit every location of a place, but it needs to feel like it might enter our narrative in some way.

How are we defining "better"? For me it makes the experience worse because I lose all immersion. I'm trying to be immersed and my brain can let a lot slip (realism is not required!) but for me the limit is when it strains even basic credulity. Yes, 50m makes the quest less hassle, but if I don't care about the quest due to the scope of the world then there's a more fundamental issue.

In games where immersion isn't a factor (e.g. The Binding of Isaac) that stuff doesn't matter. In an explorable open world I content that it's rather crucial.

I'm glad to hear it's not just me (I mean, statistically that seems unlikely, but still!). It's a little like modern cinema compared to '70s film making - let the story breathe, folks. Given that the tooling to make the world larger (but with the same amount of content) isn't all that complex, I wish it was done more. The amount of content is fine - often excessive. But give me a chance to feel like I'm actually travelling.

I felt the scaling of Assassin's Creed Origins and Odyssey worked quite well in that respect. There was actual travel!

I didn't play Tears of the Kingdom, but if you found large swaths of the map to be empty in Breath of the Wild, it means there's something hidden there that you didn't find.

It's just about density. BotW/TotK were eerily empty and dead. But something like Elden Ring? I would play a game 10x the size of Elden Ring for the rest of my life.

I played NMS ~2 years ago and thought for a huge procedurally generated game it was pretty good. The planets had lots of POIs and trading posts and stuff to go to. I quit mostly because the flight mechanics were too "on rails" compared to something like Elite Dangerous or X4. I just didn't get the rush I was looking for from dogfighting and stuff. I had constructed a series of bases that let me craft a ton of tradable items that gave me plenty of money but there was just nothing to spend it on because my ship was already plenty strong enough for everything I encountered..

I've thought a lot about this. It would have to be a game with no combat. Too cramped. It'd be a nice puzzle game like Myst, tho.

Edit: Stray 2: Kowloon

Wait I had a similar idea once! Youre right that would be cool af, but very difficult to get right. In open world games you usually get away with "isolated" side quests, in a dense cube this is difficult – which might be a good thing, it forces interconnectivity.

No, no he has a good point, let him finish

I agree with pretty much all of your points, especially about limited inventories. In isometric arpgs in particular it drives me crazy that half the gameplay is essentially a gambling system of explosions of massive amounts of items - yet they give you virtually no room to carry it? Terrible.

But on Morrowind, I love the game with mods like MULE, but the vanilla level up system makes the stat system self-defeating. The purpose of skill-based progression is to let me play the character I want to play, and do the things I want to do, and trust that my character is going to grow accordingly. But the level up stat multiplier system forces the player to do all sorts of things other than what they want, in order to get the most out of the stat system.

It's even worse in Oblivion because everything levels with you much more in that game, which means if you don't do these ridiculous things to min/max, your enemies can actually become too powerful to beat!

Same. That's why I don't really like The Witcher 3, but I keep coming back to Cyberpunk 2077. The Witcher 3 has a great story; but the game gets super boring and repetitive super quickly. Cyberpunk is setup more or less the same; tons of filler content that is ignorable, great main story, but I like the action more. I can skip through the story and still have fun blowing away gang bangers in a ton of different ways, as opposed to Witcher where there's not much variety in the action and every battle is just swinging swords and using the right spells on the appropriate enemy types.

only the first 10 are fun.

Or worse, a game where everyone keeps telling you that you need to put in 100 hours before it is fun.

Bg3 acts after 1?

I think we’re nearly there as is. There’s already mods that integrate ChatGPT with Skyrim NPC’s. There’s definitely room for improvement, but just these fan projects have achieved some impressive results.

Pair that with the developers’ eagerness to eventually fire most of their writing staff, and they’ve got a lot of incentive to dump money into improving what already exists.

My concern is that this will lead to more abandonware. Star Trek: Bridge Crew had integrated voice commands using some IBM service to process. Once their agreement with IBM ended, they shut down the feature in the game. So what happens when a developer integrates AI as a cornerstone to a game’s storylines, using remote servers to do all of the processing, and then decide to end support for the game?

That's not what they said. There is a difference between using AI in a short sighted effort to cut costs and using it to enhance content created by people. AI is a broad term, and just because a bunch of rich asshole morons are misusing a version of it that does have use does not make it automatically bad. AI, Generative or not, is just a tool.

There have been games that have procedural generation for decades in one form or another to create practically infinite content for players, but they are always limited in other ways. Minecraft can generate an "infinite" world, but what you do in the world is limited to what has been ready built. Hell, Games like Skyrim randomly generate NPCs all the time, but they are shallow and don't really add much to the game.

Having people build out the mechanics, the spells, the world, and other features with a basic foundation of game play and then having AI implemented to combine those features in a way based on player interaction, or create NPCs that are doing similar things the player can that can make the world feel more alive is likely the next real advancement that games will have.

Sure, you could have people make hundreds, if not thousands, of NPCs, but they are going to be very derivative and you'll see the usual "copy paste" people that aimlessly wonder around or do one or two things and making that many NPCs that aren't story driven would be mind numbing work.

What fairy tale? You can run models right now that people have trained to work as DnD DM’s. I guess you’re not keeping up with developments, but it’s already happening.

I agree. They won’t want to hire humans back. Capitalism will not continue to function in an AI driven economy. It’s going to be feudalism or communism. And if we don’t do something about it, I know which one the capitalists will choose.

Yeah V has the most lifeless map of any GTA since 3. Even NPC detail was missing like umbrellas when it rains.

Didn't play it so I can't comment on the SA part.
At least they have loads of little details in obscure places

They mean gamers of old. That is, currently old gamers, but back when we were young, and had time, and not a lot of games to fill it with, so we appreciated a longer game.

Current young gamers have vast libraries of games to choose from, and shortened attention spans due to social media.

Yeah a lot of these games that try and do a bit of everything seem to often fail to entertain anyone.

Yes, it was. But EA ruined it with their launcher, so you can't play it on Linux.

My spelling is accepted when I search the word.